NETHERLANDS: The Amsterdam apartment where Anne Frank began her diary before going into hiding from the Nazis will become a writers' residence, 60 years after she died in a concentration camp.
The years her family spent in the Amsterdam home were happy times. Anne Frank celebrated her 13th birthday there, receiving the diary which was to make her a household name.
"We gather from the diary and other sources they lived a very happy life there," Anne Frank House museum spokeswoman Ms Patricia Bosboom said yesterday.
Anne Frank started her diary in the apartment at Merwedeplein in southern Amsterdam in June 1942, weeks before disappearing into the secret annex of a canal-side warehouse during the German occupation.
While the building she hid in became a renowned museum dedicated to the memory of the Jewish teenage diarist, the home Anne and her family lived from 1933 to 1942 was little known.
But local housing associations, the Anne Frank Museum and a cultural body have joined forces to make the apartment available as a guest residence to foreign writers and journalists who face censorship or persecution.
"Anne Frank has become the icon of the persecution of Dutch Jews during the Nazi-era and it is fitting that her former home should become a refuge for writers who are threatened with persecution or censorship," Amsterdam City of Asylum Foundation chairman Mr Maarten Asscher said.