Amsterdam

In the previous two posts, I was trying out my Ipad’s Blogger function for the first time – pretty cool to be able to do a blog post in a few seconds while I’m standing in the airport in Amsterdam waiting for my luggage.

 Though we had some delays on our flights, we arrived in Amsterdam early enough to make our appointments at the perpetually-lined-up-around-the-block-to-get-in Anne Frank House.  Reservations are awesome.  You just walk past the huge line and go in your own special door.  

 About half the kids have read Anne Frank's diary, so I gave everyone a short lesson on Anne’s optimistic but tragically short life before we entered.  The museum is the actual building that Anne, her family, and four other Jewish people lived in for two years.  They lived in a small "secret annex" hidden behind a hinged bookshelf in an unused part of the building that housed Otto Frank's jam making business.  I find being in the actual room that Anne's bed was in quite poignant - it is more like a small hallway than a bedroom - and she had to share the space with one other person.  To make the room more cheery, she pasted up cutouts from cinema magazines of movie stars.  But the room is dark, the curtains are not allowed to be open even a crack during daylight hours...  she was about the same age as the kids on this trip.  Though her story is profoundly sad, her overwhelmingly positive spirit in the face of such hatred, fear, and stress is her true legacy.  Anne was born in 1929, three years after my wife's mom - she very well could still be alive today if someone had not tipped off the Nazi police who raided the annex and shipped all the people off to various concentration camps.  Think of the terror they went through trapped in that annex when they were rounded up - and the helplessness Mr. Frank must have felt having his family split up and not being able to protect them.

  Anne and her sister died in Bergen-Belsen just a couple weeks before the liberation.  Otto, Anne's dad, was the only one of the eight to survive, and when he eventually returned to Amsterdam from Auschwitz in Poland, he was presented with Anne's diary by one of the women who had helped to hide them.  It is now one of the most widely read books in the world, the diary of a young girl who wanted to become a writer when she grew up...

Pictures are not allowed in the Anne Frank museum, but I did get a few pictures in the short time we had to walk around Amsterdam:

 In the Netherlands, there are as many bikes as people.  It's flat here!

 The statue of Anne Frank just outside the church near the museum.

 Cute kids on their way home from school with mom.

 Interesting canal view.

 This party cart is powered by a bunch of guys pedaling and drinking beer.  At the same time.  That's Amsterdam for you.

 Darth Vader takes over the Dam Square.

The Dutch National War Memorial in the Dam Square.