It was just overwhelmingly sad.  Not haunting or scary, just sad.  So this was where she lived for almost two years.  This was her room.  These pictures on the walls are the celebrities she admired.  This was her sister and parents’ room.  This is the room where the other family lived, which also doubled as a living room. This was her kitchen.  This was her bathroom.  This was the skylight she could look out at night, when there was nothing to see but a dark sky and, if she was lucky, some stars. 

These are the stairs she and her father would creep down at night, when it was still safe to do so.  This is the bookcase that hid the stairs that led to the annex.  This is her diary.  It is smaller than I thought it would be.  The cover is red and white plaid, not brown as I had always assumed it was.  This is the handwriting of the girl who wrote the diary that gave me (and so many others) an honest, personal account of a vast war and a horror so grave it is difficult to grasp. 

She gave the world a piece of literature she planned would be her first of many.  It was her only. 

In March of 1945, at the age of 15, Anne Frank died in Bergen Belsen after being deported in 1944.  It was one month before the camp was liberated.  She lived in the annex in Amsterdam with her family, the van Pels family, and a family friend Fritz Pfeffer, who had all gone into hiding in an attempt to survive the war and evade the Nazis.  They were betrayed and consequently sent to concentration camps where they all, with the exception of her father Otto Frank, died at the hands of monsters. 

Otto Frank returned a year after being liberated to find the annex in shambles.  After much work and fundraising (it was slated to be torn down), he was able to preserve the landmark that sees thousands of visitors each year.  We were told to get there early and arrived at 10am, an hour after opening.  The line was already around the block. 

As I walked through each room I tried to imagine living there for two years.  They were not allowed to go outside and, after the danger was too great, they were not able to even go downstairs.  I tried to imagine spending adolescence here and living as Anne had, but I couldn’t.  All I could feel was the overwhelming sadness that seems to permeate the annex and the abandoned factory below. 

As I walked out onto the street where the eight people in hiding were taken away by the Nazis, the sadness remained but there was anger too.  Who had betrayed them?  Why would someone do such a thing?  If they could have stayed in hiding for one more year, they would have spent the last 65 years celebrating college graduations, weddings, births, bar mitzvahs, and milestones.  They would have mourned the deaths of loved ones, of course, but those would have come in time as it does for all of us.  Instead their lives were destroyed, along with those of their friends and family and all that remains is a building and a diary.  And the honor we give to their memories by visiting the building and reading the diary, and passing it down to our children who must know the story of an extraordinary young girl, who had the courage to write the truth. 

Until tomorrow and the new adventure…

Rachel