Secrets in the Attic

Every time we visited Nan’s house, in New Chelsea, we always coerced some grown-up to setting up a stepladder and bringing us up to the attic, where the musty smells of half-forgotten relics and school books from the past 50 years were a surefire assault to the senses—in a good way. We usually left with a small bounty of finds from the attic.

I guess there’s something about an attic—how you put these unremarkable things away, because you can’t quite bear to throw them away but don’t want them in your sight every day, and all of a sudden a bit of time passes and the rediscovery is something altogether fascinating. How something can wondrous can be just out of sight.

Let’s go back, for a minute, to May 26, 1578. The Dutch Revolt was ongoing in this part of the world, as Protestants rejected the rule of the Catholic King Phillip II of Spain. The Alteratie refers to the actual date when the Catholic government in Amsterdam was actually ousted, in favour of a Protestant one. Shortly after that, open Catholic worship was prohibited in the city.

The oldest building in Amsterdam, the Oude Kerk, 

was formerly a Roman Catholic church

That doesn’t mean that Catholicism died out. I said open worship was prohibited, but if you’ve been reading anything else I’ve written about Amsterdam up until now, you know that this city is almost notorious tolerant. It adopted an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality, so that clandestine churches sprung up overnight. These were actual churches, with altars, priests, confessionals, and congregations, that met in nooks of canal houses. The most intact of these dates from 1663: Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, or Our Lord in the Attic.

Jan Hartman was a wealthy Catholic merchant who purchased the canal house, and converted the attic into a church. The museum starts on the lower floors, exploring the kitchen and the living quarters, before moving up narrow staircases to the attic. And there, you’re greeted by a pretty unexpected sight.

From the outside, this looks like an ordinary house along an Amsterdam canal. Even knowing it houses a church, you’d expect it to be a room, but the galleries are open in the two levels above it, so the hidden church has an almost-impossibly spacious feel to it.

It makes sense though, that this space would be so ornamented and lavish. Rather than being a novelty for Jan Hartman and his Catholic friends, this was the Catholic church for Amsterdam central for some 200 years, before the opening of the Basilica of St. Nicholas in 1887.

Our Lord in the Attic was saved from demolition and became a museum the year after, making it the second-oldest museum in Amsterdam, after the Rijksmuseum.

Not far from the church in the attic sits another attic, and this one also tied to religion. Specifically, tied to religious intolerance, during the German Occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, but her family left Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. She grew up in Amsterdam, a place of supposed refugee—however, despite the Netherlands insistence on neutrality during the European war, Hitler invaded in 1940, beginning the German Occupation. It was no longer safe to be Jewish in Amsterdam, but it was also now impossible to leave.

By 1942, the situation was more dire, and Otto Frank made the decision to put his family—his wife, Edith, and Anne and her older sister, Margot—into hiding, rather than risk being sent to the concentration camps. The house at 263 Prinsengracht had been, in happier times, Otto’s business space, where his company Opekta sold a gelling agent for making jam, and Pectacon created spice mixes for meats. Those businesses continued throughout the Second World War, but not under Otto’s Frank’s Jewish name—anti-Semitic laws prohibited that.

While the house continued to serve as a business space on the ground floors, housing a warehouse and offices, there was an annexe to the house, a full back portion, containing two floors and an attic. It was here, by putting a moveable bookcase against the entranceway to the annexe, that the Franks hid during the war.

Shortly before going into hiding, on her thirteenth birthday, Anne Frank received a bound diary as a present. That diary, which started out documenting schoolwork, friends, and boys, went with her into the secret annexe, and documented something altogether different that has become one of the most important stories of the twentieth century.

When we arrived at the Anne Frank House (a museum since 1960) on Sunday afternoon, the queue stretched right around the side of the nearby Westerkerk, the church Anne referenced several times in her diary. There are a limited number of tickets you can buy online for a designated time period—most of the pre-sales up until late November are now sold, but we lucked into ours and beat the lineup.

Although, having been through the house, I will say that even if you have to wait in the lineup, it is worth it.

