Prinsengracht 263 – Part 3 Leaving the secret annexe

We left the annexe by way of the rooftop terrace, the only bit of outside those in hiding had been able to have, and only when it was dark. We moved across to the new building next door.

It was a relief to be out. When we left, unlike Anne, we escaped the oppression. But the journey wasn’t over yet. There was a series of filmed accounts by Miep and school friends of Anne. And there was another, of Otto Frank, who had been the only survivor of the eight hidees. It was his request that the rooms remain as empty as when the Nazis had cleared them out with the family, as a symbol of the hole left by the massacre of millions of people. I thought of the ownerless shoes I had seen the day before. They had dangled like washing, on the street light cable across the street, silhouetted and abandoned against the clear sky. They took on a new meaning.

All who had known Anne spoke with deep emotion. Otto talked about how, after learning that his family had not survived, Miep had given him his daughter’s diaries, but that it had taken him a long while to open them. When he did, he had come to know a side of Anne’s personality that he had not known in life. She had opened up to her diary in a way she had not been able to with him. He wondered sadly if one can ever truly know their children. Hearing him speak, it brought back to me having seen him on “Blue Peter” in the 70s, when he had talked about Anne and their experiences of hiding. He had brought with him, the first of her many diaries, the famous red checked one. They were displayed, open, in the museum. Pages and pages of writing, containing two years in a silent, secret world.