Monday 5.2.11 – A Museum, A Small, And Family

Today we went to the Anne Frank museum.  Afterwards we went to Haarlem and onto Zandvoort an Zee.  The Anne Frank museum was interesting, but not as moving as I expected.  Maybe because it didn’t teach me anything new I’ve become numb to the information.  I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but of the 105,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, only 5,500 survived the war.  Why was Anne so much more important than the others?  In hindsight it felt more like a memorial to “Daddy’s Little Girl” with barely anything about the rest of the people in hiding though Margot did get a room at the end dedicated to her.  After the museum we headed to Haarlem to walk around the town a bit.  My aunt and cousin did some shopping and my mom and I walked around taking pictures.  After we met back up with my aunt and cousin they told us about how they were almost hit on the head by a shingle.  That evening we headed to Zandvoort an Zee to meet up with family from the van Cleeff side of my grandmothers family.  Unlike the cousins I spent the previous weekend with I had never met these cousins in person, only via e-mail and Facebook.  However we all just started gabbing with each other right away as if it had only been a few months or years since we last met.  Since these family members had to work the next day we did not stay out as late as we did with the Polak side.

#vanCleeff