Anne Frank foundation buys her family home
THE HAGUE: The foundation maintaining the Amsterdam house where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis during World War II said that it had bought another property where her family lived in the 1930s.
But the Anne Frank Foundation said it had no plans to use the “other home” as a museum, as it does with the one in Amsterdam’s canal belt where the Frank family hid for two years, and which now draws thousands of visitors each year.
“It’s important for the foundation that the home where Anne Frank lived in the 1930s remains intact and is looked after in a proper way,” a spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker said.
“It has a very special character – the home situated at the Merwedeplein is inextricably linked to Anne Frank,” Bekker added, referring to a square in Amsterdam.
The home in southern Amsterdam formerly belonged to a housing corporation which had said it could no longer assume responsibility for its upkeep.
Anne Frank’s father Otto bought the first house in 1933 after fleeing rising anti-semitism in neighbouring Germany, and she arrived there as a four-year-old girl.
Fuzzy black-and-white pictures show a smiling Anne looking from a window frame or sitting in a deck chair on the house’s rooftop terrace.
The home purchased by the Anne Frank Foundation has been restored to its original 1930s style.
Since 2005 it had been let out to the Dutch Foundation for Literature, which uses it as a home for writers forced to flee persecution.
Currently Syrian writer Samer Alkadri and his family reside at the home, Bekker said. — AFP