The Secret Annexe

Behind a bookcase at the back of an office on the canal, eight people lived in silence for two years and a month. Four employees of the firm downstairs kept them fed and hidden at the risk of their own lives.

They were betrayed on 4 August 1944; only Otto Frank came back. Miep Gies had picked up the scattered pages of his daughter's diary from the floor and kept them unread in a drawer until she could give them to him. The rooms are left empty of furniture, at Otto's insistence, because that is how he found them.