Anne Frank House

At Prinsengracht 263, behind a bookcase that swung open to reveal a hidden set of rooms, Anne Frank and her family hid from July 1942 until their betrayal and arrest in August 1944. The building — Otto Frank's former business premises — survives essentially as it was, and the Secret Annex is preserved unfurnished, exactly as Otto Frank asked when he founded the museum in 1960, because he felt it should stay empty of everything except what remained: photographs Anne pasted to her bedroom wall, the pencil marks on a wall tracking the children's height, the movie star clippings still there decades later.

The museum's permanent exhibition moves visitors through the annex, the offices and warehouse below where the family's helpers worked, and finally to a exhibition covering the family's discovery, deportation and deaths — all but Otto survived — alongside the afterlife of Anne's diary, published by her father in 1947 and now translated into more than 70 languages. The narrow, steep staircase behind the bookcase and the low-ceilinged rooms make the hiding conditions viscerally real in a way no textbook description manages.