Anne Frank House

In Prinsengracht 267 you will find the hiding place were, from the 6th of July 1942 to August 1944, Anne Frank, her family, the Van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, found shelter. The secret lodging was in the same building of the company owned by Otto Frank, Anne's father, and before becoming their shelter it was used as a storage room. Her father moved his company in this building a few weeks after the German invasion and the hideaway was secretly built in the months before their going into hiding. After the treachery and the deportation of the family the pages of Anne's diary where kept in custody by trustworthy friends of her father until he came back, only survivor to the horrors of Nazism’s concentration camps. At the end of the War he started over with his company, which survived thanks to Johannes Kleiman who kept on managing the company during Otto Frank's absence. In 1953 Otto Frank closes his company in order to commit himself entirely to the diffusion of Anne's diary, and Kleiman will remain by his side to help him out until his death. In the following years the building will risk being demolished, and only thanks to the direct intervention of Amsterdam's Major, Van Hall, who organized a found risings it was renewed and saved. In 1953 Anne Frank's House Foundation was founded and three years later the Foundation gave life to the Museum. The House manages the Museum, gathers educative material and fosters activities to support values like tolerance and mutual respect. In its first year the Museum received 9000 visitors that ten years later become 180.000. The great number of visitors convinced the Foundation’s Council Board on the need to undertake some major renewals and enlargements in order to be able to accept a larger number of people, and also to establish an entrance fee, since up to that time the Museum's management costs were covered by the generosity of individual benefactors. In the following years, visitors grew constantly reaching the record number of 936.000 visits in 2004, thanks to the latest renewing made in 1999 and to the introduction of the “night ticket”. The latest works didn't nock the original aspect of the hideout that still keeps the atmosphere of the sad days when Anne was a prisoner among its walls. Thanks to the new profits some educative campaigns have been launched, seminars have been organized outside the Museum and instructive material is now on sale.

Una tienda del Herengracht de Amsterdam.
by Arturo García

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