Europe Diary - Post #4 by Rebecca

Some of the most significant parts of Dutch history are the holocaust and boats. When the Germans started banning Jews in their country, many of these German Jews fled to the Netherlands. The Franks were some of them.

Then the Nazis started to invade other countries. Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, tried to move the family to England and twice tried to move them to America, but emigrating was impossible because they were no longer German citizens and they weren’t Dutch citizens yet either, so they were forced to go into hiding.

They hid in the secret annex above the jam factory the Otto Frank managed. They lived there with the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeiffer. The annex was found two years after they went into hiding and Otto Frank was the only one that survived the concentration camps.

When I first saw the Anne Frank Museum, I thought,”Why is there a museum about this? What’s so important about a girl’s diary and where she hid for a few years?” But that thought was short lived and I quickly realized that this is all here to keep that kind of prejudice from happening again.

The museum takes you through the factory and through another building with more history of the holocaust. In the latter building, we found a cool room where they showed us recent problems on a TV screen and had us vote on what we thought of the problem. It wasn’t an official vote, but more like a way to practice working for the better. I think that was the most interesting thing in the museum, though it was all worth seeing.

My two favorite things mentioned in history are castles and ships. I like manors, houses, and other boats as well, but the first mentioned are my favorites. I want to be a pirate! Yes, I’m aware that I sound like an unsocialized, homeschooled weirdo, but most pirates aren’t well socialized anyways.

I got to partially live my dream when we visited the Scheepvaart /Maritime Museum. The museum is in an old ship-cargo-loader-thing with an awesome boat tided up out at the deck next to the building. The boat Amsterdam is a typical 18^th century cargo ship. It has really neat decorations on the back including full color statues of Neptune and Hermes.

Inside the museum, we saw multiple exhibits about subjects such as whales, globes, and the Dutch trade routes. One exhibit about the modern use of ships in the Netherlands has a room that stimulates what it would be like to be shipped. My dad was fully convinced that we were cheese. Oud cheese.

To end of our day, we took a boat tour through the canals of Amsterdam. It was a perfect summary of Dutch history from the water view.

Well, as I’ve been writing this, we’ve gone through multiple different countries, visited the World War II museum in Diekirch, Luxembourg, and saw a Roman guy yelling from the Porta Nigra (no, it was not my dad), so I need to wrap this up so that I can start writing about those. So . . . I saw cool stuff! It was really interesting seeing the importance of those in Dutch history.