Anne Frank

The Anne Frank Museum is located next to one of Amsterdam's seven main canals. It was here that for two years Anne Frank, a German teenage Jew, whose family left Hitler's Germany for safety in Holland, lived in secret with her family and friends to avoid arrest at the hands of the Nazis. Anne, who wanted to be a writer, wrote a diary for two years about her experiences in hiding. In order to survive the ordeal, Anne cut out pictures from newspapers and magazines and decorated the walls with them. One of the photos was a picture of her Hollywood heartthrob, actor Robert Stack, who would later star as Elliot Ness in the TV show "The Untouchables".

Behind me is the passageway leading to the secret rooms where Anne and seven other family and friends stayed for two years. This entrance was behind a bookcase which could be slid to the side to reveal the opening. For two years these people lived in quiet above a jam factory that Anne's father had owned. Anne, fell in love with a teenage boy that was in hiding with her and wrote about this in her diary. In August 1944, they were betrayed and ten people, including two who helped them from outside of the house, were arrested by the Nazis and sent off to various concentration camps. Of the ten people sent to these death camps, only the father, Otto Frank, whose camp Auschwitz was liberated by Russian forces in January, 1945, would survive the war. Otto Frank would return to Amsterdam where he met a woman who aided them but was able to avoid arrest at the hands of the Nazis. She had found the diary and kept it and gave it to the father. This diary would be published into a book and later produced into a Broadway play and many different movies over the time. Anne Frank who died at the age of 15, was just one of the upwards of 85 million people that were killed during World War II but fortunately her story, unlike many others, would survive. From Amsterdam, my brother and I travel to the village of Opheusden on "the Island", a desolate territory completely surrounded by water between Arnhem and Nijmegen. This tiny area was ordered to be attacked by Hitler in early October 1944 after the Allied attempt, Operation Market-Garden, failed. Because this region was a shortcut that bypassed Germany's West Wall, Adolf Hitler personally ordered it to be retaken to prevent anymore attempts at this Nazi weakpoint.

Photos by Dave Wilber