Better Late Than Never: Mourning

While in Amsterdam, I also went to the Anne Frank House. It was a powerful, somber, depressing experience and I'm glad I went.

I'll be honest, I'm a tad ashamed to say that I actually had no clue that the house she hid from the Nazis in was in Amsterdam, or even in the Netherlands. But as my own grandfather was held in a POW camp in Germany for the last two years of WWII, history from this time period has always been of personal importance to me. When my grandfather's camp was liberated and he came back to the US, the fact that he weighed 83 pounds was not the only part of his return that shocked my grandmother, who thought all that time that her husband was dead. The last time I weighed 83 pounds, I was probably in 6th grade. But while my grandfather surely endured deplorable conditions, I'm certain the POW camps in WWII may as well have been nice hotels compared to the concentration camps of the Holocaust.

I went to a few museums in which all forms of photography were banned, but the Anne Frank House was the only one I went to in which everyone respected this rule. Despite the perpetual crowds of people, it was surprisingly quiet and sober, the only obvious noise being the sound of footfalls on the old, creaky wooden floors. Those floors, those rooms, those walls were the only ones Anne Frank and her family knew for two whole years. I remember an eerie feeling creeping over me as I moved further up the house. An unease as I thought about the nature of, well, human nature.

As I moved through the museum, I was building in my head a timeline of events that transpired. So it was in the last room within the Secret Annex that I came to a realization that made the air suddenly feel heavier. The Frank family hid all that time only to be discovered and arrested by Nazi authorities just a few months before the war ended. Anne Frank and her sister died only a few weeks before their camp was liberated.

I had been standing just moments before in this young girl's room, magazine cutouts of heart throbs, Chanel ads, and famous blonde actresses taped to the walls. And now I was standing in an attic, mourning the loss of this girl I never knew. Mourning the loss of 11 million people that no one would ever know again.