Hiding

Just finished walking through the Anne Frank house. I'm now in the cafe enjoying a warm cup of tea. Outside is cold and rainy. I'm grateful for the cafe at the end of the museum, not only for the shelter and tea but as a place to regroup, collect my thoughts and become human again after touring the museum. To call it it a museum is really a misnomer. It is a haunted house. That's the best way I can describe it. When you go to the museum you don't enter the house straight away. There is a space next door, connected, that you enter through and a small exhibit of artifacts from Anne's life before the war and before she went into hiding, as well as artifacts from the time. You know when you have entered the house. I am certain I would be able to tell even if I was led in blindfolded. It's cold. The air is thick. My chest closed up tight and it felt like I couldn't relax until I was out. Standing in line waiting to get in, the enormity of what I was about to see hit me. This is a real place. Real people lived, no, were trapped and tried to live here, for 2 years. The place is unfurnished, as requested by Otto Frank, Anne's father and the only one hidden to have survived the war. There are pictures and artifacts and moving video portraits but the emptiness pervades and lends a ghostly air. I wanted to weep openly but instead continued blink wildly, dab at my eyes, sniffle and keep some sort of composure. There were a couple of things that particularly moved me.
-A yellow star mandatory for all Jews to wear browned from time and frayed at the edges
-the wallpaper in Anne's room decorated with clippings of celebrities like Ginger Rogers & Sonia Henie and a picture of monkeys at a table
-a video of Otto taken in 1967 describing getting Anne's diary back by saying "After I heard the news that my children would not come back"
-And pages from Anne's notebooks; in her handwriting.
The actual diary is not here; just a replica. The original is somewhere safe in a temperature controlled environment. Everything else remains protected behind glass. Still I couldn't help but reach out and touch the glass; the need to connect, feel, have contact with this story and with the people was so strong in me.
Standing in the middle of these tiny rooms I tried to imagine the daily life of being hidden for 2 years in such an extreme way; how anything can become the the new normal. Anne Frank's father made a comment in his video about how much about Anne's writing surprised him. Its depth and emotion making him realize he barely knew the girl he literally spent 24/7 with for 2 straight years. Even Anne confides in one of the first entries how she hopes this diary will be something she opens up to more than anything or anyone she ever has. It made me think about all the ways in which we as people hide ourselves. Whether with make-up or clothes or people or relationships, sometimes it can seem easier to hide. I am in no way trying to compare hiding from the Nazis to hiding from ending a bad relationship
or hiding from expressing any part of yourself. It's that when faced with the remnants of someone literally having to hide themselves away because of who
they are for fear of death, one can truly see the absurdity of hiding from anything less than that. The legacy that Anne created (as well as the incredible people around her) just by expressing her true self is an inspiration and just as important as the legacy of tolerance her writings leave behind.