Looking Up to People in Amsterdam

I knew that I was going to have to look up to people when we arrived at our hotel room. In our bathroom, I had to stand on tiptoes to see the mirror. The towel rack was at least a foot over my head. I couldn’t even reach the hook to hang up my towel. Most Dutch people are really tall. At five feet, I had to look up often during our visit there. As our taxi driver told us on our way to the airport, “Yes, we are the tallest people in Europe. That’s been known for years.”

At the Anne Frank House, I found other ways to look up to people. Before going there, we went to beautiful neighborhoods and saw the houseboats on the canals and visited the Van Gogh Museum. For both the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House, it’s important to buy timed entry tickets on-line about three months before you go to Amsterdam. In fact, at the Anne Frank House it’s the only way that tickets are sold.

Over a million people visit the House each year and everyone we asked knew where it was. On a walking tour through downtown Amsterdam the previous day, a young Dutch woman told me that all the public schools in the Netherlands are required to teach about the Holocaust and she was anxious to visit the Anne Frank House, also.

On arrival at the Anne Frank House, we were given audio guides in our preferred language to listen to in each room. The house - really Otto Frank’s office - is narrow with steep stairs. A bookcase hiding a door led to the secret sector of the house where the Franks and their friends the Vandamms hid for two years. During the day, they couldn’t look out the window, flush the toilet, or make any noise for fear of being heard and thus, caught and deported.

A photograph of the bookcase in front of the door leading to the Franks' hiding place

While Anne Frank and her family led an excruciating life for those two years and met a tragic end being deported only a few months before the end of World War II, their helpers also led a dangerous life for those two years. During that time, Miep and Jan Gies, Johannes Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kleiman helped them to hide. They brought them food and supplies and did everything they could to keep the families hidden. They did this at the risk of deportation or even death to themselves. Years later when Miep was asked about her heroism, she said, “They asked for my help. How could I do anything else?”  

Those Dutch Jews who’ve survived or are descendants of survivors feel uncertain. They look at their non-Jewish neighbors and wonder, “Would you hide me now?”

What these people did to hide the Frank family was truly heroic. I have to look up to them and ask myself what I would do in a similar situation. I hope that I would have the courage to do the right thing but until one is up against a situation, it’s all conjecture. As immigrants get deported here in the United States and even naturalized citizens are threatened, I wonder what I would do. In the meantime, I protest against our regime’s immigration policies in the hopes that I’ll never have to find out.