A Room that could not be a Home: Confinement, Displacement and the Psychology of the Secret Annex

Written By: Aleena Sebastian

Edited By: Malaika Noorani

Graphic Design By: Aleena Sebastian

On July 6, 1942, Anne Frank and her family entered a hidden apartment behind her father's business at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. The space was cramped and concealed behind a movable bookcase that was deliberately designed to be invisible. For two years, Anne lived in that space alongside seven other people, never able to leave because of the uncertainty of the next day. In her diary, written during that confinement, Anne tried to document not the war outside, but the psychological disturbance within, i.e., the gradual erosion of what it meant to feel at home.

The Secret Annex was a place which one cannot call a ‘home’. The fact that Anne continued to lead some kind of a ‘normal’ life there, interacting with people, eating regular food, and even studying speaks volumes about how abnormal the situation was for everyone. Anne’s diary makes it clear that while she and her family were in the Annex, they could not feel safe, sound, and contained. All they could do was wait for the end and hope they would not have to live in that environment any longer. They lacked the comforts of a domestic environment, such as safety and a sense of belonging. All they had was a makeshift shelter that had protected them from the enemy but not from despair. 

The Annex's physical space dictated the nature of the disturbance. The eight individuals who had hidden there lived in a small apartment at the rear of the building, which made any noise outside a risk of discovery. Moreover, the toilets needed to be quiet, and the chatter had to be limited. When the building’s employees were at work, it became impossible to flush the toilet or even run the tap. The windows were covered, making the air poorly ventilated. 

In Anne's words from her diary, dated November 19, 1942, in what is now recognised as the original version rather than the abridged editions published after the war: "I can't imagine what it will be like when everything becomes normal again." The statement revealed something crucial about the Annex: it was not simply a place of temporary hiding but a permanent condition of abnormality.

The Nazi regime had established a horrifying period in the history of the Netherlands, which had pushed the Jews to go into hiding. The Third Reich had issued a series of anti-Jewish decrees that forbade the Jews from attending schools and shops, and also from using public facilities, such as swimming pools and libraries. Wearing the yellow Star of David had been made mandatory. Deportations to labour camps began in July 1942, the same month the Frank family went into hiding. The persecution was systematic, and it had created an impossible choice: surrender to a system that was designed to strip identity and eventually cause death, or hide in a confined space and endure psychological suffocation instead. Anne's family chose the latter. But that choice meant accepting a form of disturbance that would reshape every aspect of existence.

What made the Annex psychologically significant is not merely its size but its psychological role. It was designed to be invisible. The people inside had to make themselves invisible too. One might argue that the concealment was a practical consideration. Psychologically speaking, however, situations like that place enormous stress on a person. The teenage years of an individual are formative, since that is when they begin to understand themselves and express that understanding through actions in the world. Anne Frank was 13 years old when she entered the Annex, and this marked the beginning of a difficult period of her life. She had to fundamentally change who she was, vanishing from the world around her. She not only hid, but also avoided attracting attention, even from the mysterious people who sometimes visited the opposite side of the building.

Despite these impossible conditions, Anne and her family had attempted to create home-like structures. They had established routines, celebrated birthdays, observed religious holidays, studied, read, and even argued. Anne had made a calendar on the wall, arranged her possessions on the shelves, and even written in her diary constantly, constructing narratives about her life and her future. In one entry, dated December 24, 1943, Anne recorded, "I can picture Grandma so clearly. She was so good to me, and I loved her dearly." The diary entry recorded an act of memory – a deliberate effort to maintain connection to people and moments from the life she had lived before hiding, the life she never lived again.

It makes one think that the psychological mechanism behind it is truly remarkable. The deprivation of space and uncertainty that people feel in such cases pushes them to find ways to restore the violated balance. Anne had used material items to fix her world, and her diary is a manifestation of this. She had tried to live an ordinary adolescent life: worrying about her appearance, developing feelings for other people, analysing her relationships with her parents, fantasising about her future, etc. She did all the things teenagers do, but in an attic, in whispers, without freedom of movement, privacy, or certainty that she would survive.

Ultimately, creating a home in the Annex failed because, no matter how hard she tried, Anne could not overcome the circumstances of their life there. She was constantly surrounded by the oppressive idea of possible discovery and danger, which ruled out any possibility of finding comfort and safety. The necessity to hide made them silent, restraining them physically and emotionally, and taking away any prospects of a different future from consideration. In her diary dated May 3, 1944, Anne wrote, "I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, and my courage is reborn." This statement is often quoted as evidence of the diary's restorative power. But when read in context, it reveals something different: the diary was necessary precisely because everything else had failed. The physical space could not provide comfort, so Anne had turned to writing as an alternative form of space.

The distinction between a shelter and a home matters psychologically. A shelter protects the body from immediate danger, and a home provides the conditions in which the self can develop and feel safe. The Annex was a shelter. But the diary became something closer to a psychological home: a space where Anne could think freely, construct her identity, and imagine futures that were impossible in the physical world. Yet even this psychological home was fragile. The diary could not protect her from the fear, provide privacy from her mother or siblings, or give her the adolescence she deserved. It was a record of what was lost, even as it created a temporary space to process that loss.

One of the most significant aspects of confinement in the Annex was how it interrupted adolescent development. Anne had entered the Annex at thirteen, and adolescence typically involves increasing independence, sociability, sexuality, and self-discovery. All of this was impossible in a conventional way. She could not go to school, meet new people, make new friends, be free, explore her sexuality, or gain privacy and autonomy. She had to remain under surveillance, depending on her parents in ways that would normally be resolved through adolescent separation.

