In the 1980s, Ilya had worked in the main Russian historical archive, at that time called the State Archive of the October Revolution. He even presented a Soviet TV programme called Lessons from History which made him quite well known. Some time later he heard through other historians about the existence of an ominous-sounding document, published in Jerusalem in 1980 in Russian, that was known as The Black Book. This attracted Ilya’s curiosity and he decided to find out more. He discovered that The Black Book had been compiled by Vassily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, two Jewish journalists who had served as war reporters with the Red Army. From as early as 1943, these two journalists had started documenting the atrocities they had witnessed. Grossman and Ehrenburg were part of the unit that had entered Treblinka and Majdanek death camps and their testimonies had been used at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials of senior Nazis. Under its full and explicit title, The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the German Nazi Death Camps established on occupied Polish soil during the War 1941–1945, their testimony was partially printed in the Soviet Union immediately after the war. However, when it came to the attention of the Soviet censors, the writers were pressed to conceal the anti-Semitic character of the atrocities and downplay the role of Ukrainian collaborators in the murders. Although translated copies did appear in the US and other countries, publication in the Soviet Union was forced to stop in 1948. Ilya Altman’s discovery of the horrors that were contained in The Black Book started his mission to document the Holocaust, even within the restrictions of the last years of the Soviet regime. It resulted in his role in the eventual publication of The Black Book in Ukraine in 1991. Ilya’s influence on Holocaust knowledge and understanding in the immediate post-Communist era cannot be underestimated.
Ilya told me that the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition that travelled around Russia in 1990 astonished visitors and project partners by the level and quality of its hardware, design and presentation of information. Looking back now, and comparing it to current digitally-produced and easily-transportable exhibitions, it seems like a technological dinosaur in its monochrome simplicity of heavy metal and plastic.
As a historian looking back over a quarter of a century, Ilya reflected that, ‘At the time I was frustrated that the Russian authorities and museum curators in the various cities seemed much more interested in the partnership with a prestigious international organization than in presenting the facts about the Holocaust.’ He continued, ‘Now I understand more about the difficulties they were encountering just organizing such an event, and I believe the exhibition actually opened a new chapter in Russian understanding of the history of the Holocaust.’
Anne in Ukraine
After Moscow, the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition had then travelled 850km southward to Kiev in Ukraine. It was set up in no less an institution as the Museum of Lenin, with its vast rooms and high ceilings overwhelming the 200m2 and 2m-tall Anne Frank exhibition. In the entrance lobby stood a colossal and all-dominating 6m-high statue of Lenin, carved in white marble. Times were changing in Ukraine but some potent vestiges of Communist society still remained intact.
As the doors of the launch event were thrown open, a throng of chattering people entered the room, fascination and curiosity visible on their faces. During the course of the evening, and after all the formal speeches, Jan Erik was to make an astonishing discovery. Dozens of the people standing among the exhibition panels, which depicted the effect of the Holocaust on a Western European family, were themselves survivors of the brutalities carried out by the Nazis in the east of Europe. Jan Erik found himself talking to middle-aged women in their 50s and 60s who had hidden this traumatic chapter in their lives deeply within themselves throughout the intervening years of Soviet rule, but here at the Anne Frank exhibition were opening up about their experiences for the first time.
The ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition displayed some distressing images of the mass shootings of Jews carried out by the ‘Einzatsgruppen’ execution squads in the forests and ravines of Eastern Europe. Set against the stark white panels, these blurred black and white images had a particular power to shock exhibition visitors. Men, women and children were photographed by their executioners as they stood terrified, arms in the air, in the full knowledge that their lives were ending and they would be joining the tangled masses of bodies in the open pits below their feet. One young woman in a dark dress and coat clutches her baby tightly to herself and, with an imploring look at her killers, prepares for their two lives to be extinguished. Men, women and children who just a few hours earlier had awoken from their night’s sleep, and dressed themselves for the possibility of another full day spent alive. Their agonized pleas and screams have fallen silent as we look at the two dimensional images printed onto white plasticised panels, their pitiful faces carefully rolled up after each exhibition and transported on to the next venue.
Like many of us who have seen those images of highly-efficient firing squads, Jan Erik had not realized that there had actually been a small number of people who had survived them. One such person was Clara Vinakur, who told Jan Erik what had happened to her. Clara was just 12 years old when she crawled out of a mass grave that contained the bodies of all her family and hundreds of others. The young girl, despite the agony of bullets in her body, had the presence of mind to play dead until the men of the killing squad had left the scene, probably to spend the evening washing away the vision of the day with tumblers of strong vodka. But there was no vodka-soaked relief for little Clara who grew up with this memory seared into her mind. She had to wait over forty years, until she came to see an exhibition about a Dutch teenage girl, to tell others what had happened to her.
