The first office

In the office building here on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, the Candida building, the company that would later decide everything began in 1933. Otto Frank had come from Frankfurt to Amsterdam that year, borrowed fifteen thousand guilders from his brother-in-law and registered the Nederlandsche Opekta Maatschappij with the Chamber of Commerce in September.

He sold pectin to households that made their own jam, and for that he needed people. Victor Kugler joined that summer. And a neighbour brought along a girl who was looking for work: Miep Santrouschitz, sent from Vienna to the Netherlands as an undernourished child and never gone back. She got the job, and to be able to demonstrate the product she first had to learn to make jam herself.

Those two names return in every story that follows. Kugler and Miep Gies, as she was called after her marriage, kept the company running while the Frank family was hiding above it, and it was Miep who picked Anne's notebooks up off the floor after the arrest and kept them. At the end of 1934 Opekta moved to the Singel, and later on this walk we stand there.

Now we walk back west, across the canals, until we are on the Leliegracht at number 58.