Writers refuge.

24 Dec, 2007

The three-bedroom apartment in a quiet suburb of southern Amsterdam where Anne Frank spent her childhood from 1933-1942 has been restored and rented out to Amsterdam Foundation for Cities of Refuge, a group that helps persecuted or censored writers from all over the world. Annes description of the apartment in a letter and photos from the family archives were used to return the 1930s-style dcor to how it was when the Frank family lived there before being forced to go into hiding when the Nazis occupied the city. The apartment at 37 Merwedeplein will now become the home for a year to persecuted writers. The first resident is 32-year-old Algerian novelist and poet El-Mahdi Acherchour. Instead, the hiding place where Anne wrote her famous diary is now the Anne Frank House Museum on the Prinsengracht canal.