The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  Jan Erik had joined the Anne Frank House in January 1982 working in Information and Documentation. At that time a new extreme right-wing party was emerging in the Netherlands and as a challenge to this anti-Fascist committees were springing up throughout the country. From his desk at the Anne Frank House, and having access to relevant documents and articles, Jan Erik started to support these committees by providing useful information. He also helped to organize a large anti-Fascist demonstration in the centre of Amsterdam, which he believes put the Anne Frank House on the map as an organization that was addressing contemporary issues as well as educating about the past.

  Jan Erik was in fact a draft resister. The Netherlands, a country that had suffered the dire consequences of Nazi occupation, continued active conscription to the armed forces up until 1995. Dutch conscription dated back to its introduction in the early nineteenth century by Louis Bonaparte, who had been installed as King Lodewijk I of Holland by his older brother the Emperor Napoleon. Many of the Anne Frank House staff up until the mid-1990s were similarly draft resisters as the last conscripted soldiers were not demobilized until 1996. Jan Erik chose to resist the draft, despite strongly believing that ‘there are times in history when there is a real justification for going to war’.

  Jan Erik was appointed Head of the International Department in 1989, not long after I first met him in Bournemouth, and set about growing the Anne Frank exhibition into the global force for good that it has become. He has spent most of his life since 1989 in a bright canalside office, either on the phone, receiving and sending faxes and after the mid-1990s responding to hundreds of emails a day, inspiring his growing team of equally dedicated staff, or boarding planes and trains to ensure the Anne Frank project happened. He has met thousands of people along the way in all parts of the world, setting up the projects, and then convincing others to fund it. Having known him for thirty years, I like to remind Jan Erik that he is personally responsible for bringing Anne Frank’s story to many millions of people. Highly intelligent, charismatic and with an impish sense of humour, Jan Erik is nonetheless imbued with a quiet modesty. Never comfortable as a public speaker, he was always happy to take a back seat at the openings he had made happen, watching successive Anne Frank House directors, Hans Westra and then Ronald Leopold (and myself when fortunate enough to be sent by the Anne Frank House), give the keynote speech at each international launch.

  Nonetheless, Jan Erik believed in a future for taking the story of Anne Frank out to the world. He flew to London and met with representatives of the Greater London Council (abolished by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986), community leaders and anti-racism activists. ‘Anne Frank in the World’ duly opened in February 1986 at the Mall Galleries, just along the road from Buckingham Palace in central London.

  Successful as the Mall Galleries event was, Jan Erik wanted to ensure that Britain maximized the use of this specially-created English/Dutch language copy of the exhibition. He came to live in London for three months in the autumn of that year, living in one room in the East End, cycling around the city and getting to know England and Scotland by train. He made connections in those weeks which resulted in twelve cities taking the exhibition over the next two years, while raising £75,000 to kick the programme off – no mean feat in those early days.

  From its inception ‘Anne Frank in the World’ was something special and unique in its transformative power. Whether being shipped across oceans from Amsterdam to countries where people knew little about the horrors of Nazism or were emerging from their own painful histories, or going to communities riven by division, suspicion and sectarianism, there has never been a travelling event that has been such an empowering force for good.

  In the following pages you will read about some unforgettable people from all over the world and learn about Anne Frank from a new perspective. But before we go on that adventure, I will explain what happened next in Britain.

  Chapter 4

  The Anne Frank Trust is Born

  In 1986, following the opening of the first Anne Frank exhibition in Britain, Jan Erik Dubbelman from the newly-formed International Department of the Anne Frank House had come to live in the East End of London to help ensure the exhibition continued. Using the traditional Dutch means of transport, a trusty bicycle, to get himself around the city, he started building a network of local and then national connections, mostly from the more sympathetic left wing of British politics.

  This was around the middle period of Margaret Thatcher’s government, which saw the rise and influence of young testosterone- and cocaine-fuelled City traders. The term ‘yuppie’ was being used as an acronym for ‘young urban professional’ – particularly those who worked in a well-paid job and had a luxurious lifestyle. These outputs of Thatcherite Britain were satirised by a new wave of comedians such as Ben Elton and Harry Enfield. Shoulders became wider on male and female clothing due to ‘power padding’ (referencing popular culture such as the American TV series Dynasty and British bands such as Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet). On the other hand, the Live Aid concert in July 1985 heralded a new era in which young people felt they could and should take responsibility for the iniquities and inequalities of the world.

  The UK was becoming a very polarized country by the mid-1980s. In the post-industrial north of England the coal industry was dying following the crippling year-long miners’ strike. At the opposition Labour Party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, the party’s leader Neil Kinnock had made a damning speech about the Militant wing of his party, and in particular Liverpool’s left-wing council. This was considered the finest speech made by Kinnock, and is cited as a historic turning point in the history of the Labour party – leading to its thirteen-year period of government between 1997 and 2010.

