This article was written by Claudia Clemente
I first encountered Anne Frank by reading her diary, when I, like her, was a voracious adolescent reader dreaming of future careers and loves. Years later, as a new resident of Amsterdam, I was to experience another, three-dimensional, view of Anne. For the first time, the Anne Frank-Fonds has opened a public exhibit of Anne's letters and diaries and the Frank family correspondence from 1933 to 1942. "Anne Frank: Her Life in Letters" at the Amsterdam Historical Museum, reveals Anne as a giddy schoolgirl who played in the open spaces and relative freedom of Amsterdam.
I visited the new exhibit on May 5 to celebrate Bevrijdingsdag, the Dutch Liberation Day, which marks the end of Germany's five-year occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. The night before, I had joined thousands of spectators in Amsterdam's Dam Square for Herdenkingsdag, or Remembrance Day, to remember those lost in World War II, the Holocaust, and later wars. As we bowed our heads at 8pm sharp for two minutes of silence, I realized the thought and taste invested in these holidays. The next day, I handed over my Museumjaarkaart (a membership card which allows free entrance to many participating museums in the Netherlands) at the Amsterdam Historical Museum and dropped by to see an old friend, Anne Frank, the lump still in my throat from the night before.
The first hall in the exhibit is constructed to convey the relative openness and freedom that Anne experienced in her first years in Amsterdam after fleeing Germany with her family in 1933. At the room's head, the space narrows at a large photograph of an image of the building that towered over the Merwedeplein square, where Anne lived while in hiding. Here, physical remnants of Anne's early life testify to the community spirit built into her refuge at the Merwedeplein in the Rivierenbuurt, the neighborhood of Amsterdam South, where Otto and Edith Frank moved 4-year-old Anne and her sister, Margot, from Frankfurt.
The first glass case in the exhibit shows a piece of lined stationary, decorated with a cartooned dog tugging a kite from a boy's grasp. Here, in prim cursive German, Anne wishes her Grandmother in Basel a happy birthday. This first letter, only two steps into the exhibit, stands as gatekeeper, as if to say: This exhibit will illustrate Anne's transformation. The exchange of German for Dutch is only the beginning of Anne's transformation.
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