time marches on
Sunday, June 14th, 2009by Rachael
Vianen, Holland
She peeked out that window. She saw Jews walking along the street and felt guilty, as if she had betrayed them by hiding. She agonised about fresh air. She felt trapped. She felt proud to be a Jew, but simultaneously desperate. She stuck pictures on the wall, she used a Delft blue-n-white toilet, she whispered and tip-toed, she felt, she matured, she wrote. She was Anne Frank, and this was her hiding place. We saw the toilet, the pictures, the attic window. We climbed the steep stairs and listened to/watched interviews with people who knew her, people who had hidden her. In the dim orange preserving light, we saw her diary.
And just like when we came away from the Genocide Museum in Cambodia, we knew we must always fight for freedom.
I don’t want to write too much about the museum itself – and we have no pictures to show anything as it is requested that you not take any (not that too many people respected this) – because I think part of the interest of it was not knowing what to expect. Of course, we had a picture in our minds’ eye…a picture formed both from reading the diary itself and also from watching the black and white movie by the same name as the book. The picture was accurate, although the blackness was darker than any of us had imagined. We were surprised both by the bigness and the smallness of the museum! And by the number of people filing through; there was a constant steady stream. If you get to go one day, make sure you arrive early to avoid the queue, which wound round the corner and past the church…but if there is a queue, it’s worth the wait. Take your time, and be moved.
As with any other “museum trip”, the trip itself was not the only highlight. Just walking TO the museum was a delight:
But then we had to drive away from clean and tidy, canal-filled festive cosmopolitan Amsterdam (description is a combination of everyone’s impressions), where over 50% of the children come from non-European backgrounds, where there are eateries from Italy, Turkey, China, America, Thailand, Holland, Japan, Germany, Greece (and that’s just what we found in two afternoons), where people party on the streets and picnic on their boats as they cruise along the canals. While it would be nice to still be there, visiting the Rijksmuseum, cruising ourselves, cycling around, we needed to move on.
At the end of the day, we pulled in to our free parking spot 50km away right beside another canal, within sight of a bridge that would – within minutes of us arriving – be lifted to let a boat through. (We had chosen this spot for its price (free) and its not-too-far-away-from-Amsterdam location….it looks like it’s going to offer more than just that. Grandpa has already gone for a wander and reported back that’s it’s well worth a look in the morning, with an old town gate and walls, and an impressive clock tower…..but that will have to wait until tomorrow for the rest of us).
Almost equally as close, but in a different direction, is a church with bells, which ring out a cheerful tune every half hour. The bells of Europe lend happiness to the day, as well as marking the passing of time. For Anne Frank, time was short. None of us know, how long we have. Let us make the most of each day. Live. Laugh. Love.
Time on the road: 1 hour
Distance covered: 50km
rayres