Heroism.

I am six years old. My mother and I stand in a doorway. I am holding her hand, listening intently.

“See, Kelli. Here is the bookcase. They used this to help block the door because no one could know that they were hiding here.”

I stare at the hidden door, the bookcase. I see an older man walk past me to enter the annex, he glances down at me. I silently wonder if he knew Anne or Otto or her family. I’m too young to grasp the 40 years that has already past since the family was in hiding, too little to fully comprehend all that took place during Europe’s occupation.

- At times, even 24 years later, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around it. -

Mom helps me climb the stairs, leads me around the annex. She bends down to explain things, she points out Anne’s movie posters, still tacked onto the walls of what was her bedroom. We talk about the movie we have recently watched about Anne’s diary, Mom points out the kitchen, the living area. My mother and grandmother talk, remarking to each other about the tight living conditions, how stifling it must have felt to have hidden for years. I reach down and pick up a button I’ve found on the floor.

“Mommy, do you think this belonged to Anne Frank?”

“No sweetie, I don’t think so.”

She reminds me of how the diary was found, reminds me of the woman named Miep who kept the diary for Anne once the family was taken away by the Nazis, of how the Frank family had helpers to bring them food, books and news from the outside during the years they had to hide. She explains that this building is now a museum, created so people can visit and learn and never forget what occurred during WWII.

Still, I keep that button, all the same, slipping it inside my pocket.

******

I am 22 years old. I’ve hopped a weekend flight from London to Amsterdam with one of my flat mates and two of his friends visiting from the States. The four of us wander through the city the afternoon of our arrival; the boys decide they want to wander the red light district that night. I pass. “It’s too depressing,” I tell them, “all those women standing in windows? It strikes me as so sad. Besides, I want to get up early tomorrow and beat the line at the Anne Frank museum.”

I bid them adieu after we grab dinner together, walk alone back toward our hotel. A church bell strikes and I know in an instant I’m hearing the bells from Westerkerk, the same bells Anne heard from the Annex. I think of Anne writing that the Westerkerk bell was a comfort to her every night as she went to bed. They comfort me as well. I crawl into bed and fall asleep quickly.

After their night on the town, the boys sleep late and I spend the day sightseeing on my own. After a quick breakfast, I make my way over to 263 Prinsengracht, take a spot in line. Once inside, I climb the steps and stare at that same bookcase I saw 16 years prior, slightly amazed I recall my first visit so vividly. There are tourists milling around me, all of them quiet, hushed. I climb the stairs and enter the hiding area. It is much smaller than I recall, and now at 22, I’m much more acutely aware of what the Franks and the other family in hiding must have endured. I walk into Anne’s bedroom. The movie posters are on the walls still, covered by clear plexi-glass, just as they were during my first visit, still exactly as she had left them. I’m struck then, as I think about my own bedroom with my own movie posters by what an ordinary teenager Anne was. An ordinary teenager propelled into extraordinary times, a girl who wrote a diary that changed the world.

I tour the rest of the Annex slowly, trying my best to absorb every detail. I think of living in that space – so much smaller than what I remembered at age six – with eight other people for more than two years. I think of the tension, the depression, the fear that must have lived in each of their hearts. I recall a line from a movie I saw once, a made for television special about Anne and Miep Gies. Miep comforts Anne one night, telling her: every day we live through it, is one day less of it.

Eventually I make my way outside, grateful that I am free to step outside to breathe the chilly March air, grateful it is 2002, not 1942 and the Allies defeated the Germans in the war. Again, I think of Anne’s diary, of one of her more famous lines: I still believe, in spite of everything, people are truly good at heart.

******

Earlier this week, Miep Gies passed away. She lived to be 100, which is no small feat. Miep, the woman who found and kept Anne’s diary, the woman who risked her safety to help the family hide for years, has said repeatedly in interviews that she never wanted to be called a hero. ‘Of course it’s nice to be appreciated. But I only did my duty to my fellow man. I helped people in need. Anyone can do that, can’t they?’

When my mother learned of Miep's death, she told me right away. We were both sad, melancohly. I cannot help but mourn the loss of this woman, one I never met personally, a woman I never knew, but someone I have always admired and looked up to, from the age of six.

Might we all be so brave, so strong, so sure in such extraordinary times.