  An hour before the speech, David Soetendorp and I had sat with Kinnock in a nearby hotel lounge discussing the plight of Soviet Jewish ‘Refuseniks’ (to our delight we later heard him refer to their plight in his speech). As we were leaving the meeting Kinnock took us over to a group of men in animated discussion. He introduced us to the black man who seemed to be leading the conversation. The man looked up at us, politely smiled and said a friendly hello. ‘This is Oliver Tambo,’ Kinnock said casually. We smiled back and waved hello. We were greeting the exiled President of the African National Congress, after whom Johannesburg International Airport is now named.

  Meanwhile, during these times of social upheaval, Jan Erik and his wife Dienke managed to arrange a meeting with the Conservative government’s Schools Minister Angela Rumbold. Unlike later meetings with government ministers that he and I came to experience, Jan Erik recalled being surprised that it was the Minister without the attendance of any advisers making notes and action points. There were pleasantries and supportive words over a cup of tea, but no government support for the Anne Frank exhibition to continue its work was forthcoming.

  Despite this, Jan Erik’s determination proved to be successful and between 1986 and 1990 there were bookings for the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition by twenty British cities, including Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Barnsley and Bradford. It was an important time in the evolution of formal Holocaust education with the creation of the Holocaust Educational Trust and its campaign for Holocaust education to be a part of the History curriculum in secondary schools; the 1988 ‘Remembering for the Future’ conference organized by the respected Holocaust historian Dr Elisabeth Maxwell (the French-born wife of the disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell) and the publication of the Auschwitz teaching pack by the Inner London Education Authority (which ceased to exist in 1990), the first-ever comprehensive Holocaust teaching resource produced by a governmental body in the UK.

  One of the people Jan Erik and his partner, the exhibition’s co-creator Dienke Hondius, had met while planning the Manchester exhibition was a young historian called Tony Kushner. To give an indication of the lack of Holocaust education in British schools prior to the mid-1980s, a decade earlier Tony had chosen History fo
r his O-Level and A-levels. For both exams he had studied Nazi Germany but, despite the excellence of his teacher, there was astonishingly no mention in the curriculum of either Jews or the Holocaust.

  Tony’s interest was first sparked by watching the episode on the Nazi genocide of the ITV flagship series The World At War (first screened on 27 March 1974). ‘My mother was disabled and my brother was blind. I remember thinking how incredibly vulnerable we would have been under the Nazi regime, let alone being Jewish.’ He decided he wanted to be a social historian and went to Sheffield University, the only faculty with a course on Social History. Sheffield, home city to the headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers, was known as the ‘Socialist Republic of Sheffield’ during the mid-1980s and the atmosphere was highly charged politically. After completing his PhD, Tony went to work at the newly-created Manchester Jewish Museum, where he worked on an exhibition called ‘Before the Holocaust’ about Jewish refugees from Nazism who had settled in the city. ‘At that time, Holocaust survivors were not as prominent as they are now and their stories were more unknown than those of the refugees to Britain.’ In 1986 Tony moved to the University of Southampton where he set up the highly esteemed Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations. He has also written several books connecting Britain and the Holocaust.

  In the summer of 2016, Tony and I sat in the café of the University of Southampton. He reflected back on those times when the Anne Frank exhibition was just starting out on its journey throughout the UK.

  If you had said to me in 1989 that Holocaust education would become part of the school curriculum, there would be War Crimes legislation in two years, that the Imperial War Museum would have a Holocaust exhibition larger than its World War II exhibition, and that there would be a national Holocaust Memorial Day, I would have laughed at you at the improbability of it all.

  In the summer of 1988, I had received the telephone call that was to change my life forever. It was from my good friend Rabbi David Soetendorp. He had just come home from paying a pastoral hospital visit to a congregant. During the conversation, she had mentioned to him casually that there was an exhibition travelling around Britain about Anne Frank and that her daughter had seen it in Bristol. On the phone to me David sounded excited. ‘Was I was aware that his Dutch father Rabbi Jacob Soetendorp and Otto Frank had been good friends? Would I be interested in helping him bring this exhibition to Bournemouth?’ Yes, David, I would.

  David contacted the Anne Frank House, where there is an education room named in memory of his late father. He then called a well-known philanthropist called Bertha Klug, who divided her time between her homes in London and Bournemouth. Bertha, known to all since childhood by her nickname of Bee, invited us to her apartment overlooking the sweep of Bournemouth Bay. When I walked into the room, already sitting round the laden tea table was David, happily conversing in Dutch with Jan Erik Dubbelman, Dienke Hondius and Cornelius ‘Cor’ Suijk, Otto Frank’s friend who was the Emeritus Director of the Anne Frank House and a roving international ambassador for the organization. I later learnt that Cor, who died in 2014, had belonged to a group of Dutch Resistance heroes during the Second World War who had saved the lives of thirteen Jews.

