Wednesday Oct. 11 – THE ROOM AS WORLD (finally, a short blog entry!)
Posted by Tina Landau on 11/06/2006Today I went back to the Anne Frank House and sat inside the rooms of the Annex for a very long time. Just sat.
I decided to get there not at 8:30 so as to be first on line, but at 9:15 so as to go in after the initial rush of early-risers and, this way, neither have to wait on line nor contend with the greater crowds which would start later. Can you believe I spent so much time strategizing about the lines at the Anne Frank House? Anyway, this worked. I did not have to wait on lines, and the House was relatively empty still at this hour.
I’m not sure what, if anything yet, is a new revelation or insight for me today from the time spent here. I just know that I noticed all sorts of new sights and details – mostly stains on the walls, cracks in the kitchen counter-top, the odd angle of the mirror over the bathroom sink, the miniature drawings on Peter’s game board, and so on.
I did spend enough time in those rooms – and ONLY those rooms today – that I began, I think, to get a teeny tiny miniscule tad of a fraction of a glimpse of what it must have felt like to be in those rooms for…. two years? No, I probably did not even get that fraction. But perhaps. After only some hours, those rooms grew so small to me. So intimate. An entire world. I imagined them AS the entire world. For that is what they were to those eight people. The world.
November 15th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Tina,
I would imagine that you saw this item in today’s Chicago Sun-Times, but in case you didn’t, I thought I would pass it along.
Anne Frank’s beloved tree to be cut down
November 15, 2006
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — The chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she was in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland must be cut down, the Amsterdam city council said Tuesday.
The tree in the courtyard behind the canal-side warehouse where the Frank family took refuge for more than two years has been attacked by an aggressive fungus and a moth, called the horse chestnut leaf miner. Experts estimate the tree’s age at 150-170 years.
The chestnut is familiar to some 25 million readers of The Diary of Anne Frank. Frank looked at it longingly from the attic, the only window that was not blacked out to prevent anyone seeing movement inside the apartment in the rear of the warehouse on Prinsengracht street, where the family hid.
The Jewish teenager made several references to it in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until the family was arrested in August 1944.
Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.
I guess it just adds to the idea of people remembering her time gazing out the window at freedom.
Larry Kucharik