The Legacy of Anne Frank Read online

  The Legacy of Anne Frank

  The Legacy of Anne Frank

  Gillian Walnes Perry

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  PEN & SWORD HISTORY

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire S70 2AS

  Copyright (c) Gillian Walnes Perry 2018

  ISBN 978 1 52673 104 3

  eISBN 978 1 52673 105 0

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 52673 106 7

  The right of Gillian Walnes Perry to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  List of Photographs

  Prologue Anne Frank is Here in the World

  Chapter 1 Anne Frank

  Chapter 2 Otto Frank

  Chapter 3 ‘Anne Frank in the World’ is Launched

  Chapter 4 The Anne Frank Trust is Born

  Chapter 5 Anne and Eva Schloss – the Girl who Became her Stepsister

  Chapter 6 Anne Frank’s Role in the Transition from Communism

  Chapter 7 The Woman Who Gave a Personal Pledge to Otto Frank

  Chapter 8 Anne Frank in Latin America

  Chapter 9 Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn

  Chapter 10 On the Road with Anne Frank

  Chapter 11 Anne Frank and the Children of Bosnia

  Chapter 12 Anne Frank and Nelson Mandela

  Chapter 13 Anne Frank and her Protector Miep Gies

  Chapter 14 Anne Frank goes into British Prisons

  Chapter 15 Anne Frank and Stephen Lawrence

  Chapter 16 Anne Frank Helping to Make Peace in Ireland

  Chapter 17 Anne Frank and her Secret Hero

  Chapter 18 Anne Frank and Daniel Pearl

  Chapter 19 The Anne Frank Declaration

  Chapter 20 The Anne Frank Trust is Growing

  Chapter 21 Who Betrayed the Frank Family?

  Chapter 22 Anne Frank is Educating Millions

  Chapter 23 Inspired by Holocaust Survivors

  Chapter 24 Anne Frank and the Girl who was Kidnapped by Sardinian Bandits

  Chapter 25 Anne Frank in the Far East

  Chapter 26 Anne Frank was a Real Person

  Chapter 27 Anne Frank in the Indian Subcontinent

  Chapter 28 The Strange Circle of the House on Blaricummerweg

  Chapter 29 Anne Frank and her Fear

  Chapter 30 Anne Frank and the Future

  References

  Acknowledgements

  I truly want to thank everyone I have encountered or heard about in the world of Anne Frank for their dedication and for being an inspiration to me. But sadly I can’t, or this chronicle will span a further 300 pages. So here are my thanks to a few of the key players in a story that relates the lives and activities of hundreds of fascinating people and spans a period of thirty years.

  To all my wonderful colleagues, past and present, at the Anne Frank Trust, the Anne Frank House, the Anne Frank Fonds and throughout the Anne Frank family of educators and activists around the world. Too many to mention I fear, but they all know who they are.

  To Hans Westra, Rabbi David Soetendorp, Eva Schloss, the late Bee Klug, Jan Erik Dubbelman, Dienke Hondius and the late Buddy Elias for the faith they placed in me all those years ago. I followed an unforgettable path with them, and they have guided my life with wisdom and love.

  To Penguin Books, to Michelle Rosenberg and to Jon Wright, Laura Hirst, Stephen Chumbley and the team at my publishers Pen & Sword who have so ably and supportively helped to realise this dream.

  It has been a true privilege to have worked with you all.

  To my late husband Tony Bogush, who was behind me every step of the way from the start and left a huge mark on the Anne Frank Trust.

  To my children Joe and Tilly, who lived throughout their teenage years with the Anne Frank Trust taking over their family home. Having survived the experience, they grew up to make me the proudest mother in the world from their remarkable achievements and a doting Nana to Ewan, Emily and Jonah.

  Finally, to my amazing husband Elon Perry, who brought his talent and many years of experience as a celebrated Israeli journalist, writer, poet and editor, to help bring the manuscript into such shape that the publishers had no need for editing. Also, for his love, devotion, endless cups of tea, beautiful Sephardic meals, and his support along the way.

  List of Photographs

  1. Cover image: Anne Frank aged eleven in April 1941. Photograph taken at the Frank family apartment on the Merwedeplein, Amsterdam. Photo by Anne Frank Fonds – Basel via Getty Images.

  2. Happy and normal family life. Edith Frank takes seven-year-old Margot and three-year-old Anne on a trip to Frankfurt city centre in March 1933. Hitler has been in power for two months, and life for Germany’s Jews is about to change. Photo by Anne Frank Fonds – Basel via Getty Images.

  3. In May 1941, the photographer Frans Dupont took a series of exquisitely posed studio images of eleven-year-old Anne. Photo by Frans Dupont/Anne Frank Fonds – Basel via Getty Images.

