Amsterdam, Netherlands
Anne Frank Huis · AH-nuh FRAHNK hœys
A canal house of 1635 with a warehouse below and a hidden annex behind. Eight Jews lived in the annex for two years during the German occupation, and one of them, a girl of thirteen, kept a diary. The rooms are empty now, as her father wanted.
Photo: Martin Furtschegger, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
This is an ordinary Amsterdam canal house. Downstairs Otto Frank ran a small firm that sold pectin for making jam. At the back, joined by a short passage, stands an older wing that the Dutch call the achterhuis, the back house.
From July 1942 to August 1944 eight people hid in that back house: the four Franks, the three van Pels, and a dentist, Fritz Pfeffer. Four of Otto's staff brought them food and news. On 4 August 1944 the police came. Only Otto came back.
His younger daughter Anne had written a diary all that time. It has been translated into more than seventy languages. In China it is read as 《安妮日记》.
One ticket, one route. You see the front house, the annex and the museum wing in that order. There is nothing else to buy.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The warehouse and offices (front house) | Included |
| The bookcase and the stair | Included |
| The Secret Annex | Included |
| The diary room | Included |
| The Westermarkt: statue, church and memorial | Free, outside |
The narrow brick house with the green door is the original. The glass and brick block beside it is the museum's newer wing. You go in through the new wing and come out through the old house.
Upstairs a grey bookcase swings open like a door. Behind it is a steep stair. That was the way into the annex, and the only way out.
The rooms behind it have no furniture. Otto Frank asked for that when the museum opened in 1960. The empty rooms stand for what was taken away.
On the wall of Anne's room the pictures she glued up are still there: film stars, a royal princess, a painting by an old Dutch master. A girl of thirteen made her room her own.
"You can buy a ticket at the door." You cannot. Every ticket is sold on the museum's own website, for a set time, and sells out weeks ahead. People who sell entry in the street are cheating you.
"The family hid in an attic." They hid in a whole wing of three floors and an attic, behind the business. The attic was only the top of it.
"Anne died in Auschwitz." She and her sister Margot were sent on to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, and died there of typhus early in 1945, weeks before the camp was freed.
"We know who betrayed them." We do not. Several people have been named over eighty years. None of the cases has been proved.
"The diary is a novel." It is a real diary. Anne also rewrote parts of it herself in 1944, hoping to publish it after the war. Scientists have tested the ink and paper.
We searched Dutch, English, German and Japanese sources for this list.
The route runs one way: through the warehouse and offices in the front house, behind the bookcase, up through the annex, and out by the front. The stairs are steep.
Stand on the bridge over the Prinsengracht and look along the canal. The tall tower is the Westerkerk, finished in 1631. At 85 metres it is still the highest church tower in the city. On top sits the crown of Emperor Maximilian, which he gave Amsterdam the right to use in 1489.
Its clock chimed every quarter of an hour. On 11 July 1942, five days into hiding, Anne wrote that her parents and sister could not get used to the chimes. She liked them from the start. They sounded so reassuring, she said, especially at night.
From the air you can see how these houses work. A front house faces the canal. A back house stands behind a small yard, invisible from the street. Thousands of Amsterdam houses are built this way. That was what made the hiding place possible, and also why it could be found.
The house was built in 1635 for a merchant. Otto Frank's firm moved here on 1 December 1940. Opekta sold pectin, and a second firm, Pectacon, sold herbs and spices for butchers. The warehousemen below did not know who was living over their heads.
During working hours the eight in the annex could not run a tap or flush the toilet. Every sound carried down to the warehouse. They took off their shoes.
Upstairs are the offices where the four helpers worked: Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler. Each of them risked prison or a camp, every day for two years.
At first the door to the annex was an ordinary door. In August 1942 Bep's father, Johan Voskuijl, who worked in the warehouse, built a bookcase in front of it. It is filled with grey office files and swings out on hinges.