  We sat around Bee’s table and were all equally inspired by the enthusiasm of Jan Erik, Dienke and the much older Mr Cor Suijk. After tea had been served, Bee left the room and returned carrying a framed photograph. She proudly pointed out her son Brian, a young man in the midst of a large group of smiling men and women. Bee then explained that this was Brian in the 1960s, attending one of Otto Frank’s international student conferences. And there, on the right hand side of the group, was an unmistakeable young David Soetendorp. David recalls that, ‘This certainly led to a very good outcome from that afternoon. Bee wanted, there and then, to become the principal backer of the exhibition.’

  Bee and her businessman husband Sid generously offered to sponsor the cost of staging the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition in Bournemouth, in those days £5,000 to cover the transportation and build costs. A strange customs anomaly meant that in those days the exhibition had to travel back and forth from Amsterdam to the UK for each staging. Also back and forth across the North Sea came a pair of gung-ho exhibition builders led by Joost Dekkers, who drove it to each venue in a large truck.

  We set up a voluntary committee of local educators and activists to plan and stage the exhibition in Bournemouth. I can’t recall what my exact role was on the group – probably David’s ‘Girl Friday’ – but I remember it took up my every waking moment for the following nine months.

  Our first task was to find a suitable venue. After doing the rounds of local churches and civic facilities, we were offered a large room at Bournemouth College of Art which, although on the outskirts of the town, was perfect. A competition was held among the art students to design the event’s publicity materials, which long before Apple Macs and whizz-bang computer graphics and technology, were rather naively amateurish.

  On a sunny April morning in 1989, I stood in anticipation outside the college and watched as a large truck, containing the panels and frames of ‘Anne Frank in the World’ as well as the two waving and smiling Dutch exhibition builders, drove up the road towards the building. Anne Frank and her story had arrived in our town. I was overcome with emotion and tears welled up in my eyes watching the previous nine months of activity and excitement come to fruition.

  Inside the empty exhibition space a team of five teenage boys doing Community Service for petty criminality were waiting around with their supervisor to help our Dutch friends. It was my first of many future encounters with young offenders. The boys had no idea of who Anne Frank was, let alone what had happened to her, and they set about their building task in a nonchalant, sometimes even petulant, manner. As the panels took shape one by one and the story unfolded, each of the boys seemed to quieten down and start to take an interest in what they were doing. Their work ethic seemed to change too. At the end of the build, Joost Dekkers presented each one with the exhibition catalogue in appreciation of their hard work, and as a further learning tool.

  Eva Schloss, in the early days of her journey as a Holocaust speaker and educator, came from London to launch the exhibition. I felt the excitement at her visit as so many have done in the subsequent thirty years of her remarkable travels and lectures. She was 59 on that evening of our first meeting and as I write is approaching 90, but is as active as ever.

  The ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition was on show for three weeks in that fateful spring of 1989. Over 10,000 people from Bournemouth and its neighbouring towns came to see it. At the end of the three weeks I felt bereft at its leaving but managed to obtain a large metal road sign advertising the Anne Frank exhibition which I kept on the inside wall of my garage as a souvenir.

  I was restless that summer and couldn’t leave the experience of the Anne Frank exhibition behind. In September, I took a plane across to Amsterdam for a further meeting with Jan Erik and Dienke, who introduced me to the Anne Frank House Director, Hans Westra. I convinced Hans that the tour of the Anne Frank exhibition had to continue in the UK – it was essential – and that they needed someone who was based in that country to manage it.

  That road sign sitting in my house became a metaphor for my future career. I was duly appointed by Hans as the ‘British Representative of the Anne Frank House’ that autumn and was tasked to promote the exhibition in the UK. I would receive a percentage of the hire fee for each exhibition I brought to fruition. I immediately set to work with huge drive and motivation, partly because I was in the sad process of separating from my first husband Peter Walnes, had two growing children and needed an income.

  Several further meetings in Amsterdam followed. In the spring of 1990, it was agreed with Hans and the Anne Frank House’s Managing Director Kleis Broekhuizen that a charitable trust should be set up in the UK to help groups of volunteers and community activists around the country who wished to bring the exh
ibition to their town or city. The Anne Frank Educational Trust, as it was first known, was duly born. I was to be its Executive Director.

  To apply for charitable status we now needed a Board of Trustees and a Chair of that Board. In Hans Westra’s office we decided to invite David Soetendorp, who had such close links to Otto Frank, to be the Founding Chair, to which he naturally and readily agreed. Eva Schloss was asked to be a Trustee and Jan Erik suggested others from around the country he had worked with. The first Board included Shirley Daniel, head teacher of a high-achieving Asian girls’ school in west London and Professor Tony Kushner, whom Jan Erik and Dienke had first met in Manchester but was by now director of the Parkes Institute for Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Southampton. Otto Frank’s widow Fritzi was appointed as a Founding Patron. As an elderly and always supremely elegant white-haired lady she attended a couple of our first Trustee meetings brought along by Eva, but Fritzi’s English was not very good so her venerable presence in the room was more motivational than practical.