Anne Frank House

From the street, Prinsengracht 263 is an ordinary Amsterdam canal house: built in 1635, refaced in 1740, used over the centuries as a home, a stable-fronted warehouse and a workshop. What makes it one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands is the building behind it. The rear annex, hidden on all four sides by the houses around the courtyard, is where Anne Frank, her parents and sister and four other Jews hid from Nazi persecution for two years and one month, from 1942 until they were arrested in 1944. Anne called it the Achterhuis, the "back house", and that became the title of her diary when it was published in Dutch in 1947; English readers know it as the Secret Annex.

Otto Frank had moved the offices of his spice and pectin businesses here in December 1940. His employees Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler kept the business running in the front of the building while supplying the people in hiding. After the arrest the annex was emptied on the orders of the police, but Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl went back and rescued Anne's papers. Of the eight people in hiding only Otto Frank survived the camps.

The way into the annex was hidden behind a movable bookcase, and it is still the threshold every visitor crosses. The rooms beyond are deliberately bare. When the museum was being prepared, Otto Frank was asked whether they should be refurnished and refused: everything had been taken away during the war, and he wanted it to stay that way. Scale models commissioned at his request show how the floors looked when they were lived in. The emptiness is the point. The wider museum tells the story of Anne and her family with quotations, photographs, film and original objects.

The house was nearly lost. In the 1950s a company bought the block with plans to demolish it, and a newspaper campaign and a protest on the day of demolition saved it. The Anne Frank Foundation was set up in 1957, and the museum opened on 3 May 1960. It now spans Prinsengracht 263 and 265 and a newer building on the corner of Westermarkt, close to the Westerkerk.

Getting there

The entrance is at Westermarkt 20, on the edge of the Jordaan in central Amsterdam. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS) is about 11 km away.