Anne Frank House

Prinsengracht 263
Now we come to probably the world’s most famous Dutch house, Anne Frank’s house. It is also a KLM house (number 47). Let me tell you its story.
In 1635, the first houses along this part of the Prinsengracht were constructed. At the rear of number 263, two warehouses were built for Rem and Lysbeth Bisschop. You remember them. I talked about them earlier.
In the 1930s, Jews in Germany were made into second rate citizens by the Nazis. At that time, the Frank family lived in Frankfurt. Anne's father, Otto, heard disturbing rumors about concentration camps and he and his wife Edith decided to flee to Amsterdam, with their daughters, Margot and Anne.
On July 5, 1942, Margot was summoned to report for labor camp. The next day, the Frank family went into hiding. Before that, Otto Frank had been carefully preparing the empty annex of his office for just such an eventuality. His business partner, his wife and their son hid there, too.
About two years later, on Friday, August 4, 1944, the people hiding in the secret annex were betrayed and deported to concentration camps. Two months before the end of the war, Anne Frank and her sister died at Bergen Belsen.
During the war, Anne wrote a diary. She often mentioned the carillon of the tower in front of you. It kept the people in hiding awake at night, but she liked it. She wrote: ‘Father, mother and Margot still can’t get used to the chiming of the Westertoren clock, which tells us the time every quarter of an hour. Not me, I liked it from the start; it sounds so reassuring, especially at night’.
When Anne's diary was published in 1947, it took the world by storm. The story of Anne Frank painted a shocking picture of the life of a teenage Jewish girl forced to go into hiding to flee Nazi persecution. The manuscript was translated into 55 languages and has sold over 27 million copies to date. The house where she hid is now a museum.