July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is
leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look
at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been
captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the
second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37,
also on the second floor. The Anne Frank House can offer you this film
footage thanks to the cooperation of the couple
Almost all of us have read the story of Anne Frank, but we surely all picture it quite differently. Most of us have seen the photos used on the various covers of The Diary of a Young Girl, and some of us have even gone to Amsterdam and walked through the home in which she wrote it. But now, thanks to the internet, we have access to historical imagery that can help everyone envision the life of Anne Frank a bit more clearly.
Many years ago, we featured the only existing film of Frank, a 20-second clip from July 22, 1941 in which she looks on as a bride and groom pass below her window. Though short, the invaluable footage breathes a surprising amount of life into the cultural image of perhaps the 20th century’s most important diarist. Even more comes from the 3D tour of her house and hiding place more recently made available online. The tour’s interface, with which anyone who played 1990s graphic adventure games like Myst will feel immediately familiar, gives you a first-person view behind the bookcase which for two years kept the Frank family’s living quarters a secret from Amsterdam’s Nazi occupiers.
frank virtual tour
The tour’s creators have loaded the digital recreation of the house with different spots that, when clicked, tell in audio of a certain aspect of the Franks’ experience there. The farther we get from the Second World War, the more these events might seem, to students reading about them for the first time, like a piece of capital-H History disconnected from their own experience. But resources like these keep the story of Anne Frank and its lessons feeling as immediate as they should.