The psychological consequences of this distorted development unfolded throughout the diary version. Anne's growing up and awareness of gender took place in the confines of the Annex, where she fell in love with another teenager, Peter Van Daan, also in hiding; their romantic and physical relationship, as mentioned in various published excerpts, unfolded under those same conditions. In her original diary version, Anne not only explored her developing sexuality but also underwent a kind of education in human relations.

Nevertheless, her opportunity to grow up was limited by the conditions of the time, during which adolescence was usually prolonged. Anne experienced an extremely tense and thrilling period of life, but instead of separating from it, she felt as if she had raced through it. Her psychological development was at an accelerated pace, constrained by the conditions of the time.

Such accelerated psychological development without physical freedom inevitably leads to disturbance, as Anne's diary reveals. Her desire to be taken more seriously as a 'grown-up' conflicted with her desire to retain her childish innocence. Anne's sexual relations matured in parallel with her romantic feelings, but she was 'imprisoned'. She became a woman in an environment specially designed to make development impossible. Thus, the disturbance of adolescence in the Annex was not a mental breakdown but the forced coexistence of normal development with the completely abnormal environment.

The psychological condition of the Annex was not primarily of acute crisis, but of chronic waiting. The war continued outside, and so, the hiding had to continue inside. Every day brought the possibility of discovery, but discovery did not come predictably. Instead, there was waiting. Waiting for news, for the war to end, and to know if they would survive. This waiting is psychologically damaging in ways that are distinct from the trauma of specific catastrophic events. It is the prolonged disturbance of uncertainty, with the nervous system being held in sustained alert without resolution.

Anne's diary recorded this waiting explicitly. She documented the routines of daily life in the Annex, the small conflicts with her mother and other residents, and the jokes and conversations that were attempted to maintain normalcy. Yet, in many ways, the diary entries are overshadowed by the omnipresent feeling of the fragility of life. There was always the possibility that the next day would be the last, and one could never plan further than one day ahead. This state of mind cannot be characterised as sheer anxiety, as the terror of the approaching catastrophe was mixed with the feeling of loss of home as a permanent fixture in one's life. The waiting wore away the possibility of a home because a home required a sense of permanence, a belief that tomorrow would exist and be recognisable.

Within the constraints of the Annex, Anne attempted to anchor herself through objects and memories. She kept her diary with meticulous care. She read books, works of literature, poetry, and history that connected her to the world beyond hiding. She maintained a map and followed the progress of the war, trying to understand when liberation might come. She cut pictures out of magazines and pasted them in a notebook. These objects and practices were not decorative. They were psychological necessities. When physical space provides no sense of security or permanence, objects can become anchors to continuity and identity.

The diary itself functioned as the most important object. Anne addressed it as a person, naming it as "Kitty", and creating a relationship with the diary that substituted for the relationships and spaces she had lost. She poured into the diary what she could not express in the Annex's confined physical space. She theorised about her future, wrote about her dreams, analysed her relationships with brutal honesty, and explored her fears and desires. The diary became a form of self-construction that the Annex could not permit. It was a psychological space where Anne could be fully present to herself in ways the physical environment forbade.

The conditions of the Annex can hardly be considered separately from the historical catastrophe in which it was embedded. The persecution of Jews in the Netherlands was systemic and rapidly escalating. By the time the Frank family went into hiding in July 1942, thousands of Jews in the Netherlands had already been deported. The process of the Nazi state’s extermination policy was already underway. The Franks did not hide due to the dangers of the Holocaust or social discrimination, but instead from direct persecution, which was formally established through state structures. This fact changes the psychological context of life in the Annex. For the persecuted Jews, it was not a confrontation with a universal social threat, but a confrontation with the direct illegality of the state and its violence. From this perspective, the psychological disturbance in the Annex stemmed from political violence, not internal human factors.

The diary reveals Anne's awareness of this historical moment. She was reading newspapers when information was still available. She understood that the war was happening, that Jews were being deported, that her existence in hiding was a response to organised persecution. Unlike someone confined for psychological reasons or even for criminal punishment, Anne was hiding because her identity of being Jewish had been criminalised by the state. The psychological disturbance of the Annex was therefore inseparable from the larger historical catastrophe. The Annex was not separate from the Holocaust. It was a microcosm of it; a small space where the persecution manifested in the form of forced confinement and psychological suffering.

Anne Frank's diary records the attempts to create a home within conditions that made home impossible. The Secret Annex provided physical shelter but could never provide psychological safety. It contained all the activities associated with home – family meals, education, celebration, rest, etc., yet it remained fundamentally an ‘anti-home’, a space of imprisonment and fear. Anne responded by creating an alternative psychological space through writing. The diary became a room within the room, a place where she could exist more fully than the physical space allowed.

The diary ultimately documents not the successful creation of home, but the failure of displacement itself. Anne was displaced from her ordinary life, school, friendships, city, and sense of belonging. The Annex was where she was displaced to. It was not a home she chose but a prison she had to inhabit to survive. The diary records this experience with unflinching honesty. It documents what it means to live in a space designed to be invisible, to exist in conditions of permanent uncertainty, to experience adolescence in confinement, and to maintain psychological continuity amid systematic disruption. The Annex never became a home. But Anne's act of writing preserved something essential – her voice, her analysis, and her refusal to disappear even as the historical forces outside sought to eliminate her. The diary survives, even though Anne did not.

The psychological disturbance documented in these pages reveals a broader truth about displacement: it is not always sudden or dramatic. Sometimes it is a daily accumulation of the inability to return to what was normal. It is confinement without resolution. It is the loss of adolescence, privacy, freedom, and the future, all compressed into a hidden room where eight people attempted, and failed, to create something resembling home.