If the Anne Frank House is a fitting refutation, or logical conclusion, of the goal for a Jewish museum that Hitler envisioned (see note below), he would have been disappointed in the turnout. Every day crowdes queue up from the time the museum opens to past ten pm, when it is strangely light out still. They stand in the rain for a chance to feel the pain, the shame we must share as humans.

I know: you may have lost relatives in the Holocaust, or may have fathers who fought in the war, as did mine. But the history is bleak: the news of the death camps was everywhere (including Reader’s Digest!), and stories of the Nazis rounding up Jews was not enough to get some people involved. And that is the collective shame.

The good people of Amsterdam, some of them anyway, formed anti-fascist groups as early as 1933, and welcomed the first German refugees with open arms. Many were artists, intellectuals and performers; Anne Frank’s father made jam, which is a form or art where I come from. After the Nazis invaded many resisted (see the Black Book) and gave aid to those fleeing persecution.  Most of the people helping to hide the Franks were rounded up, too.

There is not a lot of hoopla here: no guided tour, no audio guide. You move from room to room, most of them as bare as the Nazis left them, informed by bare-bones text and excerpts from Anne’s diary of what happened. There are videos and some first-person accounts as you move up the stairs and to the last rooms, filled with reproductions of the clips from movie magazines she had on her bedroom wall, followed by photos of the camps themselves.

The last room features a video of her father, who survived to oversee the museum’s opening. He speaks of the surprise he felt at first reading her diary: what a serious girl! he marvels. What deep thoughts she kept hidden and he wept to recall how little he really knew his own daughter.

Back on the street the tourists kept coming. I recalled a reading William Gass gave at Eugene Lang College a few years ago. The then head of the writing program asked him about the moral force of fiction, positing the idea that if Hitler had read Anne Frank’s diary, he could never have gone forward with the Holocaust. Gass (good name!) was quite dismissive of the idea, and practically laughed like a Santa. Of course he could have read it and killed them all.

Next question.