  4. (a) The front cover and (b) inside of Anne’s original diary with photos she pasted inside it. From the Anne Frank House collection.

  5. The first Anne Frank traveling exhibition Anne Frank in the World 1929-1945 was monochrome and huge in scale. Here it is on show in Glasgow in 1990. From the Anne Frank House collection.

  6. Otto Frank and his wife Fritzi visiting Audrey Hepburn at her home in Switzerland, circa 1957. A copy of this photo was given to me in Los Angeles by Audrey’s son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer. It was taken by his late father, the actor Mel Ferrer.

  7. Anne Frank’s cousin Bernd ‘Buddy’ Elias reads the Anne Frank Declaration to United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan at UN headquarters in New York in January 1999. Those watching include (from left) footballer and UN Ambassador John Fashanu; my late husband Tony Bogush; the UK’s Ambassador to the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock; Eva Schloss; myself and at back right, Barry van Driel, who composed the Declaration. Photo: UN photographer, from the Anne Frank Trust collection.

  8. A very special memory of attending the 1996 Academy Awards in Hollywood with Miep Gies. Jon Blair, the writer and director of the Oscar winning documentary feature Anne Frank Remembered is at the back on the right. Photo: Jerome Goldblatt.

  9. Anne Frank House International Director Jan Erik Dubbelman greets Japanese children coming to the exhibition in Tokyo in 2010 Photo: Aaron Peterer, Anne Frank House collection.

  10. Latvian and Russian teenagers performing together in The Dreams of Anne Frank Riga, 1998. For some it was their first opportunity to
interact socially. From the Anne Frank House collection.

  11. Student peer guides in the South African township of Orlando West with Aaron Peterer of the Anne Frank House education team (centre right back). Photo: Gift Mabunda, 2009 from the Anne Frank House collection.

  12. Eva Schloss with a prisoner guide (face obscured) at Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London. On the right is Steve Gadd, the Anne Frank Trust prison tour manager. Photo: Mark McEvoy for the Anne Frank Trust.

  13. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen (with red tie) is shown around the Anne Frank, A History for Today exhibition at the CEU Paraisopolis School in Sao Paulo, 2010. His enthusiastic and knowledgeable guides are as young as ten and eleven. Photo: Riccardo Sanchez for the Instituto Plataforma Brasil.

  14. Anne Frank Ambassadors show schools and members of the public around the Anne Frank + You exhibition at Bradford College in West Yorkshire in 2013. With thanks to Bradford Metropolitan District Council and the Anne Frank Trust.

  15. Anne Frank peer guides at the Forest Gate School in London. From the Anne Frank Trust collection.

  16. After the thirty-year-long Sri Lankan civil war, the Anne Frank, A History for Today exhibition gave students in Jaffna an opportunity to reflect on their recent past and future. From the Anne Frank House collection.

  Prologue

  Anne Frank is Here in the World

  ‘We’re all alive, but we don’t know why or what for; we’re all searching for happiness; we’re all leading lives that are different and yet the same’.

  Anne Frank, Thursday, 6 July 1944

  Some time in the late winter or early spring of 1945, a 15-year-old girl lay on a cold and bare wooden bunk in Bergen-Belsen, the near-abandoned Nazi death camp situated on the icy and windswept Luneberg Heath in Northern Germany. Beside the girl lay her older sister, trying to find the physical strength to continue breathing. But the older girl was so fragile, she toppled from the bunk on to the hard concrete floor and not having the strength to withstand the shock, died immediately. A few hours later, the younger sister also gave up her struggle to stay alive. Their emaciated bodies, already looking like skeletons from the hunger these young girls had endured, were carried out of the barrack and thrown into a pit serving as a mass grave. Eventually the pile of bodies was set alight.

  The physical Anne Frank was no more.

  Annelies Marie Frank was gone, but her spirit and her story is still echoing all around the world through a little red-checked notebook that she had used as a diary, a personal journal which she had kept while in hiding from the Nazis in rooms above her father’s business in Amsterdam. Her diary was published as a book in June 1947 and became one of the world’s most widely read and most admired chronicles of the Second World War. Even people who cannot quite recall who she was, and what happened to her, are familiar with the name Anne Frank.

  But what is not so well-known is the story of a thread Anne Frank has woven around the world over the past thirty years. Not just through her diary, but through the world’s most popular and enduring travelling exhibition and the educational programmes carried out in her name. These were not for commercial success nor for glorification or sanctification of her name, but purely for the noble cause of trying to make this fractured world a bit better.

