A timely blog post today by author Thomas Harding about The House on the Canal, the house that hid Anne Frank. The blog post and the book are personal and well worth a read.
THE HOUSE ON THE CANAL
By Thomas Harding
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is an incredibly special place. Each year, more than a million people visit it from around the world. Of course it is where Anne Frank hid with her family for two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. But the house was built in the 1600s and so there is 400 years of history that took place in this building. And by looking across this extended timescape, it is possible to see how Anne’s story is very human, its core themes and conflicts — home, family, betrayal, persecution, nature, creativity — are universal.
Over four centuries, the house witnessed extraordinary history: the building of a modern city, global trade and slavery, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the round-up of Jews who were transported to Auschwitz and other camps, the Jews who hid to escape deportation as part of the Final Solution, Victory in Europe Day and the saving of the house through community effort.
When I was researching THE HOUSE ON THE CANAL, I was incredibly lucky to be given access to the building before the tourists arrived. The place was totally quiet, I was by myself. I walked up the steep narrow stairs and along a corridor to the back of the building. There was the bookcase that covered the entrance to the Secret Annexe where Anne Frank and her family hid. There was Anne’s bedroom where she wrote her diary. There were the marks on the wall that her father made to measure his daughter’s heights as they grew during their time in hiding. The window out of which she looked at her cherished chestnut tree in the garden.
When preparing for this book, I thought a lot about the power of writing. Anne Frank of course chronicled her time in hiding in her diary, she then revised her writing, editing and re-editing as she wanted the book to be as good as possible so that one day it could be published. Her book became one of the most read in history. But there were others in the story who wrote. The woman who lived in the house in the 17th century with her 12 children could both read and write, an example of how female literacy was much higher in the Dutch provinces than it was in Britain, France or other European countries. The fire that erupted in the house and was saved by the firefighters was reported by the Amsterdam newspapers. The wealthy family who lived at the house in the 18th century wrote letters to their customers and tracked their sales in the double-entry books.
Early on in the project, we discussed the use of nouns in the main text, such as ‘Nazis’, ‘Germans’, ‘Dutch’, ‘concentration camps’, ‘Christian’ and ‘Jews’. We decided to enhance the readers’ connection to the universal themes in the story by limiting the use of such nouns to the absolute minimum. For greater learning, we added two pages of additional information at the back of the book providing further details for each of the families featured including Anne Frank and her family.
To make THE HOUSE ON THE CANAL I worked with the amazing illustrator Britta Teckentrup who produced the stunning pictures for the book. Britta is German and lives in Berlin. My family is German-Jewish, we had to flee Berlin in the 1930s because of Nazi persecution. The production of the book is, therefore, a coming together of two German stories, a reconciliation.
As I finished the book I was yet again reminded of something important: history is personal.
