Fire Breaks Out at Anne Frank’s Former Amsterdam Home
by Shiryn Ghermezian
A fire broke out at the Amsterdam apartment where Jewish holocaust victim and famed diarist Anne Frank lived before she went into hiding from the Nazis, Britain’s Daily Mail reported on Monday.
Firefighters were called on Sunday night to the block on Merwedeplein where the teenager resided between 1934 and 1942.
A neighbor successfully extinguished the flames before firefighters arrived but had to be taken to the hospital after inhaling some of the smoke. The occupant of the apartment was not home when the small fire started, according to the city’s fire department.
The cause of the fire was not identified at time of publication.
In 2004, the apartment on Merwedeplein was made available as a shelter to foreign writers who cannot freely write in their own countries, the Daily Mail noted.
Frank lived for almost eight years on the second floor of the Merwedeplein apartment before going into hiding with her family in 1942. In July of that year they moved three miles away to the Achterhuis, which now houses the Anne Frank House museum.
The family was anonymously betrayed two years later and Nazis sent them to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Frank died of typhus in 1945. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, returned to Amsterdam after the war and found her diary intact. It was published in 1947, leading to his daughter’s posthumous fame.