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My family spent Thanksgiving in Amsterdam. We stayed in the Jordaan neighborhood, two blocks from Otto Frank’s old warehouse. Every night, we went to sleep to the sound of ringing church bells. Anne Frank used to listen to them, too. (On July 11, 1942, she wrote in her diary: “Father, Mother and Margot still can’t get used to the chiming of the Westertoren clock, which tells us the time every quarter of an hour. Not me, I liked it from the start; it sounds so reassuring, especially at night.”) Of course we took the Anne Frank House tour. Of course it was powerful. I’d last visited in the early ’90s; since then the museum has been thoughtfully expanded and renovated. My older daughter, Josie, 16, found the visit particularly potent, though she and I both made a quiet snorting noise when the tour concluded with a quote from bestselling young-adult novelist John Green.
To our surprise, however, a different museum wound up being even more powerful for both my daughters. The Verzetsmuseum, aka the Dutch Resistance Museum, has a large section aimed entirely at kids. If you’re visiting with your family, skip the main exhibit, dedicated to the Netherlands’ experience during the war, and go straight to Dutch Resistance Museum Junior, further back in the building. It is practically a Ph.D.-level course in effective museum design for kids—interactive without being infantilizing, engaging without being pandering, thoughtful about how young kids experience narrative, reflective about how much historical scariness young museumgoers can be expected to handle. Maxine, 13, was spellbound. As we left, after two hours that positively flew by, Josie gave it the highest rating an ironic hipster teen can give: “Mom. That museum was fire.”
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