Anne Frank House

Prinsengracht 263 looks like any other canal house from the outside, which was exactly the point. Behind this modest 1635 facade, eight people hid from the Nazis for 761 days in a secret annex accessible only through a door concealed behind a movable bookcase. Anne Frank was thirteen when her family went into hiding on July 6, 1942, and fifteen when the Gestapo raided the building on August 4, 1944. Someone had betrayed them. Who did it remains one of the most investigated cold cases in Dutch history.

Otto Frank, Anne's father, was the only one of the eight who survived the camps. When he returned to Amsterdam, his secretary Miep Gies handed him the notebooks and loose pages she'd found scattered on the annex floor after the arrest. He published his daughter's diary in 1947 under the title "Het Achterhuis" — The Secret Annex. It has since been translated into over 70 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Anne wrote with an honesty and wit that still catches readers off guard: she wasn't writing a historical document, she was a teenager trying to figure out who she was while the world outside was trying to kill her.

By the mid-1950s, the building was slated for demolition. A group of citizens and Otto Frank fought to save it, and the Anne Frank House museum opened on May 3, 1960. Over 9,000 people visited that first year. Today, more than a million visitors come annually, making it perhaps the most-visited house in Amsterdam.

The annex rooms are deliberately empty — Otto Frank wanted it that way. You walk through bare spaces and have to imagine eight people living here in terrified silence, the bookcase closed behind them.