There is a CCTV security camera, one specific camera in a planet full of them, that I keep thinking about.

Last year I took my daughter to Amsterdam to visit some friends and get out of the house in the miserable Scottish winter. I decided that she was old enough to handle a trip to Anne Frank House. So off we went.

If you’ve never been there, it’s a place that has a lot of rules, for obvious reasons. One of them is no phones or cameras; these go into the lockers at the entrance. This is more than a good idea, as it forces you to really focus on the experience.

If you know the house, you know that there is a small corridor leading to the bookcase which concealed the stair up to the attic where Anne and her family sheltered. You wait in that corridor, politely, for people to make their way up one at a time. It is a strange liminal space, that corridor, one where you mentally prepare to make a pilgrimage into a space of profound intimacy.

It was there, while I was waiting, that I looked up and spotted a little CCTV eye.

Obviously it is there for the House’s security staff, who are keeping an eye on the corridor, making sure the queue is manageable, making sure no one’s broken their legs on the Dutch staircase, and making sure that no one’s doing anything stupid.

But given the work I do, that little CCTV eye, in that corridor, of all places, is almost beyond words. All that humanity hidden up that staircase for years, all the precautions taken, all of the daylight they never saw, all of the silence and whispers, all of the lives silenced, all of the lessons it gave us, all of the warnings it’s flagging up even now, and eighty years later there’s a little surveillance monitor.

Right there. Watching the people. Watching the attic.

And I keep thinking about that.