  This is a story of people from radically different places and circumstances who share a commonality. All their lives have been affected by Anne Frank. They are remarkable educators who have travelled to the far reaches of the globe or challenged the establishment for the betterment of their own community, they are young people brought up in deprivation or violence, they are brave human rights defenders who have risked their lives, or those who will become our next generation of influencers and change-makers.

  This thread travels through the past three decades of some of the most seismic events in recent world history and into post-conflict arenas. It brings with it a platform for open and honest discussion between former enemies, or those from opposing cultures and communities who had never before had an opportunity to spend time together.

  By bringing about productive and fruitful partnerships with local human rights organizations, social welfare groups, cultural associations, youth agencies, embassies and diplomatic missions, the Anne Frank exhibition and education programmes have left behind strong legacies that have been seized and built upon.

  Most importantly, through implementing a peer-to-peer method of educating in some of the most challenging areas, it has empowered a generation of young people to consider themselves as our future leaders and influencers. Many of these young people live in the world’s toughest societies, where violence, poverty and persecution are taken for granted.

  This remarkable story is one of hope, inspiration and aspiration. It is an enactment of Anne Frank’s dreams of making a better world and the embodiment of her father Otto Frank’s vision of a force for good in his daughter’s memory.

  What follows is a collection of stories of people who found themselves living through turbulent times. The Anne Frank connecting thread over the past three decades has linked children in the townships of the newly post-apartheid South Africa, to those in post-civil war Sri Lanka, to those in gang-ridden cities in Guatemala and Brazil, to the follower of a murdered Russian priest, to the daughter of a young woman thrown from a plane during the Argentinian dictatorship, to a terrified little Jewish boy pushed forward by a hero-worshipping crowd towards Hitler, to a teenage girl who testified against the soldiers who murdered her family in Kosovo, to a boy killed on a London street whose family went on to challenge racism in the police.

  The thread links leaders of countries going through great changes, such as Nelson Mandela, stars such as Audrey Hepburn, Luciano Pavarotti and Angelina Jolie who have offered their celebrity for the benefit of the less fortunate, or those who have found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, such as the idealistic American journalist Daniel Pearl. They are those who have survived the near impossible, such as Malala Yousafzai and Zlata Filipović, and inspirational Holocaust and genocide survivors. This story links world statesmen and presidents, British prime ministers and leaders of all the world’s major religions with those who knew Anne Frank and hold memories of the real person and things she said and did.

  So how did this thread come about? How and why did the world’s most popular, enduring and effective travelling exhibition start? An exhibition that has so far been staged over 5,000 times in 95 different countries, and has to date been visited by over nine million people.

  Thanks to Otto Frank, the Mayor of Amsterdam and a small group of friends, in May 1960 the building at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam where the Frank family had sought refuge opened its doors to the public as a museum. It was known in Dutch as the ‘Anne Frank Huis’. Although its first visitors had to ring the doorbell to be allowed in, by the 1980s the museum was receiving over 400,000 people a year.

  One morning in 1984, after watching the very long queue of visitors standing patiently in the cold in front of the ‘Anne Frank Huis’ museum, staff member Bauco van der Wal approached the Director Hans Westra with a novel idea to create a ‘touring Anne Frank House’. The Director warmed to the idea and tasked the museum’s historian Joke Kniesmeyer to create an exhibition showing Anne Frank’s life and times on panels that could be displayed in external settings.

  Little did these three realize the impact this ‘novel idea’ was about to have on the world.

  Chapter 1

  Anne Frank

  But first, who exactly was Anne Frank? It is a name well-known around the world, and across seven decades, because of her diary, written over the course of twenty-six months. From being drawn into its pages we get to intimately know a young girl, who is describing how it felt to have her very existence continually threatened by the irrational persecution of adults.

  Over the past seventy years since her diary was first published as a book, Anne Frank’s words have touched the hearts and minds of millions. She has inspired a
n unending stream of biographies, artistic interpretations of her story, academic analyses of her literary prowess, children’s poetry and even pubescent obsessions. Anne’s diary chronicled a fun-loving and intelligent girl’s fears and frustrations in having to hide to save her own life. The complex personality leaping from its pages resonates with children and adults, male and female, with all who are in the process of going through, or have already been through, a time of emotional upheaval and physical changes to both mind and body.

  But to millions of people around the world, Anne is even more familiar to them by what she looked like. This is thanks to an unusually large collection of black-and-white photographs taken by her father, Otto Frank, who was the proud owner of a classic 35mm Leica camera. He snapped his daughters Margot Betti and Annelies Marie spontaneously or in carefully posed situations. His twin passions became his beautiful little dark-eyed girls and his hobby of photography. He liked to experiment visually, and some of his photos (which have been referred to as the ‘shadow pictures’) even contain his own elongated and ghostly shadow in the foreground.