I've been to the Museum in Amsterdam. I'm not too sure what I was expecting to see. I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a teenager and finding it rather heavy going.
One of the last days of my first visit to Amsterdam we decided to visit the museum. It's not hard to get to after all, we reasoned, and it seemed like one of those places you more or less had to visit. We'd done the red light district and the coffee shops to death by that point.
I remember being a little surprised at how close to everything it was. It stands in quite a nice part of the city, overlooking a canal. Perhaps I wasn't expecting it to be quite such a tranquil place, I'm not sure. It certainly wasn't what I'd pictured in my mind after reading the book all those years ago. I couldn't picture Nazi troops walking down the street on which I was queueing, hard as I tried. It just seemed somehow wrong that such a monument to the horrors of the holocaust was such a sterile, calm and peaceful place.
Inside is all wrong, too. I'm sorry to say that it didn't impact me in the way I expected. It's a little bit too clean, too modern. Almost as if they've completely swept away the ugliness surrounding the place, hidden away the reminders of the fear and terror of the people who called the place home for so long behind the sterile polished wooden floors, black and white photographs and recorded AV presentations.
If I go to a concentration camp I don't want to see a five star hotel in its place. I want to see a concentration camp. I need to feel what it might have been like to be packed into a small room like a rodent with sixty other people, fearing for my life. The same is true for Anne Frank Huis. It's big, open and clean, it smells pleasant, it feels modern and comfortable. It's a little too easy to forget where you are when you're inside.
It does contain a gallery of wartime horrors, but you can go just about anywhere to see that.