Anne Frank apartment to become home for writers

AMSTERDAM - 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.

"It was her youth she spent there. We gather from the diary and other sources they lived a very happy life there," Anne Frank House museum spokeswoman Patricia Bosboom said on Friday.

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 in the city during the German occupation in World War 2.

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 Maarten Asscher said.

The three-bedroom apartment, overlooking a park in a quiet suburb of the city, will be restored to its former 1930s glory.

The first visiting writer will be welcomed in September 2005 and will be invited to stay a year.

"It will be used by the foundation to house writers from countries where it is difficult to write freely," said Pieter de Jong from the Ymere Public Housing Co-operative, which is buying the apartment.

Anne, whose diary has sold more than 30 million copies, died in a concentration camp after she and her family were discovered in 1944.

Her diary, first published in 1947 by her father Otto Frank, is the most widely read document to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed.

It has been translated into more than 60 languages.

The Frank family, like many German Jews, fled Hitler's Germany to settle in Amsterdam before the Wehrmacht invaded and occupied the Netherlands in 1940.

Born in Frankfurt on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, weeks before it was liberated.

- REUTERS