{"id":183,"date":"2017-12-05T02:44:53","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T02:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/?p=183"},"modified":"2026-05-25T12:16:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T16:16:03","slug":"living-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/2017\/12\/living-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Living Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Anne<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBe sure to go to the Anne Frank House.\u201d That was one of my writing partners when I told her I was heading to Amsterdam.  “Also, look for the bench where Hazel and Augustus sat by the canal in The Fault in Our Stars<\/em>,\u201d she added. Since she\u2019d missed the Van Gogh Museum when jet lag left her sleeping through her timed entry, she limited her recommendations to those two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As much as I loved The Fault in Our Stars<\/em>, I wasn\u2019t sure about finding the bench. There must be hundreds, thousands of benches by canals in Amsterdam. I couldn\u2019t stroll around forever. And the Anne Frank House? Wasn\u2019t that in Germany? Maybe Amsterdam had some kind of museum but not the actual hiding place. I googled it and, sure enough, Anne Frank had hid in Amsterdam. How did I not know that? I\u2019d read her diary as a kid and again as an adult and never placed the location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went online for tickets and the only entry time left was the morning I would arrive in Amsterdam after flying all night from Boston and changing planes. Everything had to work perfectly: Both flights had to be on time, international customs had to be a zillion times faster than it is in Boston, and I couldn\u2019t get lost going from the airport into the city and walking to the museum. Never mind I\u2019d never been to Amsterdam before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite a middle seat in a row of five across, I slept several hours on the plane. Flights and customs were a breeze, signage at Schipol International Airport to the train was easy\u2014no Dutch required\u2014and a helpful conductor motioned all of us going into Amsterdam onto a waiting train. Thirty minutes later I arrived downtown, checked my carry-on in a locker at the train station and headed toward the Anne Frank House about a mile away, feeling quite self-satisfied and full of energy from a perfect cappuccino at the airport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I arrived with nearly an hour to spare and no, they don\u2019t let you go in before your allotted time. It was hard to slow down. I walked through the Cheese Museum (smelly), West Church (grand Renaissance church where Rembrandt was buried in 1669) and the Tulip Museum (kind of pointless) before returning to the Anne Frank House and trying to absorb its presence. It looks like any building in Amsterdam, a flat-fronted, brick, four-story row house along a cobblestone walkway next to a canal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stared at the exterior trying to imagine what people felt in the 1940s, passing this unremarkable building after the Nazis invaded The Netherlands, or what Anne and her family and the Van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer felt hiding inside for over two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People now sit at open air cafes on nearby corners, drinking Amstel Light or espresso, and enjoy the sun and each other\u2019s company even on a raw windy day. That Anne Frank\u2019s actual hiding place was here is such a contrast to the current scene surrounding it that it seemed unreal, like a movie set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long lines of people were waiting to enter: teenagers, older couples and everyone in between, wearing jeans and t-shirts, slacks and dresses; people of light and dark complexions, speaking a variety of languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once inside, I viewed a short video showing scenes from that grim time in history that forced Anne and her family into hiding to avoid the Nazi death camps. From there, I passed beside the hinged bookcase, now left ajar, that hid the doorway to the annex, and entered Anne Frank\u2019s world. I followed the stream of visitors, reading quotes from Anne\u2019s diary written on the walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that\u2019s what I want!\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut, and that\u2019s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ended up in her room, hardly realizing it at first since it is dimly lit to protect the magazine pictures she had put up on the walls. I passed through the other rooms and up the stairway, as steep as a ladder, to the attic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actual diary itself, sits under glass in low light, in the middle of the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c<\/em><\/strong>Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone, no one knows who, informed on the people in the annex, and Dutch police, led by an SS squad leader, arrested all eight of them in 1944. They were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, probably only a few months before the war ended in 1945. Anne was 15. Her father, Otto Frank, was the only one of the eight to survive. He devoted the rest of his life to bringing her words to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The museum shows how their survival depended on Otto Frank\u2019s four employees, who were not Jewish and who hid them and kept them alive for over two years. Miep Gies and her husband found food every day for the eight in the Secret Annex and another Jew they were sheltering in their own home and themselves\u2014eleven people at a time of coupon rationing, running the risk of death themselves. They kept the people in the Secret Annex alive long enough for Anne to write her diary chronicling all that happened. It was Miep Gies, who found Anne\u2019s diary and papers after Anne was arrested and gave them to Otto Frank when he was released from Auschwitz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once outside, reflecting on the experience, I was certain I had heard Anne\u2019s voice, speaking aloud when I was inside. And even though I was sad and angry, I was also happy. She had a huge ambition in life and she realized it in her short time here. And the humanity and courage of the helpers doing the right thing inspired me as much as Anne and her father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never ended up looking for Hazel and Augustus\u2019 bench. I was actually in Amsterdam for the opening of an opera about Machiavelli, for which my older brother wrote the libretto, and the opera was stupendous. But the Anne Frank House was the beating heart of the trip. If Anne could see the millions of us now, waiting in line to read her words, walking through her hiding place, and glimpsing what befell the people there, she would know how much she gave all of us, for which we are forever grateful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBe sure to go to the Anne Frank House.\u201d That was one of my writing partners when I told her I was heading to Amsterdam.  “Also, look for the bench where Hazel and Augustus sat by the canal in The Fault in Our Stars,\u201d she added. Since she\u2019d missed the Van Gogh Museum when jet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","event_title":"","event_details":"","event_timezone":"","event_gmap":"","event_image":"","event_image_url":"","event_calendar_link":"","event_location":"","event_location_name":"","event_location_address":"","event_location_unit":"","event_location_city":"","event_location_state":"","event_location_country":"","event_location_zip":"","event_datetime_with_summary":"","event_datetime":"","event_date":"","event_time":"","event_date_type":"","event_rulesummary":"","event_ticket_rsvp":"","event_capacity":"","event_capacity_remaining":"","event_capacity_sold":"","event_sold_out":"","event_low_stock":"","event_ticket_count":"","event_ticket_summary":"","event_sales_start":"","event_sales_end":"","event_ticket_price_from":"","event_ticket_price_to":"","event_ticket_price_range":"","event_date_year":"","event_date_month":"","event_date_month_short":"","event_date_day":"","event_date_day_name":"","event_date_iso":"","event_rsvp_capacity":"","event_rsvp_remaining":"","event_rsvp_going":"","event_rsvp_full":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/anne-frank-real.jpg?fit=298%2C298&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahignatius.com\/staging\/4657\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}