Amsterdam and Anne Frank

I have gone to Europe for a few weeks. My first stop has been Amsterdam and here I am. I'm writing from a beautiful, albeit small, attic room at the Ambassade Hotel along the first canal of Herengracht. The room is well appointed with a royal blue bed cover, blue and yellow drapes and a yellow, vaulted ceiling with chandelier. Amsterdam is surrounded by three canals that are lined with row houses essentially built on stilts through hundreds of feet of marshy soil to reach solid ground. Some of the houses lean left and some lean right. The canals are lined with house boats. From inner to outer canals they are named Herengracht, Keisergracht and the Prinsengracht. It's softly raining and from my open windows I see an array of rooftops and windows of other apartments. Quite a rich urban setting.

Since I saw the Anne Frank house today, 263 Prinsengracht, quite near my desk and computer in my attic, I want to reflect on a time when an attic setting on the canals of Amsterdam may not have been so settling. I don't want to dwell on the Holocaust itself but outline the thoughts of this girl and her family. The Franks' anguish, as outlined by Anne, was a mere example of the turmoil in the minds of individuals that lead to eventual death at the hands of the Nazis. Maybe her diary remains popular because it lends insight into the horror that each individual Jew, and other social and political outcast, must have experienced before their eventual capture and death in the 1930's and 1940's. It puts emotion to the statistics of genocide and could probably be thought to apply to those individuals killed in Cambodia in the 1970's, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's and perhaps in North America in the 19th Century.

I bought a copy today of Anne Frank's Diary since I don't remember reading it for school. Maybe I did but if I did it didn't make the impression on me that it has today. She's writes to an imaginary friend named Kitty. Kitty eventually becomes us as she feels the eventual doom that we are now aware of. Her diary starts with the innocent musings of a thirteen year old girl in the Summer of 1942. She was excited to get the diary for her birthday and starts by making entries about a Rin Tin Tin movie, her ping pong and volleyball games, flowers, and her own humility since she admits that it is likely no one other than herself will enjoy reading the entries. She also wrote of her anguish over getting passing grades in school. She got a C minus in math, and a B in writing.

When her older sister gets a call from the Gestapo saying that she will be deported to an area for girls her father decides that the family must go into hiding, at 263 Prinsengracht, the building where he worked. The diary makes a transition. She begins recording the tension between herself and her Mother, the spats between families in the Annex, as the hiding place is called, the famine they experience, the heat and the cold, and the fact that they eventually can't open their windows for fear that others would discover their presence in that "Secret Annex". My windows are open and given a cool breeze. She describes the tension that the bombing of Amsterdam creates and the sound of gun fire so loud that they can't speak to each other. She even saw a "dogfight" between British and German planes from her closed window. She describes the toilet habits of others and describes her genitals. She also falls into fantasy as she seems to love Peter, but Peter seems to be a composite of two Peters living in the Annex. Continuing to regress, eventually she turns onto herself, letting us know that she wishes she could be a better person. The last entry in the Diary ends like this, somewhat confused, "Believe me I'd like to listen, but it doesn't work, because if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I'm not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be ill, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can't keep it up any more, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if...if only there were no other people in the world." With that her diary ended. It was recorded that the Gestapo entered their house and found Anne, her family and others hiding in the Annex. Anne's Mother and the Peters were killed at Aucshwitz and she died of Typhus at Bergen Belsen. Her father was the only survivor of the camps and lived until 1980 in Switzerland. He was responsible for the publication of her diary in 1947. She had written that she looked forward to becoming a famous author, and she achieved this. Wow. Being three or four blocks away from this house in an attic I suspect similar to that on 263 Prinsengracht left feeling close to her.

I was going to wax on how the Nazis exemplified a bad outcome of the Enlightenment and it's attention to science, and the Nazis eventual misappropriation of social darwinism, and the ethics of Kant and his encouragement to treat every individual as an end, not just a means to an end, in his categorical imperitive, and how every culture and government, including our own, may have similar embarrassing events in their history as epitimized by Nazi Germany, but I'm too off the subject now by writing about Anne Frank and thinking about her suffering, not just the physical suffering, but the emotional suffering that the anticipation of capture and death must leave with the victims of genocide, to go on. Maybe we should revisit the events of the Holocaust...and Rwanda, and Cambodia, and etc... periodically: to never forget.

The Dutch smoke like it's a profession and now the cool breeze through my attic windows has begun to smell like cigarettes.

(the spell check setting has essentially outlined my whole essay, maybe a consequence of the Dutch Wi-Fi. So, sorry for spelling errors that have gone un-noticed.)