The Secret Attic

Amsterdam
March, 2007

There was a girl who lived in an attic for 2 years with her family and 4 others, never making a noise during normal business hours. She longed to go outside and play and breathe the fresh air and feel the sunshine on her face, but she knew that she could not without the dire consequences of having herself and her family taken away. At times she found solace in the chestnut tree that stood outside the old canal house where she was hiding. She could see the leaves from one of the windows. Somehow, she managed to find joy and hope, to dream and to forgive. She wrote about her feelings and her hopes and her dreams not only for herself but for all people in her diary. She was able to transcend her circumstances. But I'm sure she still felt afraid and alone at times.

I had the privilege of standing in the very spot where she slept, looking up to where she must have looked on sleepless nights, staring at the very wooden beam she stared at. I silently shouted out my hopes and fears and dreams into that beam as well. And wondered how many others had done the same.

One of Anne's hopes was to become a journalist when "it was all over." The first thing she wanted to do was to write a book called The Secret Attic. And in spite of all that happened to her, her hiding, her captivity at Bergen-Belsen and ultimately her death at same camp, she in fact did write that book and it was in fact published and has inspired many people all over the world, including me as a young girl and even more so today as I stand in the places she stood, see the things she saw. At the end of the tour, there is a video with a woman who had tossed care packages over the fence of the camp to Anne. She last saw her about a week before she died. And she says in the interview that if only Anne knew that her father was still alive, maybe she'd still have hope and she could have held on a little longer. It was only a month later that the camp was liberated by the Allied forces. But Anne felt alone since her sister died a few weeks earlier from Typhoid. She had been separated from the rest of her family. She was alone. And she lost hope. And she died.

The Anne Frank House invites its guests to sign their name on a leaf of a virtual chestnut tree. In order to become a part of the legacy, a part of that solace from 1944. In signing it, I felt a little less alone and a little more hopeful. Loneliness is as deadly as hope is lifesaving. Perhaps they cancel each other out.