AMSTERDAM - A TRAVELLER'S VIEW

FEW TOURISTS who visit the Dutch city of Amsterdam return to their home feeling a sense of disappointment.  Amsterdam is one of the rare places in the world which caters for everybody's tastes.

     It's rich and colourful history will leave even the most ardent scholar entertained for hours as they examine the way the city and culture has developed.

     People who are of a more liberal disposition can relax in one of Amsterdam's many coffee shops, smoking copious amounts of cannabis whilst philosophising deeply about the many injustices which plague our world.

     Or for the more sexually orientated, the cities Red Light District promises to satisfy most proclivities, no matter how deviant in nature these may be.

One of Amsterdam's quirky buildings covered in Graffiti

For me, the city of Amsterdam is a living entity; a breathing metropolis whose individual streets, bars, coffee shops and canals revealed new aspects of a truly unique personality.  As I wandered along the cobbled streets, Amsterdam's culture whispered into my ears, and before long I found myself captivated.

      It was then I discovered the home of Amsterdam's most famous resident - a beautiful young woman whose short life was extinguished after the madness of war enveloped Europe in the fall of 1939.  I had reached The Secret Annex - the hiding place of Anne Frank.
     Finding this house seemed more poignant as Holocaust Day, commemorated in Britain on January 27th, was vast approaching.

     Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929, Anne Frank fled Germany with her family after The Nazi's came to power.  However, after the German invasion of The Netherlands in 1940, her life changed dramatically.  Almost immediately, the German authorities instituted draconian laws against Holland's entire Jewish population, and overnight a wave of anti-Semitism swept through the nation.

     Anne's father, Otto, an astute businessman, immediately understood the danger he and his family faced, and he made preparations to hide his family away from the new authorities.

     When the order was given for all Dutch Jews to prepare for deportation to "The East" in 1942, Otto ,his family, and four family friends - with the co-operation of Dutch associates - disappeared into the attic of 263 Prinsengracht.  They were to remain hidden in these cramped quarters for the next two years until, weeks before Liberation, they were betrayed and transported to the death camp of Auschwitz.

     As I walked around the tiny confines of The Secret Annex, it was impossible to imagine how eight people survived, day in, day out, in an area no larger than fifty square meters.  During daylight hours they could not move around for fear of generating unwelcome noise; the windows too were permanently blacked out, encasing the residents of 263 Prinsengracht in world of virtual darkness.

     Yet despite their hardships, Anne, who aspired to become a Journalist, began recording her daily experiences in the form of a Diary.  Over the course of her self-imprisonment between 1942 and 1944, her commentary reveals the hardships of her young life and generated feelings of compassion, understanding and anger in the reader.

     The only crime these eight people were guilty of was that fact they were Jewish.  And the Frank family, steered through life under Otto's prudent leadership, rarely practiced their religion.  However, the perverse policies promulgated by Hitler's regime singled these people out for extirpation.  Despite the fact all eight residents were hard working, law abiding citizens, their ethnicity effectively condemned them.

     The death of one life is a tragedy, but it is somehow amplified when the individual involved is a young, intelligent and diligent individual.  Reading over extracts of Anne's diary, one cannot help feeling a wave of anguish as her writing reveals her to be a bright and perceptive young woman.  How could so many German people who, in 1900 led the world in the fields of culture and the arts, have allowed themselves to become so blinded by propaganda that they no longer recognised Jews as human beings, whose visceral thoughts and emotions mirrored their own?    

     When the family were betrayed in August, 1944, they became part of the final transport from The Netherlands that was destined for Auschwitz.  Less than one month later, the majority of Holland was liberated after Field Marshal Montgomery launched his abortive offensive to capture the Dutch city of Arnhem, on the river Rhine.

     When the war ended, Otto Frank was the only surviving member of his family.  Anne, her mother, and her elder sister perished inside Hitler's concentration camps.

     Her diary, which was published in 1947, has come to symbolise the horrors of the holocaust.  For it represents a time when reason and logic died, replaced by the creed of intolerance, bigotry and hate.

     

The statue of Anne Frank near263 Prinsengracht 

70 years have passed since the Frank family entered their enforced isolation, however as the world economy teeters on the brink of another Great Depression, the bitter lessons humanity learnt during World War Two seem to be fading.

     Once again the growth of the Far Right is on the rise throughout Europe.  Many politicians, unable to countenance policies which are focused on social egalitarianism, prefer to create division and disunity through the guise of nationalism, in order to support their narrow objectives. 

     Terrorism has become the new pretext for the erosion of civil liberty, and the connotations associated with that word have been deliberately exaggerated to fuel the fires of suspicion within society.

     As I walked back to my hotel, I did begin to wonder whether humanity actually learns from the past or, like the Diary of Anne Frank, I questioned, is the past merely viewed as a manuscript for reference, a reference to be acknowledged but not really understood . . .