The Anne Frank Huis draws almost one million visitors annually (prepurchase tickets online to minimise the queues). With its reconstruction of Anne’s melancholy bedroom and her actual diary – sitting alone in its glass case, filled with sunnily optimistic writing tempered by quiet despair – it’s a powerful experience.
The focus of the museum is the achterhuis (rear house), also known as the Secret Annexe , a dark and airless space where the Franks and others observed complete silence during the daytime, outgrew their clothes, pasted photos of Hollywood stars on the walls and read Dickens, before being mysteriously betrayed and sent to their deaths.
