A Diary Almost Burned, a Church Hidden in Plain Sight

Anne Frank's diary survived by pure chance and one woman's restraint. When the Gestapo raided the Secret Annex in 1944, an officer dumped Otto Frank's briefcase onto the floor to make room for valuables, scattering Anne's papers everywhere. Her father's employee Miep Gies gathered them up afterward and locked them in her desk drawer — unread, for years. She later said she was glad she never opened it during that time: knowing what was actually written about the people still in danger, she believed she would have felt obligated to burn it. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight who survived the camps, and when he returned to Amsterdam, Miep handed him the papers exactly as she'd found them.

The Begijnhof looks like an ordinary quiet courtyard, but its church has been hiding in plain sight for over three centuries. After Amsterdam's Protestant takeover in 1578 banned public Catholic worship, the lay religious women who lived here converted two ordinary townhouses into a fully functioning Catholic church behind an unmarked facade — one of the city's earliest clandestine "schuilkerken." The congregation of Beguines who ran it kept the tradition alive right up until the last of them died in 1971, and the hidden church still holds services today.