PRISENGRACHT 263

Writing about one of those lovely tiny pictures in her diary, Anne Frank says :


"Dit is een foto, zoals ik me zou wensen, altijd te zijn... Dan had ik nog wel een kans om naar Holywood te komen. Maar tegenwoordig zie ik er jammer genoeg meestal anders nit."


13 oct. 1942
Zondag


This is a picture, just as I wished I would always be... Then I would still have a chance to go to Hollywood. But I rather see that unfortunately this is hardly going to be so."

Anne didn't go to Hollywood. 

On August 4, 1944, 10.30 a.m., the police stops in front of number 263, Prisengracht Straat. Somebody has warned them a whole family is hiding there.

They are taken first to Westerbork. In March 1945, Anne, one day after her sister Margot, dies from typhus in Bergen-Belsen. 

They both thought they father was dead, just as their mother Edith. But Otto had been liberated 6 weeks before from Auschwitz. 

He published her diaries and fought until he could open the house where they hid as a museum in 1960. Prisengracht 263. 

Do visit the place, remember you can and will go back to your life, remember Anne never did, never could. Anne never went to Hollywood.

Anne Frank Huis


Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
and anger in the very place, whoever comes
to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
the bookcase slides aside, then walks through
shadow into sunlit rooms, can never help
but break her secrecy again. Just listening
is a kind of guilt. The Westerkerk repeats
itself outside, as if all time worked round
towards her fear, and  made each stroke die
down on guarded streets. Imagine it-


three years of whispering and loneliness
and plotting, day by day, the Allied line
in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope
she had for ordinary love and interest
survives her here, displayed above the bed


as pictures of her family; some actors;
fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth.
And those who stoop to see them find
not only patience missing its reward, 
but one enduring wish for chances like


my own : to leave simply as I do, 
and walk where couples drift at ease
up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
a silent barge come clear of bridges
settling their reflections in the blue canal.




Poem by Andrew Motion