Prinsengracht is a tree-lined cobbled street
like many another beside Amsterdam's canals.
On a houseboat across from no. 263, sunbathing
youths ignore a stream of visitors to the tall,
narrow dwelling. But who on leaving that house
can help pausing to look at them, while thinking
of a young girl denied friends and freedom
because she was born a Jew. Anne Frank was
barely thirteen when she came into hiding in this
Prinsengracht apartment, not quite sixteen when
she died of typhus and malnutrition in a German concentration camp. The
building is a museum now, to remind us of the 125,000 Dutch Jews who died
in World War 11's camps, and Anne in particular because of her famous diary.
Prinsengracht is a tree-lined cobbled street
like many another beside Amsterdam's canals.
On a houseboat across from no. 263, sunbathing
youths ignore a stream of visitors to the tall,
narrow dwelling. But who on leaving that house
can help pausing to look at them, while thinking
of a young girl denied friends and freedom
because she was born a Jew. Anne Frank was
barely thirteen when she came into hiding in this
Prinsengracht apartment, not quite sixteen when
she died of typhus and malnutrition in a German concentration camp. The
building is a museum now, to remind us of the 125,000 Dutch Jews who died
in World War 11's camps, and Anne in particular because of her famous diary.
