Description of the attraction
Among the many diverse attractions of the capital of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, the Anne Frank House Museum, located in the city center on the Prinsengracht embankment near the Calvinist Westerkerk Church, deserves special attention. It was here, during the occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War, with her family and several other people hiding from the Nazis, a Jewish girl Anne Frank, who wrote her famous diary, entered in 2009 in the UNESCO World Heritage Register.
The house, whose back rooms became Anna's refuge, was built back in 1635 by Dirk Van Delft as a private mansion, and then it was used as a warehouse, a stable (due to the wide doorways on the ground floor), an office for a household appliance company. and in December 1940, the building housed the Opekta company, where Anne's father Otto Frank worked. After Franks received a summons to the Gestapo in July 1942 in the name of Otto's daughter Margot, the family moved to the head of the family's office, where in the back of the house Frank and company employees set up a shelter, the entrance to which was disguised as a filing cabinet. Soon the Pels family joined the Franks, and then Friedrich Pfeffer. Here they hid for two years, and all this time Anne Frank kept her diary, describing their lives in detail, but in August 1944, as a result of a denunciation, the Nazis searched Prinsengracht and arrested everyone.
Literally by a miracle, Anna's diary and some personal belongings of the girl and other inhabitants of the asylum survived after the purge organized by the Nazis, and in 1947, after returning to Amsterdam, her father, the only survivor of the war, published an edited version of the diary, which caused a huge resonance in the world community.
In 1955, Opekta sold the building on Prinsengracht and moved. The house was supposed to be demolished and a factory built in its place, but the Dutch newspaper Het Vrije Volk launched an active campaign to preserve the building as an important historical monument. The house was preserved, and already in 1957 Otto Frank and his former colleague Johannes Kleiman, who was directly involved in the shelter of the Frank family and became one of the heroes of Anne's diary, founded the Anne Frank Foundation in order to raise funds for the acquisition and restoration of the building to create there is a museum. However, the new owners of the house showed a gesture of goodwill and donated it to the foundation, while the money raised was used to purchase a neighboring building, which made it possible to significantly expand the exhibition space. In May 1960, the Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht opened its doors to visitors for the first time.
Today, the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam is one of the most interesting and popular museums in the Netherlands. Its exposition sheds light on some of the most terrible pages of world history and acquaints its guests with the time when Anne Frank lived. The museum's exhibits include the original of Anne Frank's diary, as well as an Oscar by Shelley Winters, received by the actress for her supporting role in George Stevenson's Anne Frank's Diary (1959).
