We left the hotel fairly early in the morning, so as to be among the first to visit Anne Frank's House -Museum.
Walking along the Amstel river heading towards the Western Canal Ring we came across the 1841 Neo-Classical Mosen en Aäronkerk, whose towers have been inspired by the Saint Sulpice in Paris. It is said to have replaced the old original house of Moses and Aaron that hid a clandestine church in a period when Catholics no longer dared to hold services in public.
Soon after we came across the Zuiderkerk with its rather impressive clocks, pinacles and columns, though we were told it ceased to function as a church in 1929.
Strolling along the Western Canal Ring inevitably made me think back to what I had read on the fishing settlement that took place there some 400 years before ...
A small deviation took us into the Nieuwezijds Vooburgval with its magnificent old buildings amongst which the 1895-1899 Magna Plaza shopping mall, once Amsterdam's Head Post Office, was the most impressive to look at ...
... though we were soon back into the Prinsengracht area, just across the 1631 Westerkerk, one of the first Protestant Churches to be built in Amsterdam. Outside it there is a small statue of Ann Frank and turning to the right of it ... the secret hideout she and her family used during the plight of the Jews of Amsterdam.
The whole story of her tragic fate is poignant but more so when you enter the annexe behind the swinging bookcase that was used as camouflage and get to "experience" what it must have been like for them to have had to live in permanent fear of being heard by the warehouse workers underneath.
(to be continued)
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