The House Behind Anne Frank’s Secret Annex

A door disguised as a bookcase

Prinsengracht 263, with its four floors, hoist beam, and green door, presents itself as just another slender Amsterdam canal house. But in July 1942, something shifted. A hinged bookcase on the second floor swung inward, revealing a hidden space. The Frank family stepped through this opening, entering the Achterhuis the "back house" where they would remain in a hush that bordered on absolute silence for two years, one month, and twenty five days.

Eight people, 450 square feet

Otto and Edith Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, the van Pels family, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer shared four rooms. These rooms sat directly above the pectin warehouse where Otto had once worked. The rules of their hidden life were stark. During office hours, flushing the toilet, running water, or speaking above a whisper was forbidden. Anne filled the long nights with writing. She started in a red checked autograph book, a gift for her thirteenth birthday. When its pages were full, she switched to loose sheets of accounting paper, secretly brought up from the office below.

August 4, 1944

A Friday morning brought a terrible end. An SS officer and three Dutch policemen climbed the stairs, stopping at the bookcase. Someone had betrayed their location. Every person in the annex was arrested and deported. Otto was the only one who would ever return.

The bookcase is still there

Miep Gies, one of the office workers who had smuggled food to the hidden families, gathered Anne's scattered pages from the floor after the arrest. She kept them in a desk drawer, untouched, until Otto returned in June 1945. Then, she placed them into his hands. The house at Prinsengracht 263 opened as a museum in 1960. The wallpaper, still adorned with pictures of Hollywood actresses like Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland that Anne had pasted herself, remains on the wall of the room she shared with Pfeffer. And so does the bookcase.