Prospectus and Guide to the Secret Annex

The Prospectus and Guide to the Secret Annex is a comic, typewritten guide to life in hiding, composed as though the residents were guests at a peculiar Amsterdam lodging house. Its cheerful promises of free rooms, a radio, hot water, and classes are inseparable from strict limits on speech, movement, and noise: beneath the playful brochure is a practical account of how the residents had to organize daily life under threat of discovery.

Origin and Purpose

When Fritz Pfeffer joined the seven people already sheltering in the Annex, the residents explained that the story of an officer and a car had been deliberately circulated to mislead anyone searching for them. After hearing how they had concealed their whereabouts, he looked around the rooms, shared lunch, rested, and began to settle in. The residents then gave him a typewritten set of rules and regulations, described as a production of the van Pels family. The guide welcomed him into an established system as well as a household: in the Annex, even the arrival of a new resident required orientation to the routines on which everyone’s safety depended.

The document presents the hiding place as a lodging facility for Jews and other dispossessed people, open throughout the year and situated in quiet, wooded surroundings in the heart of Amsterdam, with no private homes nearby. Its catalogue calls the price free and offers furnished or unfurnished rooms, with or without meals. The advertisement turns forced concealment into a mock travel proposition, borrowing the language of comfort and customer choice even as the residents have no ordinary freedom to leave.

Amenities and House Rules

The guide’s inventory is both playful and concrete. It advertises running water in the bathroom and on various inside and outside walls, though there is no bath; cozy wood stoves; storage space; and two large modern safes. The facilities are real features of the building, but their presentation as hotel amenities makes the residents’ improvised accommodation sound deliberately luxurious. A separate provision for small household pets, except vermin requiring special permits, extends the brochure’s joke into the small details of communal life.

The most consequential amenity is a private radio described as having a direct line to London, New York, Tel Aviv, and other stations. Residents may listen after six in the evening, but the rules forbid German news bulletins and forbid passing them on; German stations may be used only for classical music. The apparently playful listing thus encodes a serious discipline of information. In a hiding place where the outside world arrives through broadcasts, the rules distinguish permitted listening from dangerous news and make the radio a shared resource governed by explicit limits.

Quiet is likewise treated as an essential condition of accommodation. Rest hours run from ten at night until 7:30 in the morning, with a later start on Sundays; residents must also keep daytime rest hours when management instructs them to do so. They are required to speak softly at all times, and the guide bans German as a language of conversation, allowing only what it calls the language of civilized people. German books are forbidden except for classics and scholarly works, while other reading is optional. Free-time activity outside the house is prohibited until further notice. These provisions put concealment into the form of ordinary house etiquette: silence, limited movement, and controlled reading are made into duties residents must observe together.

Other clauses give the regime a brisk domestic rhythm. Daily calisthenics are required; singing is allowed only softly and after six in the evening; movies require advance arrangements. Residents can take a weekly shorthand correspondence course, while English, French, mathematics, and history lessons are available at any hour in exchange for tutoring, such as Dutch. The rules make confinement appear orderly and even educational, but that order depends on routines fitted around the risks of living above a working building.

Meals, Washing, and Shared Work

Mealtimes are specified with the precision of a boarding house: breakfast is at nine on ordinary days and around 11:30 on Sundays and holidays; lunch is described as a light meal, served between 1:15 and 1:45. The guide adds that mealtime depends on news broadcasts, linking the schedule to the residents’ opportunity to hear the radio. Meals are not simply a matter of hospitality: their timing must accommodate the structure of the day and the limits imposed by hiding.

The prospectus also lays out the residents’ obligations to the Supply Corps: they must be prepared to help with office work at all times. This requirement reflects the Annex’s location within Otto Frank’s office building, where the hidden household depended on people and activities connected to the business. The residents’ life could not be separated from the work downstairs; the guide’s mock-institutional tone makes that dependence sound like a standard condition of lodging.

Bathing receives its own carefully phrased allowance. The washtub is available to everyone after nine on Sundays, and residents may wash in the bathroom, kitchen, private office, or front office. Instead of promising a conventional bathroom, the rules list several shared rooms that can be repurposed for washing. The range of options conveys both the ingenuity of the household and the pressure on its limited space: privacy and convenience must be negotiated within a building not designed to serve as a home for eight people in hiding.

The Guide Against the Conditions of Hiding

The prospectus belongs to a daily existence in which regulations and risk were not inventions of the residents. After the German occupation, a succession of anti-Jewish decrees restricted where Jews could go, when they could be outdoors, how they could travel, and which schools and public places they could use. The Annex’s internal rules echo those imposed conditions in miniature, but with a different purpose: residents limit their own movement and noise to avoid detection. The guide’s mock hospitality cannot erase that coercion; its humor depends on the contrast between the language of choice and the lack of any safe alternative.

That contrast became especially visible when a real burglary exposed the building to danger. After Peter found the warehouse door and street door open, the residents followed their emergency instructions: they did not wash or run water, kept quiet, dressed by eight, and avoided the bathroom. The burglars had forced doors with a crowbar and stolen cashboxes, checkbooks, and the household’s entire allotment of 330 pounds of sugar in coupons. In this setting, a rule about water or movement was not merely a comic detail in a brochure. It could become an immediate response to an intrusion downstairs, while the loss of ration coupons threatened the household’s food supply.

A later security scare prompted further changes to the residents’ arrangements. Fritz Pfeffer was assigned to work in the bathroom, Peter was set to patrol the house between 8:30 and 9:30, and he was no longer permitted to open his window after someone connected with the Keg company had noticed it. The household could not flush the toilet after 9:30 at night. A night watchman was hired, and a carpenter from the underground was expected to construct a barricade from the white Frankfurt bedsteads. These measures show the harsher reality beneath the guide’s comic tone: the residents continually revised their habits and even their furniture in response to the possibility of being discovered.

The prospectus is therefore more than a joke about cramped communal life. By styling restrictions as amenities and obligations as house policy, it gives the residents a language for ordering a space they did not control and could not safely leave. Its schedules, permissions, and prohibitions register the practical ingenuity of a hidden household, while their cheerful presentation sharpens the irony: the supposed guests are prisoners of occupation, and the most important service the Annex can offer is temporary safety.