Behind it the stair is almost a ladder. This photograph was taken in 1957, when the building stood empty and was in danger of being pulled down.
On the first floor of the annex the Franks had two small rooms. Anne first shared a room with her sister. When Fritz Pfeffer arrived in November 1942, Anne had to share hers with him, a man of fifty-three. They quarrelled over the table by the window, where she wanted to write.
The pictures on the wall are hers, kept behind glass. Look for the American film star Deanna Durbin, Greta Garbo, and the young Princess Elizabeth of Britain. There is a postcard of chimpanzees at a tea party, a watermill by the Dutch painter Meindert Hobbema, and Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait.
The princess on the wall, later Queen Elizabeth II, was only three years older than Anne. She lived to be ninety-six.
On the door frame are pencil marks where Otto measured how tall his daughters had grown. Anne grew fast in hiding, and outgrew her clothes and shoes.
The second floor was the van Pels' room by night and everyone's kitchen and dining room by day. Here the eight ate together, followed the war on the BBC and Radio Orange from London, and argued.
Next to it is the tiny room of their son Peter, three years older than Anne. From his room a ladder leads to the attic. In the spring of 1944 Anne and Peter went up there together to talk, and she wrote about her first kiss.
The attic is seen from below, through the opening. From its window Anne could see the Westerkerk tower and a great horse chestnut tree in the yard. On 23 February 1944 she wrote that she and Peter looked out at the bare tree and the blue sky, and could not speak.
The tree was about 170 years old and sick with fungus. A storm brought it down on 23 August 2010. Its chestnuts had been sown first, and young trees grown from them now stand in many countries.
The Rijksmuseum, the national museum, keeps one of its chestnuts in a block of clear plastic.
Near the end of the route, in the front house, the red-and-white checked notebook lies in a glass case. Anne got it for her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, three weeks before the family went into hiding. The last entry is dated 1 August 1944.
She filled it, and went on in exercise books and on loose sheets. After the arrest Miep Gies picked them up from the floor and locked them in her desk. Otto published a selection on 25 June 1947 under the title Anne had chosen, Het Achterhuis.
Also in the museum is the Oscar that the actress Shelley Winters won for playing Mrs van Pels in the 1959 film. She gave it to the house.
Outside, round the corner on the Westermarkt, a small bronze girl stands with her hands behind her back. Mari Andriessen made her in 1977. Across the same square is the Homomonument, three pink granite triangles, remembering gay men and women persecuted then and since.
While Anne wrote here, China was in the sixth and seventh years of its war against Japan. In the same months, Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria were living in the Hongkou district of Shanghai, one of the few places in the world that took them in without a visa. About eighteen thousand survived the war there.
Anne wrote on 15 July 1944, three weeks before the arrest, that in spite of everything she still believed people were really good at heart. Many visitors leave with that sentence.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1631 | The Westerkerk is finished | Rembrandt moves to Amsterdam |
| 1635 | The house is built | The Dutch East India Company rules Taiwan from Fort Zeelandia |
| 1940 | Germany occupies the Netherlands; Otto's firm moves in | The Battle of Britain |
| 1942 | 6 July: the family goes into hiding | The Battle of Midway; the first gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau |
| 1944 | 4 August: arrest | 25 August: Paris is freed |
| 1945 | Anne dies at Bergen-Belsen; Otto comes back | The war in Europe ends in May |
| 1947 | The diary is published | India and Pakistan become independent |
| 1960 | The museum opens on 3 May | John F. Kennedy is elected |
One line to remember: eight people, one bookcase, two years, one survivor, one diary.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Emperor Maximilian is said to have fallen ill on a pilgrimage to Amsterdam's shrine of the Holy Place, recovered, and given the city his crown for its arms in thanks. That is why the crown sits on top of the Westertoren.
Source: Amsterdam tradition; historians point rather to the money the city lent him
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The museum's own ticket page, opened on 12 November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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