Inside the Anne Frank House: What a Visit Is Really Like

Almost everything written about the Anne Frank House is about how to get in. This page is about what happens once you are through the door, because the visit surprises most people, and not in the way they expect.

If you are still trying to get hold of tickets, our Anne Frank House ticket calculator works out exactly when the tickets for your travel dates go on sale. This page assumes you already have them.

Prinsengracht 263. The annex is hidden at the back, invisible from the canal.

What you actually walk through

The museum is not a gallery. It is the working building at Prinsengracht 263 where Otto Frank ran his business, and you move through it on a single route that only goes one way. You start in the offices and warehouse, where the staff carried on below while eight people stayed silent above them. Then you climb to the introductory rooms, which set out the timeline of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands. These rooms are deliberately plain. They are there to give you the context you need before you reach the part everyone came for.

Then you arrive at the bookcase. It was Johannes Kugler’s idea to hide the door, and Johan Voskuijl built it, a cupboard on hinges that swings open like a door. Anne described it in her diary on 21 August 1942. It still stands where it always stood, and you walk through it onto a steep, narrow staircase into the annex itself, where the Frank family, the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer lived for just over two years from 6 July 1942.

Anne Frank, May 1940, the month the Netherlands was invaded. Photo collection Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, public domain.

The rooms are empty, and that is the point

This is the thing that catches people out. There is no furniture. When Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz in June 1945, the only one of the eight to survive, the annex had been stripped bare. When the museum opened in 1960 he asked for it to stay that way.

The result is a series of small, bare rooms with grey-green walls and blacked-out windows, and it is far smaller than almost anyone imagines. Visitors often expect a recreated home and find instead a set of empty spaces. That emptiness does more than furniture would. You are standing in the actual rooms, at the actual scale, and there is nothing between you and that fact.

The things people remember afterwards

A handful of details tend to stay with visitors long after the rest has faded. In Anne’s room, the pictures she glued to the wall are still there, the postcards and film stars she used to brighten a space she shared, unwillingly, with Fritz Pfeffer. On another wall, Otto and Edith marked their daughters’ heights in pencil. Over two years in hiding Margot grew a single centimetre. Anne grew more than thirteen.

In the front of the house, Otto kept a map of Normandy, tracking the Allied advance with pins as the family followed the news on the radio. And in the diary room, near the end of the route, you come to the original red-checked diary Anne was given for her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, a few weeks before the family disappeared into the annex. Beside it are the 215 loose sheets of the version she rewrote in 1944, when she learned that wartime diaries would be collected afterwards and decided she wanted hers to be read. Her ‘Favourite Quotes Book’ and her ‘Tales Book’ are there too.

Anne Frank, May 1942, weeks before the family went into hiding. Photo collection Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, public domain.

How long it takes, and how it feels

A visit averages about an hour, and there is no time limit once you are inside. The audio tour is included and is genuinely worth using: it carries the narrative from room to room, and there is a separate version, ‘Anne’s Story’, written for younger visitors and told from Anne’s perspective. Both run in nine languages.

The atmosphere inside is quiet and subdued, and visitors keep it that way without being asked. Plan for the fact that you will not want to go straight on to something cheerful afterwards. The museum café at the end looks out over the Prinsengracht, and a lot of people sit there for a while before going back out into the city.

Practical things worth knowing before you go

A few rules catch people out at the door. Bags larger than a sheet of A4 cannot come inside, and the cloakroom has no space for backpacks, suitcases or large luggage, so leave anything bulky at your hotel or in the lockers at Centraal Station. Photography and filming are not allowed anywhere in the museum, and that now includes smart glasses and camera glasses. The café and shop take cards only, no cash.

There is a minimum age of ten. The museum is clear that it is not suitable for younger children, and having seen how steep and enclosed the annex is, we would agree. The stairs are covered in their own section below.

The entrance is at Westermarkt 20, around the corner from the Prinsengracht address. It is about twenty minutes on foot from Centraal Station. Worth knowing until early 2028: there is no tram running to the Westermarkt stop, so take a tram to Dam Square and walk the last ten minutes.

The stairs, and what to do if you cannot manage them

This is the thing visitors underestimate most, so here are the actual numbers rather than a vague warning. The route takes you up three steep staircases and down three more, with two smaller flights along the way. The first climb is 12 steps with a handrail on both sides. The next is 16 steps with a handrail on one side only. The museum itself marks two of the ascents as extra difficult, including a 14-step flight with a single handrail.

Otto Frank at the top of the annex staircase in 1965, showing visitors the way up. The stairs have not changed. Jack de Nijs for Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Then there is the bookcase. Getting through the hidden doorway into the annex means a step of 39 centimetres, with only 41 centimetres of width to do it in. That is a knee-height stride through a narrow gap, and it is the point where people most often realise they are in trouble. The descents are kinder, at 16, 18 and 20 steps with handrails on both sides. There is no seating along the route, only at the beginning and the end, though you can ask at the information desk for a portable stool to carry with you.

There is no lift into the historic house or the annex, and the museum is straightforward about the fact that neither is reachable by wheelchair or walking aid. The modern part of the building is partly accessible by lift with help from a staff member, which covers the temporary exhibition, the scale models of the annex, the café and the shop. There is an accessible parking space about 40 metres from the entrance on the Westermarkt, and two more near Keizersgracht 220.

The Secret Annex in virtual reality, at street level beside the Anne Frank statue.

If the stairs are the reason a visit looks impossible, this is exactly why we built Anne Frank House Without the Stairs. It reconstructs the Secret Annex in virtual reality at street level, so you move through the rooms without climbing anything at all. It is the option we recommend for anyone with limited mobility, for visitors with knee or hip problems, and for older travellers who would rather not attempt a 39-centimetre step in a queue of people.

If you could not get a ticket

Tickets go in minutes and there is no standby queue, so if your dates are gone, they are gone. Our ticket calculator is the place to start for the next release. If the timing simply will not work at all, our private Anne Frank walking tour in Amsterdam walks the streets where the story happened, and the virtual reality experience above covers the annex itself. Neither replaces standing in those rooms. Both are worth doing on their own terms.

The Westerkerk, whose bells Anne wrote about hearing from the annex.

One more thing

There is usually a temporary exhibition running alongside the permanent route. At the moment it is ‘Who’s gone?’, following the Jewish Lyceum and its pupils and teachers through the two years the school existed, from 1941 to 1943. It takes very little extra time and it is worth the detour.