The Secret Annexe
The "secret annexe" Anne Frank and the others hid in was a house attached to the back of a small office building at 263 Prinsengracht, in Amsterdam. It seems that the group in hiding regularly used all of this rear building, except for the ground floor. The Franks and Mr. Pfeffer slept on the second floor above the street level floor. The van Pels slept on the third floor above street level -- Peter's room was the tiny room with the stairs to the attic and everyone ate meals in the main room on the third floor. The group also used the attic above. Only during non-business hours, the group members also used the private office and kitchen, which were on the first floor above street level. They also ventured into the front building during non-business hours. Like the rear building, it was rented by the business that Mr. Frank had started. The front building had offices and warehouse.     The floor plans below are largely from those on page 213 of The Diary of Anne Frank: the Critical Edition. There are two floor plan changes I made, due to discrepancies with photos: I made the book case door narrower and put two windows in the third floor instead of one large one. The scale is my guess. Because Europeans and Americans number floors differently, floors are referred to explicitly as relative to the street level floor, just to be more clear.     (Better floor plans are in The Anne Frank House: a museum with a story, a small out-of-print book you can get via interlibrary loan: it has all floors except the annexe attic, from both from wartime and the current [museum] format. Unfortunately there is no scale there, either. It is evident from these plans that the bookcase door is still narrower than what I made it below.)		This is the rear house today.

 
Other Illustrations and Photos of the Secret Annexe:

Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary, a Photographic Remembrance by Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven for the Anne Frank House has a cut away illustration of the annexe on page 51. Photos of the swinging cupboard are on page 59. A photo of Anne's room is on page 106. It has no furniture because the Nazis stole it all after the raid. However, there are photos of the annexe with furniture added for demonstration of how things had been: they are on pages 52, 57, 63, 66, 67, and 75.

There is a nice online cut-away of the annexe and front house (very small, though).

Check out Michael Bloomenfeld's CAD model of the Secret Annexe.

There is a live web cam of the secret annexe from across the garden.

Now, float up into the sky for a view, a satellite image of this block of Amsterdam (their red + is not necessarily over the annexe even though the text describes the house).

(In addition, photos and illustrations of Anne and her diary, and links to more, are on my images page.)