04-15-2024 Entry

Woke up a little earlier than usual. <> We had breakfast and then got ready to go to the Rijksmuseum when it opened at 9. We took the Metro, and I was bummed that my iAmsterdam QR code wouldn't open the Metro gate. I paid for a ticket, and away we went. Got to the museum with some time to spare, which put us in a good position in the line. As soon as we entered the museum, we went up to the Great Hall before the crowds came. It was a good strategy, as we got to see some of the signature art in the museum without a bunch of people to deal with. After this hall, which was magnificent, for me the rest of the museum was a letdown. The library was mildly interesting, but the rest of it was fairly pedestrian, with a heavy Dutch influence, obviously. We spent about 2 hours there, then walked over to the Stedelijk Museum. Much smaller, devoted to more modern art. The first exhibition floor was interesting to go through, but for some reason they had closed off the second floor, which was half the museum. That was disappointing, but I didn't want to spend all day in museums, so no big deal. From there, we walked over to an "authentic" Dutch restaurant not too far from the Oudekerk. The food was decent, it felt like a combination of a place where locals go to and where tour group leaders take their tours. We decided to limit our walking for the afternoon, so we headed to a small pub that had a lot of different kinds of beers. I had a Rauch lager with a smoky finish, and Ann had a rhubarb-like sour beer. It was sleeting while we drank, so we waited a bit for the rain to subside before heading out. We walked over to the Oudekerk, but it had just been closed to prepare for a new exhibit. Curiously, surrounding this church is a portion of the red light district, so we got the chance to see the prostitutes standing in the windows, generally looking bored or talking on their phones. All of them were wearing push-ups bras to accentuate their appearance. It was not very arousing, more transactional in nature. It was raining steadily while we were walking, but there wasn't an easy way to get to Amsterdam Centraal other than walking. So we did. The rain was steady but not heavy, bearable. But we stopped in to look at a church, the Basilica of St Nicholas, along the way. Then it was back via walking around the station, as apparently there isn't a through-way, and taking the ferry across the river. It was nice to have some down time in the afternoon before visiting the Anne Frank Museum in the evening. I had leftovers for dinner, and Ann didn't eat, as she had a big steak for lunch. The walk over to the ferry was windy and cold, but it wasn't raining. We took the tram over to the museum and basically walked right in. It was more interesting and moving than I expected. Some facts I remember from the audio tour through the house:

• There were 8 people living in the hiding place, which was more spacious than I had imagined. Four in Anne's family, including her older sister Margot, who stayed in a room with her parents. Another family of three, with a teenage boy about Anne's age. Then Anne was in a room with an older man, not sure why that was the arrangement.
• Of the 8 people, 7 were killed in death camps after they were discovered. Only Otto Frank survived the war. The non-Jewish Dutch citizens who helped hide them for 2 years were sent to a Dutch concentration camp but survived to the end of the war.
• Upon discovery, everybody was initially sent to a Dutch processing facility. Eventually, all the Jews were sent to death camps, starting with Auschwitz-Birkenau. Others died in Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, and other unidentified camps.
• The entrance to the hidden annex was located behind a bookcase on hinges, which was still in the house. All of the furniture was gone from the annex, it having been removed when they were discovered.
• Anne wrote a lot, and it was surprising to me how much of it was retained. She had a set of initial diaries, then in 1944 she started to transcribe her diaries into a set of loose leaf pages. This latter collection forms the basis of her published diary.

I'm glad we did this tour, it was meaningful and a counterpoint to my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We took the tram back to the main station, then the Metro back to our neighborhood. Thankfully, we didn't have much rain on the walk back to the flat, although I was cold and Ann was walking slowly.