The Legacy of Anne Frank

by The Legacy of Anne Frank (retail) (epub)

Michael then returned to 263 Prinsengracht. Initially nervous, he was shown to a small room down in the basement of the building where he was introduced to around thirty other participants. They were from the Netherlands, France, Spain and Switzerland, and to his great surprise also from West Germany. ‘We were mainly teenagers but there were a couple of them who were in their early twenties. This was my first exposure to people from other countries and because we all spoke in English, we bonded as a team and got along well. We were all enthusiasts, and in those days of polite reserve and hand-shaking, we hugged and kissed each other when we left.’

  Otto’s friend and confidant Rabbi Jacob Soetendorp was a friendly father figure to the group, and activities were run by his oldest son Avraham, who had been hidden with a Dutch farming family as a baby, Avraham’s fiancée Sira, a child survivor, and two other members of the fledgling staff of the soon-to-be Anne Frank House. Michael had expected all the seminars to cover the Holocaust and the Second World War but this wasn’t the case. He recalled, ‘The topics we discussed were current affairs, politics, the arts, culture and how we could work together. I discovered that LSD stood for Lysergic Acid Diethylamide as drugs was also an issue we covered’ (LSD had recently arrived on the streets of Amsterdam).

  On the third day of the conference Mr Frank came to meet them. Michael recalls spotting a slim and sprightly man who was striding up the street carrying a small briefcase. As he approached the building he was smiling (which he continued to do throughout his visit). At that point out came Michael’s cine camera for the first time during the seminar as he had felt that filming during the previous sessions would have been intrusive and disruptive. His film of the arrival of Mr Frank at the first-ever international student conference, along with footage of Amsterdam as it entered the 1960s, is now in the Anne Frank House archive.

  The group went downstairs to the basement room and crowded around Mr Frank, asking him questions and hanging on to his answers, which were in very good English (Otto had been at work improving his English during the years in hiding). Mr Frank gave the impression that he was very proud of his team and what they were doing to implement his ideas about bringing young people together.

  The next day was also one that influenced Michael’s life. It was termed ‘Art Appreciation Day’ and the group were taken to both the Stedelijk Museum, where Michael discovered the work of Mondrian for the first time, and then on to the Rijksmuseum. There, in front of Rembrandt’s magnificent ‘Night Watch’ a professional curator demonstrated to the students how to use one’s ‘inner eye’ to truly appreciate what an artist is trying to convey, something Michael says has never left him, and guides his appreciation of paintings to this day.

  The only reference to the Holocaust was as the students left the conference and they were given a booklet listing all the concentration camps in Europe. This was an eye-opener in terms of the young people’s awareness of the number of camps that were set up throughout Western and Eastern Europe, and contained many names which were little known in 1960, such as Majdanek and Belzec, words that now fill us with horror at their very mention.

  The conference, his time at the Anne Frank Huis and his meeting with Otto Frank affirmed to Michael, a good friend of mine, that youth work is where he wanted to be. Along with his business activities, he has spent his life engaged in voluntary youth work in Liverpool.

  The Anne Frank Huis, or Anne Frank House, as I shall refer to it in the rest of this book, officially opened its doors on 10 May 1960. As difficult as it is to imagine now, when in peak periods people from all over the world can wait in line for up to two hours, the first visitors rang the doorbell to be allowed into the building. But as the popularity of Anne’s diary grew, increased by the 1955 American play and 1960 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, so did the visitors. Otto Frank remained determined the Foundation should speak out and educate about other issues of racism and discrimination and abuse of human rights around the world.

  In 1963, Otto Frank created a second organization based in Basel where he lived. Known as the Anne Frank-Fonds, it would own and administer the rights of Anne Frank and other close members of her family, be responsible for handling copyrights and distributing the royalties from the diary, and be a distinct entity from the House. The Anne Frank-Fonds promotes projects in the spirit of the message of Anne Frank, helping in disseminating Otto Frank’s wish of better understanding between societies and religions. Over the past two decades the House and the Fonds have oftentimes been at legal loggerheads over copyrights pertaining to documents, artefacts and photographs, a fact that would undoubtedly have saddened Otto Frank, who had created the two organizations with so much good intention.

