The Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, is a museum dedicated to Jewish wartime diarist Anne Frank, who hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in hidden rooms at the rear of the building. As well as the preservation of the hiding place — known in Dutch as the Achterhuis — and an exhibition on the life and times of Anne Frank, the museum acts as an exhibition space to highlight all forms of persecution and discrimination.

It opened on May 3, 1960 with the aid of public subscription, three years after a foundation was established to protect the property from developers who wanted to demolish the block.

The houseThe ground floor consisted of three sections; the front was the goods and despatch entrance, behind it in the middle section were the spice mills, and at the rear, which was the ground floor of the annexe, was the warehouse where the goods were packed for distribution. On the first floor above were the offices of Frank's employees; Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl and Johannes Kleiman in the front office; Victor Kugler in the middle; with Otto Frank in the rear office above the warehouse and below the floors which would later hide him and his family for two years until their betrayal to the Nazi authorities.

The Achterhuis (Dutch for "back house") or Secret Annex — as it was called in The Diary of a Young Girl, an English translation of the diary — is the rear extension of the building. It was concealed from view by houses on all four sides of a quadrangle. Its secluded position made it an ideal hiding place for Otto Frank, his wife Edith, two daughters (of whom Anne was the youngest), and four other Jewish people seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. Though the total amount of floor space in the inhabited rooms came to only about 500 square feet, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that it was relatively luxurious compared to other hiding places they had heard about. They remained hidden here for two years and one month until they were anonymously betrayed to the Nazi authorities, arrested, and deported to their deaths in concentration camps. Of the hidden group, only Otto Frank survived the war.

After those in hiding were arrested, the hiding place was cleared by order of the arresting officers and all the remaining contents (clothes, furniture, and personal belongings) of the Frank family and their friends were seized as Government property and distributed to bombed-out families in Germany. Before the building was cleared Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who had helped hide the families, returned to the hiding place against the orders of the Dutch police and rescued some personal effects. Amongst the items they retrieved was The Diary of Anne Frank.

After Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam he was given Anne's diaries and papers, and subsequently compiled selections into a book published in Dutch in 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis, which Anne had chosen as the name of a future memoir or novel based on her experiences in hiding. Achterhuis is a Dutch architectural term referring to a Back-house (used comparatively with Voorhuis meaning Front-house), however when the English translation began production it was realised that many English speaking readers might not be familiar with the term and it was decided that a more evocative term (the 'Secret Annexe') would better convey the building's hidden position.

Anne Frank House

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