After Moscow and Kiev, the Anne Frank exhibition rolled onwards to the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev, then to St Petersburg and the Black Sea port of Odessa. While the exhibition was touring Ukraine, the Anne Frank House unexpectedly received a manuscript written by a survivor of a little-known concentration camp in nearby Moldova, where the inmates had been abandoned to rot away by their guards. No one from the Anne Frank House team had ever heard about the existence of this camp before. Jan Erik felt that, with the opening-up of the Soviet Union and the Anne Frank exhibition encouraging people to come forward and speak, this added to the feeling that ‘we were entering a world of Holocaust experiences and testimonies that we in the West had hitherto no idea about. We were going into territory that nobody had really visited. It was a very special time.’
Following the Anne Frank exhibition’s visit to the former Soviet Union in 1990, Ilya Altman and Elena Yacovitz were both invited to attend an international conference in the Netherlands. Coming from Communist Russia, they had spent their lives accustomed to waiting patiently in line for many hours to buy any item of food or household requisite, which I can verify from seeing these queues during my own visits to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. A long queue could form outside a shop simply if word spread of the arrival of a consignment of apples, potatoes, meat or even the scratchy regulation lavatory paper. Ilya described to me his first sight of the long line of people waiting outside the Anne Frank House in 1991 and how he had innocently asked Jan Erik, ‘Are we shopping for food now?’ That queue on the Prinsengracht is now an Amsterdam tourist attraction in its own right, just as the Soviet food queues were to bemused Western tourists three decades ago.
Seeing the huge interest from the public in visiting the Anne Frank House, a site of Holocaust significance, ignited Ilya’s idea to have some kind of similar centre in Moscow. And this eventually did come to pass. For the first five years of its existence, the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Centre was housed in Ilya’s own apartment with just himself and his archivist wife as the staff. They avidly researched, published documents and created exhibitions, building the reputation of the centre, until eventually the Russian government gave them a space in a building near the Kremlin.
The authorities even offered to pay the rent, and their centre became one of only ten organizations in Russia so supported by the government.
During the conference Ilya and Elena attended in the Netherlands in 1991, he had listened with some cynicism to the focus on the general issue of tolerance. ‘This topic was far from my consciousness as a Russian historian and archivist. But step by step I started to understand the reality. This new understanding led directly to 2010, when I helped to stage a conference in Beslan on “Children as Victims”.’
In 2004, the town of Beslan, in the autonomous Russian province of North Ossetia, had suffered one of the worst ever massacres of children in recent history. A group of Islamist militants from the Chechnya and Ingushetia regions broke into a local school on the first day of the new academic year, when it was packed with pupils and their parents. The terrorists held more than 1,000 people hostage within the school for three terrible days. The hostages included 777 terrified children and parents, kept in inhumane conditions. As Russian security forces attempted to retake the building, the terrorists’ booby-traps began to explode. Seeing no way out, they opened fire on their hostages. In all, at least 385 people were killed, including 156 children, the youngest of whom was only two-years-old.
Ilya said:
In our ‘Children as Victims’ conference, we applied the lessons from the Holocaust to what had happened so recently at Beslan. The idea of the ‘culture of the memory’ is the same. In the hell and terror of that school, three days was like three years in a Holocaust era ghetto. We conducted two forums and prepared a handbook for students. I know now that we can use methods we have learnt of educating about the Holocaust for other chapters in history. I realized this from working with the Anne Frank project and the Anne Frank House.
Anne in Lithuania
In 1998, the Anne Frank exhibition paid its first visit to one of the Baltic States, when it went to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Ruta Puisyte had been working as a historian for the Jewish Museum in Vilnius when she received a surprise communication from the Anne Frank House. They were looking for help with bringing the exhibition to the city. The Lithuanian Jewish community is small (still numbering under 5,000) and its members tended to keep their heads down. The Jewish Museum were excited at the prospect of working with the prestigious Anne Frank House, but with a degree of ingrained fear at the same time, even though the dreaded KGB had by then been effectively dismantled.
Ruta’s work in Holocaust education had come through an unusual route. She had been brought up as a good Soviet citizen, but in a Catholic family that celebrated the festivals of Christmas and Easter. This was done quietly in their own home so as not to put them at risk in a regime that promoted state atheism. Although religion was never formally proscribed in the Soviet Union, the official structures imposed a strong sense of social stigma on practising a religion. It was also generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. The baby Ruta had been baptised in a church, but in a different village from their own, as having the ceremony in your local church could result in being reported by your neighbours to the Soviet authorities. Nowadays Ruta freely can attend her church every Sunday.
Growing up, Ruta had naively believed that everyone in Lithuania was an ethnic Lithuanian. She was aware that Jews had written the Bible and lived in Israel but had no idea that Jews also lived alongside her in Lithuania and of their importance to towns and villages. That is until she started her studies at Vilnius University. Her history professor just so happened to be a Holocaust survivor who described to her in gruesome detail something he referred to simply as ‘the catastrophe’ (the term Holocaust was hardly used at that time in Lithuania). Ruta wanted to investigate more about this crime and discovered that there were Holocaust survivors volunteering at the Vilnius Jewish Museum. As an inquisitive historian she wanted to talk to real people feeling that, ‘Paper will never argue with you. A human being, who lived through it, will.’