  Indeed the Anne Frank House and its founder Otto Frank did not always see eye to eye. In the early 1970s the House staged a series of three consecutive summer exhibitions in the temporary display space called ‘Nazisme in Zuid Afrika’. Otto felt that the Anne Frank House were overstepping the mark in making a direct comparison between Nazism and apartheid. By that time Otto had retired from the Board of the Foundation but was concerned about any politicization of the Anne Frank House, which was not in line with what he had in mind in setting it up. Otto complained vociferously to the then Director Dr Hans van Houte about the exhibition but to no avail. The creator of the display, South African exile Berend Schuitema (who had also been wary of the name and inference of the exhibition but had acceded to the views of other members of staff), recalled that Otto Frank told him gently but firmly that ‘nothing can compare to the Holocaust . . . Frank’s view was that he wished to see the main function of the Anne Frank Foundation as a contribution to reconciliation and peace which is what Anne, his daughter, wished. Anne, after all, was not a Rosa Luxemburg but a young, innocent girl for whom admiration crosses all boundaries, including political.’ The banners that had particularly offended Otto Frank were taken down by the Director, Dr van Houte. However, the most radical members of staff were angry about the interference of the by-then elderly Mr Frank, and called for a vote of no confidence in the Director. It must have resulted in a highly volatile working atmosphere as those who opposed Otto Frank’s wishes were fired and van Houte resigned not long afterwards.

  Until he became too infirm, Otto and Fritzi travelled the world meeting people and helping to promote Anne’s diary as a force for good. In 2002 I found myself as a tourist at the synagogue on the small island of Curacao, a former Dutch colony in the far west of the Caribbean. My hosts proudly showed me a photograph of Otto and Fritzi’s visit. The couple also spent many happy times in London with Fritzi’s daughter Eva and her growing family, Otto becoming a doting and wise grandfather to Eva’s three daughters.

  Looking back on his commitment to promoting the diary and answering all those letters, Otto explained, ‘Anne’s diary was a great help for me in regaining a positive outlook on the world. With its publication, I hoped to help many people, and that proved to be the case.’

  Otto and Fritzi lived a simple life in their home in Basel, eating sparingly and whenever possible forgoing taxis for public transport. Well known and admired in his own right, whenever he was asked to sign a copy of Anne’s diary he refused to do so, shaking his head and politely stating that it was not actually his work. There were difficulties to deal with, notably the attacks on Anne’s diary by Holocaust deniers describing it as a forgery that had been created by her father after the war to make money. This was forensically proven to be untrue by both the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (resulting in the scholastic publication the Critical Edition of the Diary of Anne Frank) and a West German court, but sadly not until after Otto’s death. Attacks on the authenticity of Anne’s diary continue to this day, from right-wing extremists and also from Middle Eastern countries as a way of delegitimizing the state of Israel.

  There was also the ‘Meyer Levin case’. Otto Frank was sued for $1,000,000 (a huge sum in those times) by the American writer and journalist Meyer Levin for what he considered a broken p
romise concerning who would write the script for a stage play based on Anne’s diary. Initially having verbally promised approval to write the play to the impassioned Levin, Otto and the Broadway producers felt Levin’s script had made the story too Jewish and it would not get performed, except perhaps to a limited audience in the very Jewish city of New York.

  The play that actually opened on Broadway in 1955, and which is still being performed all over the world, was written by a Gentile husband-and-wife team, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, whom the writer Lillian Hellman had introduced to Otto. In Hackett and Goodrich’s hands, the persecution of the Frank family became universalized for a time when there was less interest in racism and anti-Semitism and America’s most pressing concern was about Communist infiltration. Levin believed the original idea for a play had come from him, had been shared with and approved by Otto and Fritzi Frank and accused Frank and the producers of plagiarism and infringement of his version. After many years of litigation, during which even Eleanor Roosevelt tried to mediate, Otto Frank was ordered by the American court to pay Meyer Levin a minimal amount of $15,000 to stop the ongoing litigation and recognize that it was Levin’s idea to create a play. Otto Frank had effectively won the case but it weighed heavily on him for many years. It also did on Meyer Levin, who in 1973 wrote a book about this deeply felt experience. He titled his book The Obsession.

