Anne Frank House

Late Saturday night (although it felt like Sunday around 5am for me and I'd been awake for 26 hours) I returned from the Netherlands. As I think about my time there, one of the most salient experiences that comes up for me is my visit to the Anne Frank House. It was during my group visit to Amsterdam that we were able to visit. And not just visit, but have an almost two hour lecture and discussion about the history of Anne Frank and her family with an outreach staff member there, and discuss the events that led to the Frank family going into hiding. Most poignant for me were the similarities of current events to those for the Frank family. I am still (and likely will continue for many months) digesting the experiences I had while in the Netherlands. And here, I'm not writing about my tourist experiences, but the ones where I interacted with refugee and immigrant students and had discussions about immigration in Europe. I believe the realness of the immigration phenomenon in Europe is lost on most Americans. The US is too vast and too big for us to have to know exactly how immigration is playing out in our own country, much less on another continent. I'm sensitive that most of us (including myself) in the States live in a region where we don't have to talk about this subject except on a theoretical or idealogical level. This means there is a high probability we form opinions about immigration apart from any personal connection or interaction with those who are immigrants. (I do know that many are also VERY involved and aware of working with immigrants and refugees, but I'll make a general argument here that the majority do not have any personal connection).

No pictures are allowed
in the Anne Frank House.
I found this graffiti tag,
and many others, of Anne's
recognizable portrait.

The woman who worked at the Anne Frank House gave us a very detailed program about the house and also led a discussion about Anne Frank and her family, tying it closely to current events. As I listened to her, I kept thinking about the students I worked with in Maastricht, and their families. How were they able to come to Maastricht? What family circumstances did they have to allow them to get there? Like Anne and her family, did they get status to move to the Netherlands somehow? If not, how many of those students came there in secret? Like Anne and her family who were denied access to the US, how many of the students in Maastricht had also been denied access to the US or other countries? How many had to hide? How many will have to hide if circumstances change in Europe like they did for the Frank family? The similarities of a dictator in power and removal or mass migration of people seeking a safer place to live during WWII and its link to today was not lost on those in my group. The personal story of Anne Frank and a revisit to her words and her secret annex deepened the daily experiences I was having with students at ISK in a way I could not have imagined.