Amsterdam must be the only European city whose most popular tourist attractions occupy different ends of the sliding scale that begins with virtue and ends with vice. It is likely that many of those who wait patiently in the queues that snake daily around the canal-side block where the Anne Frank Huis stand will make a similar pilgrimage in the evening to the red-light district on the east side of the old town. Doubtless no disrespect is intended, it is just that voyeurism is too powerful an urge to resist, and Amsterdam is a very small city indeed.

The two places are within walking distance of each other, so close indeed that the residents of each quarter can hear the bells of the 13th-century Old Church as they chime out the hour. Its belfry is the highest structure in this low-lying city, and in its shadow stands 263 Prinsengracht. This 17th-century merchant house was where Anne Frank, her family and four others hid in a secret annex from July 6, 1942, until they were betrayed on Aug. 4, 1944 -- no one knows by whom or why. The sound of the bells were her only way of knowing the time and as one climbs through the bare rooms of the house, it is details like this that root the experience in the imagination as well as in present time.

This is a museum where there are few artifacts in the traditional sense of the word. Those expecting to see the table at which Anne Frank sat to write her diary or the sagging bed on which she slept will be disappointed. One of the only direct traces of her presence are the picture postcards and photos of film stars that she stuck to the walls in the room that she reluctantly shared with the dentist Fritz Pfeffer.