  Otto and Fritzi Frank continued their mission to promote Anne’s memory well into their twilight years. Engaging with people kept them focused and active, and like many Holocaust survivor educators as they have neared the end of their lives, they became even more driven. In 1979, on the cusp of his tenth decade, Otto Frank declared, ‘I am now almost 90 and my strength is slowly failing. Still, the task I received from Anne continues to restore my energy: to struggle for reconciliation and human rights throughout the world.’

  Otto Frank lived to be 91 and died in Basel on 19 August 1980. Many of the Holocaust survivors I have met over the years have had similarly long lives, I am sure partly due to the strength of character that helped them survive what was intended to be unsurvivable. Fritzi continued to live in their home in Basel until she too became frail. She came to live in London with her daughter Eva, until she passed away aged 94 in 1998.

  I recall Fritzi, who became one of the Anne Frank Trust’s founder patrons, at the launch of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ at Southwark Cathedral in 1997. She was still a handsome woman, but at the age of 93 her memory had faded and she was clearly struggling with being in a large crowd of strangers. At one point Fritzi was being photographed in front of a panel showing a large image of Otto in the 1970s. She happened to glance behind her and her piercing blue eyes lit up. Her finger extended out towards the photo, then she smiled back at us and said proudly, ‘That’s my Otto’.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Anne Frank in the World’ is Launched

  ‘Anne Frank in the World, 1929-1945’ was the name given to the Anne Frank House’s first travelling exhibition, touring the world and soon becoming an international phenomenon. The driving force behind the international success of the world’s most enduring and popular travelling Anne Frank exhibition has, for the past thirty years, undoubtedly been due to a man called Jan Erik Dubbelman, the International Director of the Anne Frank House.

  The exhibition was first launched on 12 June 1985 to coincide with the day that would have been Anne’s 56th birthday. The venue chosen for this auspicious event was the Westerkerk, situated adjacent to the Anne Frank House, a Protestant Reform church built in the 1620s during the age of Amsterdam’s seafaring and trading supremacy. The Renaissance-style Westerkerk, with its imposing gold-adorned clock and bell tower known as the Westertoren, has long been a feature of the city, reflecting Amsterdam’s commercial importance. Anne Frank wrote about the chiming of the Westertoren bells several times in her diary, describing how the ‘dearly beloved bells’ gave her comfort in her isolation from the world. Certainly, it was an appropriate choice of venue. On my first visits to Amsterdam in the late 1980s I would stay in a hotel just along the Prinsengracht and hearing the sound of the Westertoren bells gave me an ethereal bond to Anne.

  Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was guest of honour at the exhibition launch and the keynote speech was to be given by former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. This choice was somewhat controversial to some members of the Amsterdam Jewish community, many of whom were Holocaust survivors or those who had been hidden. There had been suspicion that West Germany under Brandt’s chancellorship had failed to protect the Israeli athletes who had been slaughtered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, despite a prior tipoff to the West German government that the Palestinian terrorist group Black September had been planning an attack. On the other hand, Brandt had been the first West German Chancellor to offer contrition for the Holocaust. In an act that came to be known as the Warsaw Kneefall (Warschauer Kniefall), Brandt had prostrated himself as an act of silent atonement at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. The Amsterdam Jewish community’s concern proved unfounded and Brandt gave a warmly-received speech to declare the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition open.

  The panels of ‘Anne Frank in the World’ reflected a time when the only accessible photographs of the rise of Nazism and the Second World War were in stark black-and-white. Printing and image-scanning processes were pre-digital and the exhibition, designed to travel, comprised thirty heavy-duty aluminium frames which held white PVC display panels (not unlike shower curtains) with the black-and-white images accompanied by black text. Designed by the Dutch, a nation of tall people, the first version of the travelling exhibition showed panels some 2.5m high, which required long ladders to erect and the craning of necks by visitors to read the higher-positioned content.

