By jdippel529
This past weekend, I went to Amsterdam along with a couple of the students from my program. Long story short, I loved it. The people, the food, the architecture, and the museums were all wonderful. I think its safe to say that the Dutch culture captured my heart. The most memorable part of the trip, however, was seeing the Anne Frank House.
I first learned of Anne’s story in middle school, when we were assigned to read The Diary of a Young Girl. From then on, the story of Anne Frank and her years hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust had become a part of history for me. I felt a connection to Anne because she was this young, teenage girl who was able to create this incredible empathy inside of me even long after she was gone. Never, until I came to her museum in Amsterdam, did it really occur to me that she had this effect on people of all genders, ages and places of the world.
Most of my time abroad has consisted of learning and adapting to differences in culture, but at the Anne Frank House I experienced something entirely different. People from all countries and walks of life had come to this very place in Amsterdam to pay tribute and learn more about Anne. Even the audio tour guides came in about 20 different languages. As you walk through the house, however, all of these differences suddenly fade. When you reach the room Anne shared with Fritz Pfeffer, for example, the color of your skin, the language you are speaking, doesn’t matter. All that matters is the eerie presence of Anne and her work; work that ended up shedding a light upon the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. It is hard to ignore the greatness in that room. That feeling of a common journey most definitely contributes to the overall power and experience of the Anne Frank house.
There is this one point in time, when you are leaving the annex, in which you come to a display with Anne Frank’s first and original diary. That simple red and white-checkered diary of a 15-year-old girl is what brought a whole world of cultures together in one, little house. To me, that is an extremely rare and remarkable power we don’t see often enough.
