Let’s Hit the Attic

by Nicholas Jahr

I was in the Netherlands last week, and finally took the opportunity to visit Amsterdam’s Anne Frank Museum. Not being much for standing on line, I decided to go in the evening (the museum is open late on Saturdays). I still stood on line. Which was vaguely disconcerting – it’s possible, even likely, that everyone just made the same calculation I did, but the thought that this was the place to be (or even a place to be) on a Saturday night seemed inappropriate. As if it was just another tourist attraction, something to squeeze in between dinner and the red light district.

I worked my way through the museum itself – the house in which the Frank family and their friends went into hiding, restored sans furniture, which the Nazis confiscated after they were discovered – pretty quickly. Friends have found the experience deeply moving, but for me the empty rooms and their implicit invitation to imagine yourself in hiding ask the impossible. The scale of the atrocity is unimaginable; an hour-long tour doesn’t allow anyone to appreciate the suffocation and claustrophobia of more than two years without a chance to stand in the sunlight. (Interestingly, the museum’s website suggests there was a debate within the Anne Frank Foundation as to whether or not to add a separate egress, instead of making visitors use the same steep, narrow steps to come and go. They went ahead with the exit as part of a 1971 renovation.)

This sort of phenomenological approach, the pretense that we can project ourselves into such circumstances, always seems hubristic and self-congratulatory to me. And despite the certainty that being trapped in such tight quarters for more than two years would be miserable, I was still struck by how much larger a space it was than I’d imagined. I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that the annex was two floors. Even without the furniture, it suggested how much better the odds were for the wealthy.

In his memoir (soon to be released under Jewish Currents’ new publishing imprint), Abbie Lipschutz describes returning home to The Hague as part of the Allied advance. Searching for old friends and neighbors, for some trace of the community in which he grew up, he stumbles upon friends of his family (by no means poor) who were hidden by a Dutch neighbor:

Jos’s voice, strident, unexpected, cuts in, the first sound I hear from him. “You see that mirror? Come, I’ll show you,” and without waiting he pulls me up by the arm and leads me to it. He moves it, roughly, and behind it is a low door. “Go ahead, open it!” I do and there is a small space, no larger than a closet. “See that? That’s where we were, for two years. For over two years! In that space. Behind the mirror. That’s where we were over two years!”

“At night,” Moeke says softly, “they could come out. They weren’t allowed to speak, the neighbors might have heard them and the Boches paid good money for every Jew. I brought them food, not enough, never enough. They would have shot me if they’d found out I was hiding Jews.”

In hindsight, I found it surprising that the museum focuses almost exclusively on the Franks’ experience, instead of throwing open a window from the annex onto the Holocaust more generally, to say nothing of Dutch complicity; 107,000 people, 80 percent of Dutch Jewry, were killed. I’m not sure if those numbers were even mentioned at any point.

When you descend from the attic, the museum’s final room, faithful to Otto Frank’s intent, features brief documentary videos that raise questions about tolerance. At the end of each segment the audience gets to vote on the issue. The videos seemed understandably pitched at about the seventh grade level; most feature the sort of civil liberties concerns that Americans, with our die hard belief in freedom of expression, find it pretty simple to address (predictably, voters were still close to split on banning the headscarf). But one or two dare to go a bit further, examining, say, a Dutch police raid on Holland’s Nigerian immigrant community. It’s a welcome effort to relate to the Holocaust as something living, as opposed to something that can be safely consigned to history; to imagine today’s undesirables meeting the fate of European Jewry, to see the threat of the final solution in the early persecutions.

For me, the most touching moment was fleeting, and came at the end of the tour of the annex, in a video of an interview with Otto Frank. Discussing his surprise upon reading Anne’s diary for the first time, he declares that he finally concluded that (I may not be quoting him exactly) “no parent really knows their child.” Are these the words of an overly distant father? Or an inevitable truth driven home with terrible force? They’re the words of a man who never got a chance to know.