AMSTERDAM -10-

ANNE FRANK HOUSE

5.30.2012

Emmy Andreiss, her work, the squares her heart and mind saw and her camera captured shake me up quite a bit. I need fresh air. I leave the Jewish History Museum and head toward Amsteel River. I find an outdoor café right on the water and order a beer, a very cold one. Joy is in the air around me, everybody is chatty as they devour their beer or wine. Nobody seems to have seen Emmy Andreiss’ work, at least not today. I lock my eyes into the ripples of Amsteel; my thoughts, sadness, tension drift away along with the slowly moving water. Pure meditation, just what I need right now. Thank you Amsteel.

Amsteel with an allegro spirit at all times

I visit more museums today. Photography museum is one, at the main floor of which, believe it or not, I come across a temporary exhibition on “Mansions of Bosporus”. In an old mansion from Dutch Golden Age, where the photography museum is established, is an exhibition of the remains of mansions from another land, how sweet. I make a plan to visit some of the "yali"s in Istanbul when I go to the world child abuse conference we are organizing in Taksim, Istanbul in September. 

          A living room from a "yali" in Istanbul  
          furnished Ottoman style

I didn’t bother with Madame Tussaud, but I did visit three famous Dutch Golden Age Homes, Herren hausen, that is, just to learn about how they lived then. It is so interesting to learn about how extremely wealthy people think about living quarters. These masters built their huge mansions on Herrengracht, that is the front entrance of each home was on Herrengracht. They each extended the entire depth of the space between Herren-gracht and Keisergracth. On the latter canal were the rear ends of the mansions occupied by coach houses. Although the most elegant and show-off spaces of the homes were in the front, front rooms actually were not livable, because the canals stank like no other! What happened then, was, the lady of the home designated a big room in the back of the main house facing the beautiful inner gardens to her use to “receive” her guests. I crave for the beauty of simplicity when I hear of such complexity that gives me almost a headache…

The courtyards behind the main house of one of the mansions

 

Before I head to Anne Frank House, I want to send a postcard to a friend. I am told there is a mailbox in the lobby of a hotel in the next block. It must be where the elegant entrance is. Oops, it is not. This is the entrance to St. Nicholas Church, it turns out, closed to tourists and guess what, there is a mass. I will not take photos, I will not bother anybody. Is it a terrible thing to do to simply become part of the mass? I approach the lady handing out the reading material to be used for the mass as confidently as possible. For a moment she is hesitant, after all, my appearance screams out loud I am a tourist, a camera over one shoulder, backpack on my back, straw hat on my head. What if I am a Christian longing for a Sunday mass away from home, though? Can she kick me out of God's home? My confidence wins. She is convinced I am dying to hear the mass and have my heart cleansed. As I move to an empty seat quietly, I murmur to myself “In a way I am (for the former).” I would really like to observe how Christian Dutch worship now that I landed, without planning, on a Dutch mass.

In front of me are three interesting people. An African man with a shaved head, the left side of which has a 10 cm long indentation, an untreated depressed fracture? The doctor in me never misses differential diagnostic opportunities. My heart breaks. Did he flee to Amsterdam because of violence that fractured his skull, has he found the safe haven he was looking for? He is reaching out to the same God the two handsome, middle aged, middle class men sitting next to him do. “Are they Gay?” crosses my mind. “Is this a gay-friendly church?” I wonder. I am the anthropologist humming to the tunes they clearly all know by heart. I don’t even know what I am humming to, all the better, it feels so good and peaceful, probably because I don't know what the lyrcs are about. It is hard to believe this institution also created such atrocities from individual to global scale throughout its history. I focus on the music shooing away the negative intellectual discourse in my mind. The chorus is spectacular, I couldn’t differentiate the music from Heidelberg Chorus’s.

The can is being passed around now. I drop a E1 coin in and pass it down. In the mean time, a group of people are walking down the aisle toward the priests. They are clearly Asian: Indonesian, Malaysian? With my lack of Dutch, I do not know the context, but perhaps celebration of their joining the congregation? By now, my row is allowed to walk up to the priest that will feed us with Jesus’ flesh. I hear the priest utter “This is Jesus’ flesh.”, I can make that much Dutch from my limited German. The bland circle he drops in my mouth dissolves on my tongue. I can’t help but wonder with a brief eye contact with him “Have you ever sexually abused a boy trusted into your care?” I won’t return to my seat as my row mates will do. I walk out into sunshine, which surrounds me inside and out. “Freedom” is dancing in my mind, I hear my voice saying out not so loud “Freedom”. It is good to be free of any organized religion and historical burden that comes with them. Believing in “Good” has always worked better for me than believing in God, and I guess it will remain that way.

By the time I am out, it is raining. This may be good news, people may consider going back to their hotels early, instead of going to Anne Frank House, which is by the way the single most visited museum in Amsterdam, the line never gets exhausted, always couple blocks long, never mind the coil within the building, which is another couple blocks' worth. Or... Everybody may decide “Let’s find refuge in Anne Frank House, then I may be in trouble. It is around seven pm as I approach the House. Valla! The line is negligible, my first prediction turned out to be at work here. In a few minutes, I am within the building.

Luckily, when I visited Anne Frank House, line was not this long.

Yes, indeed, Anne Frank House is heart breaking. A whole family was stuck in the maze of a secret annex in their own huge mansion for over two years. Yes, it must have been devastating emotionally. And my heart goes to poor Anne’s writing of her daily difficulties, the darkness, the dampness, the feeling of suffocation, longing for fresh air on and on and on... Despite all the sadness and revolt all of this stirred in me, I leave with this: "Compared to what masses of poorer and poorest Jewish people went through, Anne Frank's life was a bit overrated. At least for me, what it stirred in me didn't reach the level of what Emmy Andreiss' documentation of the pain the masses experienced did. Anne could suffer from such emotional devastation because her father could afford buying their survival as long as he did. He was a wealthy businessman. He transferred ownership of his business to his trusted friend, an Arian Dutch when Amsterdam was occupied by Nazis. Thus, his business, which he was still running out of his own mansion provided the much needed funds to allow this hiding, two more years of celebrated life when all the poor Jewish people, who had no such huge mansions to hide within, who had no excess money to pay others to help them hide were picked like apples one by one in a matter of minutes to hours to be sent to concentration camps to their torture or quick deaths. As sad as I was with everything that happened to Anne and her family, I couldn’t help but think, “All these millions, visiting Anne Frank House every year should also see Emmy Andreiss’ work."