What child can resist a secret door, one that leads to another world, magical or menacing? This staple in stories from Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter excites the adult imagination, too: it appears, alongside hidden passageways and sliding bookcases, in many spy films and thrillers.
But it is not just a fictional trope. European palaces often had secret doors and passageways in case of an enemy siege. During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette evaded the Parisian mob through a secret door in her bedroom at Versailles.
The architecture of concealment flourished in England’s Georgian country houses, where hidden or “jib” doors were disguised by panelling, murals and trompe l’oeil to maintain a room’s symmetry or keep entrances to servants’ quarters out of sight. In the US during Prohibition, sliding bookcases concealed entrances to speakeasy bars. Today, they hide panic rooms, cinemas and wine cellars.
But there is a dark corollary to this whimsical architectural subterfuge. The sliding bookcase pictured above obscured the door to the Secret Annex, where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam. It was in Prinsengracht 263, a 17th-century canal house that also housed the business premises of her father Otto.
In July 1942, the Nazis warned that if people refused to hand over their bicycles — a valuable wartime asset — they would search homes and remove them. It was clear that the annex needed more security, so Johan Voskuijl, one of Frank’s employees, built the bookcase — brown, nondescript and filled with shabby box files.
“Our hiding place has now become a true hiding place,” the teenage Anne wrote in her famous diary, today translated into 60 languages. But on their 761st day of confinement — August 4 1944 — there was a raid and the family was arrested. All perished in concentration camps except Otto Frank. The apartment was “pulsed” — emptied by the Puls moving company, specialists in clearing the homes of Jews and other deportees.
When the annex became a museum in 1960, Frank asked that it remain empty, to symbolise the emptiness he felt as the sole survivor. The bookcase is the only furniture on display. Under a protective glass cover, it is barren of books, but heavy with the weight of history and human suffering.
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