Anne Frank House will be a polling station in upcoming Dutch election

Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, where the teenage wartime diarist spent two years in hiding, will open its doors to Dutch voters on 22 November for the country’s general election.

The house on Westermarkt 20, which has been a museum since 1960, announced on Friday that it will function as a polling station in the upcoming elections, called after the collapse of the four-party coalition government led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte in July.

The cabinet suddenly crumbled amid infighting over migration policy, leading Rutte – the Netherlands’ longest-serving prime minister and now acting in a temporary capacity – to declare he will not return to politics after a new government is installed.

“The Anne Frank House is one of the places that reminds us of what can happen when democracy and the rule of law disappear,” the Anne Frank House explained in a press release on Friday, expressing their wish that more young people will go to vote.

Voters casting their ballot will be able to visit the house by the canal for free, while normal visitors – including tourists – will find the place closed unless there’s a low voter turnout.

Amsterdam City Hall clarified that the decision came from the museum, managed by the Anne Frank Foundation.

The city’s mayor Femke Halsema addressed the issue of heightened tensions following the Israel-Hamas war saying that “special attention will be paid to the security of this polling station.”

The house is the building where Anne Frank wrote her famous diary and lived in hiding for two years between 1942 and 1944 until she and her family were captured in 1944. Anne Frank sadly did not survive the Holocaust and died together with her sister in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

The Van Gogh Museum in the capital and a mosque in the west of the city, Westermoskee, will also act as polling stations on November 22.