As photographs are not permitted inside the house, you’ll have to take my word for what we saw, as we entered the warehouse on the ground floor and made our ascent. The Franks were not the only ones in hiding in the annexe—they were later joined by Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste van Pels-Röttgen, their son Peter van Pels, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. If you’re familiar with the diary, those names probably aren’t familiar—it’s because in May 1944, Anne became increasingly interested in getting her diary published after the war, and started re-writing large portions of it, where she disguised the names of those she was in close quarters with. The van Pels became the Van Daans, and Pfeffer turned into Albert Düssel (“Düssel,” in German, roughly translates to “idiot.” It’s pretty clear how Anne felt about the middle-age man she had to share her squat room, and writing desk, with).

In order to survive, the inhabitants of the annexe required helpers who brought in everything from news and groceries to correspondence courses for the children. They were Miep Gies-Santrouschitz, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl, all of whom put themselves in incredible danger to ensure the safety of their friends.   

The story of human survival and perseverance is remarkable, no matter how you look at it. The house, per Otto Frank’s decision, is unfurnished, but even the bare spaces tell a story of what happened here. From the warehouse floor we passed up steep stairs to the office space, where Anne and Margot bathed on the weekends and the families listened to the radio, receiving updates on the progress of the war. It’s on the other side of the storeroom that the actual bookcase still stands, revealing a tiny door that you have to duck through, to enter the space that no one knew about for two years.

The basic layout of the annexe is this. Otto, Edith, and Margot shared a room on the main floor, and Anne and Pfeffer were next door. A bathroom, with a surprisingly decorated porcelain toilet, was the only other feature on this floor—the pipes ran right through the warehouse though, so it wasn’t just that they needed to keep their voices and movements to a minimum during the day, but also that they couldn’t flush the toilet.

A crumpled museum guide might help

Up the stairs led to the kitchen, which doubled as the living quarters for the van Pels. Peter had his room at the base of the stairs leading to the attic, which became Anne’s sacred spot to escape the claustrophobia of the rest of the annexe, and to actually be able to look out the window. That was the entirety of the living space for eight people with very human emotions and tensions for two long uncertain years.

We had access to all the spaces, except for the actual attic (mirrors at the top of the landing gave good idea on what it was like). Despite being unfurnished, there were relics—pictures of 1940s film stars on Anne’s walls, the board game Peter received for his birthday one year in hiding, pencil markings on the wallpaper to mark the growth of the children. Quotes from the diary also lent a fair bit of context to what we were looking at, and impressed the gravity of the situation.

On August 4, 1944, after receiving an anonymous tip that is still, to this day, anonymous, the German Security Service raided the house and arrested the eight. A few months earlier, Anne had written in her diary: “I want to go on living even after my death!” As the families were separated and sent to different, horrible fates, how prophetic her words ended up being.

Anne Frank aspired to be a writer. Her diary, which was salvaged by Miep Gies, was eventually published by her father, the only survivor of the group. It’s always struck me as a sad irony that Anne Frank is one of the world’s bestselling authors, her diary selling more copies around the world than Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby, and she had no opportunity to even imagine that degree of notoriety. Because, of course, just weeks before the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, Anne Frank died.

Before leaving the house, a final display offers a few more artifacts behind glass enclosures. One is the Academy Award Shelley Winters won for her portrayal of Mrs. Van Daam in the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank. More importantly, however, is the reason everyone is here in the first place: Anne’s diary. Such a simple book (and various other collections of her writings—short stories, the start of a novel, and the re-written sections she planned on publishing once she was free), in simple script, standing for so much.

The autumn late afternoon was still lovely, so we decided to venture onto the canals for one of Amsterdam’s famous canal cruises to end the day.

In a small boat with only about 25 other visitors, we went beneath the arches of the city, through the network of waterways that offers a full other world of Amsterdam life.

Passing by houseboats and narrow canal houses, we had a worldclass view of the cafés, bicycles, and heartbeat of the city, taking about an hour to loop through the Red Light District and Centraal Station, down the Amstel and back again. A view of another hidden world, completely accessible but easy enough to pass right on by.

We made it back home just as the stars were starting to peek out, and we retreated into the secret world of dreams after another superb weekend in Amsterdam.

Cheers,
rb