The rooms themselves are bare, as her father decreed. Bare, but not empty, for every corner of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam is filled with a terrible, heavy, sadness. At the fate of a girl, of a family, of a people. You want to feel some hope, some sense of uplift at the heroic story, but nothing — not even the pealing bells from the Westerkirk next door, the same bells that marked the slow passage of time for the young girl and her family and friends — can lift the sadness.

The story is familiar: the Franks fled to Amsterdam in ’33 to escape Hitler, and went into hiding in July 1942, when the tyranny spread over to Holland with the Nazi occupation. The Frank family lived there, in a secret annexe at the rear of Otto Frank’s office and warehouse, helped by three trusted office staff. Until they were betrayed in August 1944 and deported to the camps. All except Otto Frank died; Anne died, aged 16, a month before the war ended.

Walking through the house, even in the company of hundreds of other tourists on a sweltering summer afternoon, one feels a chill. The house was stripped of furniture on Otto Frank’s orders but there is enough in the display cases to evoke the terror that they lived in, and enough on the walls to show just how they tried to cope with that terror.

As you walk through the rooms — floorboards creaking at the lightest step — you pass through the bookcase that was used to block the annexe hideaway; you see the corridor that became one person’s living space, the room that doubled up as another family’s winter days when heating was forbidden, as was movement, and there was little food to sustain body warmth.

... contd.