One of my favorite family experiences was when I went to see Anne Frank’s (a Jewish victim of the Nazi persecution during World War II) hideout in Amsterdam, Holland. I had read Anne’s published diary when I was younger, so I was extremely thrilled to actually have the chance to see where she and her family hid from the Germans for so many months. I walked up the stairs of an apartment building and into a room with only a bookshelf in it. From what I remembered from reading the diary, there was a doorknob behind the books. I found the doorknob and turned it and there was the secret annex. When I stepped into the room behind the bookshelf, I felt as if I had stepped back into history. I found Anne’s room still with pictures of her favorite celebrities on her walls. The Frank family’s furniture was still placed where they had left them in the rooms, everything just as described in the diary. I toured each room in awe of actually seeing how they had lived, yet with sadness to know how it all ended. Anne’s diary was no longer just a book to me, but true heart-felt, emotional life story written by a girl I felt I almost knew.