Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Explore Anne Frank's House



Now that you've spent a few weeks confined to a small enclosed space you might be able to imagine the life of Anne Frank with a little more empathy. Of course Anne Frank spent over two years during her confinement, while hiding from the Nazis in the Secret Annex above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.



The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam is currently closed to the public but you can still explore the Secret Annex on the museum's website. You can virtually walk through the revolving bookcase in the Opekta offices and explore a number of 360 degree panoramic images of the annex's rooms.

Once in the annex you can look around the small room which Anne Franck shared with Fritz Pfeffer. You can also view 360 panoramas of the living room (which at night served as the bedroom of her parents and sister), the shared bathroom and the attic of the Secret Annex.



Before the Frank family went into hiding in July 1942 they lived in a house in Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. You can explore Street View images of Anne Frank’s family home on Google Arts and Culture. The house is now home to a 'refugee writer'. Each year the Dutch Foundation for Literature invites a writer who cannot work freely in their own country to live and work in the Anne Frank house.

You can walk around the house's rooms on Street View. Each of the rooms are decorated and furnished in a style which are contemporaneous with the time when the Frank family lived there.


Here are some other museums which you can explore virtually from the confinement of your home:

The Palace of Versailles
The British Library's Maps and the 20th Century exhibition
National Heritage's Stonehenge Virtual Tour
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
The Sistine Chapel Virtual Tour - the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo's astonishing ceiling
Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close -  a virtual tour of the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour

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