The building is an ordinary 1635 canal house with a business on the front and a secret annex at the rear, reached through a doorway hidden behind a hinged bookcase built by the office staff.
Eight people lived there from July 1942 to August 1944, silent through business hours, unable to run water or flush during the day. A teenager mapped the whole world onto four rooms and wrote it down.
The rooms are kept empty — Otto Frank insisted. The absence of furniture is the exhibit.
Memories attached to this place
“The helpers carried food up those stairs every day for two years and told no one.”
“The magazine pictures she pasted on the wall are still there. That's the detail that takes people's knees out.”
“They kept the rooms empty on purpose. You feel the size of it that way.”
Timeline
- 1635Canal house built on the Prinsengracht.
- 1940Otto Frank's business occupies the front building.
- 1942The families move into the annex behind the bookcase.
- 1944Discovered and arrested on 4 August.
- 1960Opens as a museum after a campaign to stop demolition.
Rooms hold what happened in them even when everything is taken out.