And so in the late 1990s Ruta, now working at the museum as a historian, found herself being asked to organize the visit of the Anne Frank exhibition. The exhibition arrived in Lithuania at a time of huge transformation, and Ruta considers herself a ‘true child of that time’. As well as its informative Holocaust content, she wanted me to understand the broader context of the exhibition. Ruta’s account echoed what Ilya Altman had said about the Anne Frank exhibition in Russia eight years earlier. She explained, ‘For people in the newly independent Lithuania anything arriving from the West was like the “whole universe” was coming to us. We were a young nation, insecure and looking for an identity. We were so excited that foreigners were making the effort to come to us.’
After the capital city of Vilnius, the Anne Frank exhibition went on to tour nine more Lithuanian cities. Funding for the tour came mainly from the European Union’s Comenius programme, along with support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Comenius pan-European schools programme, named after the seventeenth-century Czech educator John Amos Comenius, aimed ‘to help young people and educational staff better understand the range of European cultures, languages and values’. The programme ceased in 2013, but had been a great source of financial support for the Anne Frank House’s work in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
Norbert Hinterleitner of the Anne Frank House, who spent a lot of time working in Lithuania, felt that the Anne Frank project was sorely needed there at the time. He recalled receiving a letter from the director of one of the museums who was to take the exhibition in 1998 which started: ‘Dear Anne Frank, We would very much like to show your exhibition . . .’, demonstrating a lack of knowledge that proved to be endemic in the country.
Twelve thousand people came to see the Anne Frank exhibition on its first tour of Lithuania, demonstrating that there was certainly interest in knowing more about the subject matter. The Lithuanian tour was complemented by a series of teacher training sessions and drama workshops involving Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers working together, often for the very first time.
The success of the drama-in-education workshops can best be described by the words of one of the teenage participants who told Norbert, ‘My parents always told me that Jews are a little . . . a little bad. Now I know that it’s not really the case.’ Another proof of the project’s success were sweet romantic flirtations between some of the Jewish and Lithuanian teenage participants. Something Anne Frank would have most definitely approved of.
When Norbert recalled those days of 1998 in Vilnius, my mind travelled back sixteen years earlier. In 1982, I had visited Vilnius during my days of campaigning on behalf of Soviet Jews. Our group would travel to the Soviet Union to bring vital supplies and moral support to those who had been dismissed from their jobs and deprived of income after making the brave step of applying to emigrate to the West. Once they had done so and been refused a visa, and became what we termed ‘Refuseniks’, they lived in precarious limbo without any form of state security. Many were victims of trumped-up charges of treason and found themselves spending many years in labour camps.
I found Vilnius to have a different atmosphere from that of Moscow, with its street upon street of drab concrete Soviet-style apartment blocks. Vilnius had a more European charm, still retaining its Lithuanian language, historic squares and narrow cobbled streets. The women’s clothes hinted at a more relaxed existence, the colourful and perky little berets worn by the young Lithuanian women noticeably different from the ubiquitous fur hats or matrioshka-like headscarves of Moscow women.
However, despite this facade of a more carefree society, Vilnius had another side. Our group of four travellers from Bournemouth visited the children of the few survivors among those Jewish families who had been marched to the suburb of Ponary between July 1941 and August 1944. There, close to the suburban railway station, 70,000 Jews, along with thousands of Poles and Russian POWS, were systematically shot by Einzatsgruppen commandos and their Lithuania
n collaborators. In actual fact Lithuania and the other Baltic States became the first countries outside occupied Poland where the Nazis would mass execute Jews as part of the Final Solution. Ninety per cent of Vilnius’s Jewish population was slaughtered.
I will never forget spending an afternoon in the tiny apartment of Carmela and Vladimir Raiz, who told us about the fate of their families during those terrible years, but also described their current oppression as Jews who had committed the crime of wanting to leave the Soviet Union. Actually they didn’t tell us these stories in normal conversation. They wrote the key words of information on a child’s ‘write and swipe’ pad so that what they shared with us could be immediately obliterated. The reason for this being that one afternoon when Carmela and Vladimir were out, KGB operatives had come to the block and laid the wires to enable the authorities to tap into their every word spoken to each other in the kitchen, reception room and even their bedroom. They had found this out because, despite the fact that mostly your neighbours were possible KGB informants, one of the neighbours had warned the couple about what they had seen being done.
One afternoon during our visit to Vilnius our group were told by our concerned Soviet tour guide that we had to present ourselves to an office on the fifth floor of our hotel. Unbeknown to most tourists, each large hotel used by the (only) Soviet tour company Intourist allocated a suite of rooms to the KGB, the Soviet secret police. These rooms were used for the surveillance operation the KGB routinely carried out on Western tourists to ensure they were not making contact with the local people during their stay. So concerned were the Soviet authorities about subversive influence that even at airports Western tourists were kept in separate screened-off waiting areas from those of the local travellers.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 11
