Not Sweating the Small Stuff

Just There Leaning Out A Window

Just about everyone must know about Anne Frank and her now famous dairy - German born and moving to near Amsterdam in the 1930's to flee anti-Jewish sentiments, hiding with her family in concealed rooms in her father Otto's office building when Hilter's forces occupied the Netherlands, dying with her sister Margot of typhus in March 1945 in the concentration camp of Gergen-Belsen.

What fewer may know is that the diarist was filmed in 1941 leaning out of a window during a neighbour's wedding day.

The Merwedeplein building where the Frank family lived from 1934 to 1942

I love Anne's gesture of tossing back her hair as she turns to respond to something happening in the room behind her - it's hard not to try to imagine the dimensions of this cheerful domestic situation - so at odds with the horrors to come.

'A Window Out The Past' rather than one into it.