It's pretty incredible how they transformed the original hiding place of the Frank family into an accessible museum. You start off in a room that gives you some background info and then you legit walk across a hall into Otto Frank's jam factory.
It's hard to put into words quite what the experience was like. It's one thing to read Holocaust literature, watch movies and visit memorials, but it's entirely anther to stand literally in the same spot that symbolizes such terrible atrocities. To be in a room where 8 people lived for 2 years, in hiding from persecution in their own countries, and in the place where these 8 people learned they had been betrayed and were sent, essentially (all but one) to their deaths. It felt strange. It felt surreal. I felt a bit nauseous.
I'm so glad to have seen it though. So glad that when he returned from Auschwitz and learned all his family had perished in the holocaust, Otto Frank decided to turn the annex into a museum. It's so, so important that people go there and through the story of one family-one girl really- remember. Just remember.
The museum is very tasteful and simplistic. On some walls, there are inscriptions from Anne's diary. There are a couple displays, but for the most part the rooms are completely empty. The guide book explains how after the Franks and their friends were deported to concentration camps, the home was raided of all furniture. Upon returning and developing plans for the museum, Otto Frank insisted the rooms remain empty, to symbolize the emptiness left by those who would never return.
You know, Anne Frank wasn't just a girl whose diary happened to get published and who happened to live through a terrible terrible thing. She was a real writer. A good one. It doesn't do justice to say it was such an enormous tragedy what happened to so many Jewish people in Europe in the Shoah. Definitely a solemn and thoughtful experience.