  Dienke Hondius is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Amsterdam and author of many respected books on the social history of the Netherlands, specializing in documenting its waves of immigration and how Dutch citizens reacted to these. In the early 1980s, Dienke had been part of Amsterdam’s radical activism scene, including being a proud member of the ‘Squatters’ Movement’ who would use empty buildings as temporary homes. In line with her ideals and years ahead of the eco movement, when I first knew Dienke she jointly owned a car with a friend to help cut down on carbon emissions. As a newly-graduated historian, in the mid-1980s Dienke happened to be using the Anne Frank House archive to study neo-Nazism in order to help her activist movement to challenge it. The Anne Frank House historian Joke Kniesmeyer asked the willing and knowledgeable young graduate to help her in the creation of the panels for the planned new mobile exhibition.

  Dienke recalled some of the thinking that drove the content. ‘One aspect that we consciously included in the historical part was the topic of anti-Nazi resistance within Germany on the one hand, and that of pro-Nazi collaboration within the Netherlands on the other hand. We wanted to oppose the outdated idea, particularly in the Netherlands, that all the Dutch had been in the resistance, and that all the Germans had been Nazis.’

  The narrative of the exhibition was written in the present tense, giving the reader, who understands where it is leading, a feeling of history playing out in the here and now. Dienke explained this rationale, ‘As a general rule, the present tense has the effect of bringing historical events closer to us; we imagine more easily how things happened when we read about it in the present tense. Bringing history closer to our lives here and now was one of the main objectives of making ‘‘Anne Frank in the World’’.’

  The exhibition started by introducing visitors to the Frank family, Otto Frank in the Great War, his wedding to Edith Hollander and the births and early childhood of their daughters, and it then took its time in building the context of the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. Panels showed the freefall of the German economy after the First World War, the rise from nowhere of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party and how every section of civil society was sucked into
propagating its ideology. There were panels about German universities, where young anti-bourgeois students were some of the most fanatical and avid book-burners, and about the corruption of the justice system and the judiciary. The exhibition also showed how the German people, still recovering from the trauma of the Great War and the economic crash, were seduced by cheap Volkswagen cars, paid summer and skiing holidays (under the ‘Strength Through Joy’ programme) and the offer of jobs building autobahns and in armaments factories. There was a panel on school life and how children were taught their gender differences – boys encouraged to fight for their nation and girls to cook and to produce Aryan children. A strong-faced woman was shown proudly wearing a large medal, awarded by the state for being a productive Aryan mother.

  The Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when senior Nazi leaders met to ratify the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, was not shown until well into the exhibition. From then on the Frank family’s increasingly dangerous situation as Nazi measures against the Jews intensify resulted in their fleeing into hiding when Margot was summoned to be deported. The eventual arrest and fate of the eight people in hiding, the publication of Anne’s diary and Otto’s later life and mission closed the historical section of the exhibition. The final panels gave a snapshot of northern Europe in the mid-1980s with neo-Nazi movements on the rise. One of the most memorable images was of an enraged middle-aged woman in Sweden hitting a neo-Nazi demonstrator with her handbag. She was comical and heroic in equal measure. Dienke explained, ‘This was one of the parts of the exhibition where we wanted to zoom out from the “Dutch” and “German” and “Frank family”. Here, too, the aim was to stimulate discussion and to show connections between “then & there” and “here & now”.’

  After its much-publicized launch at Amsterdam’s Westerkerk, German-and English-language copies of ‘Anne Frank in the World’ opened in Frankfurt and New York respectively. The New York event proved to be very expensive as, because it was early days in the exhibition’s life and still an unknown quantity, verbal promises of sponsorship mostly didn’t materialize. When hearing about the costs that had been incurred in New York the Board members of the Anne Frank House put their foot down. They unanimously agreed that ‘There is no future in a travelling exhibition’, echoing projections about the future of motor cars, TV and telephones – and even Anne Frank’s own question as to whether ‘anyone will wish to read the musings of a thirteen-year-old girl’. The Dutch-language exhibition, opened to great fanfare by the Queen of the Netherlands just a few months before, was already languishing in storage in a back room of the Westerkerk ‘covered in pigeon poop’, as recalled by Jan Erik Dubbelman, the man who was to be the saviour and driving force behind the Anne Frank exhibition.