The thing I wanted to do the most when I was planning my not-so-planned trip to Amsterdam was to go to the Anne Frank House. I took a class in Jewish Studies my freshman year of school, and it only seemed right that I would go visit a piece of Holocaust history while in a country that faced so much oppression during the Nazi invasion. So I went.

I woke up at seven, left my questionably overpriced hostel, walked, got lost, walked a bit more, and found the line before I found the museum. I waited for over an hour and paid 16 euros to get inside. It struck me when I was waiting in the line, when I had just a minute to think, how weird this whole situation was. The thing about museums is that they are usually created with the intention of becoming a museum. The Anne Frank House was not; it was created to be lived in and double as a factory for Otto Frank’s business. Obviously, it wasn’t created to become a secret hiding place for Jews, but it wasn’t meant to become an international spectacle. The wait in line started to become more depressing the more I thought about the monetization of a very solemn piece of history, but then I saw The Pretzel Guy.

When I left the museum, the line was about twice the length it was when I was in it, and positioned in the middle of the line was The Pretzel Guy. There he was, creating his own line within the original line, selling giant soft pretzels to the suckers in the line with the three-hour wait. The whole ordeal was so ironic and interesting, and I am not ashamed to say that those pretzels did look delicious. In one of the museum’s rooms, there is a thick book listing all of the casualties from the Holocaust. There are probably thousands of pages; the print is so small to fit the names of everyone lost in the camps. That alone was what made the museum experience hit me. But it was when I saw The Pretzel Guy and the gigantic line that I was reminded how much life surrounds the Anne Frank House.

I know that pulling a "Fault in our Stars" reference at this point seems kind of juvenile and campy, but hear me out. I’ve been thinking about one quote specifically, one that I actually thought a lot about while in the Anne Frank House. It goes like this: “…you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House…[but] Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House…she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.” Would I kiss someone in the Anne Frank House? Probably not, but that is probably because I cannot stand PDA and am a total love cynic, but I’m on Hazel’s side of this.

Amsterdam is such a beautiful, lively place, and the piece of Holocaust history that I had just walked through made me realize that its intent was not only to mourn the past, but also to recognize our present. We are being told to live, to remember what was left behind and in turn, to move forward. To travel to Amsterdam, buy pretzels from The Pretzel Guy, to love and grieve and experience everything and anything while we still can. And so we must.