NGOs who are funded by international money are regarded with suspicion both at national and local level. ‘There is a kind of paranoia that foreign money may bring about a revolution,’ explains Sergiy. His local Anne Frank project partner Yelena Shvetsova, the young woman who was doggedly determined to bring the Anne Frank exhibition to Kazakhstan, has adopted a straight-talking attitude to dealing with officials and has succeeded in creating her own Human Rights NGO called ‘Wings of Liberty’ but this, and a plan to bring TEDx Talks, have received a negative response from officialdom.
One of the Anne Frank exhibitions was staged at a Nazarbayev School, one of a network of elite schools named after the Kazakh president but open to all ethnic groups. The aim of the school is to create a new generation of Kazakhs who will be active thinkers, but although these schools are open to international projects such as the Anne Frank exhibition, it is not possible for foreign NGOs like the Anne Frank House to come and undertake the project in their usual way of encouraging open discussion about the political situation.
The exhibition was located in the Nazarbayev School’s concert hall where alongside it stood a traditional Mongolian yurt-style tent containing carpets, pottery and artefacts that were all redolent of the days of Genghis Khan. Having been worried that students so far away from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam both in time, in distance and in culture would not make any connections to her life and theirs, Sergiy was delighted to see a huge enthusiasm for Anne Frank by the young people in the school. He conducted an exercise about the incremental implementation of the Nazis Anti-Jewish Laws and the students themselves connected these to current threats to democratic values.
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In trying to capture twenty-seven years of the Anne Frank House’s work across the vast expanse and diverse nations of post-Communist Europe, there is so much of equal importance that has gone unsaid. But the selection of stories I have related of those astonishing times and of the work these remarkable educators, activists and students have undertaken, reflect the imprint that Anne Frank’s message has left on thousands of people with hugely different histories, views and hopes for the future.
Chapter 7
The Woman Who Gave a Personal Pledge to Otto Frank
Bertha ‘Bee’ Klug was a co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust and its Honorary Life President until her death in 2012. She was devoted to the charity and its mission due to a personal pledge she had given to Otto Frank in the 1960s. Born in 1920, Bee’s entire life had been influenced by witnessing the rise of the Fascist movements that swept across Europe when she was a young woman.
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The year was 1968, and the Western world was being influenced by a new radical movement, but this time with more benign motives. In San Francisco, the previous summer had seen the zenith of the flower power movement and the ‘Summer of Love’, calling for civil rights and social justice for African-Americans and the end of the Vietnam War that had sent young Americans to their death over the far side of the world. The call for change led by young people traversed the Atlantic, and in 1968, Paris was in lockdown, first by factory strikes and then by university students protesting against capitalism, consumerism and American imperialism. Protests also took place in Germany and Japan.
Then it came across the Channel from Paris to London as Hornsey College of Art succumbed to striking students, and then down south to Bournemouth College of Art, where I was a willing student activist, enjoying taking part in several days of rowdy protest sleep-ins (although I don’t actually recall getting much sleep).
It was during this turbulent time, when young people were finding their radical political voice, that Otto Frank and his wife Fritzi, along with Fritzi’s daughter Eva and Eva’s husband Zvi Schloss, were enjoying a convivial dinner at the London home of Bee Klug, along with Bee’s husband Sid and the Klugs’ four offspring, Harold, Tony, Brian and Francesca.
After the usual inconsequential dinner-table chatter of new social interaction, followed undoubtedly by a conversation about the spreading worldwide protests, the mood had changed to something more profound. Bee and her family listened very attentively as Otto Frank spoke about being a seventh-generation German Jew who had grown up feeling safe and secure in his home city of Frankfurt. He and his contemporaries had been initially contemptuous of Hitler’s threats against the Jews, believing that such things could never happen in Germany. Bee nodded sympathetically, explaining that there had been the same complacency amongst the Jewish people in England at that time.
Otto then quietly described to the Klugs his family’s experiences under the Nazis, the daily struggles to stay alive in Auschwitz and the terrible fate of his wife and children. Bee later recalled that, ‘We talked about how we could prevent such things happening again. Not just to the Jews but to anyone. The obvious answer was education. We talked of this in detail and what stands out in my memory was when Otto said, “If I could see something in education in England in Anne’s name, it would be some compensation.” There and then I vowed to myself that I would try and get something started.’
How the Klug and Schloss families had first come to meet is an interesting story. In the 1960s, Sid Klug was a successful businessman building a property portfolio. He had gone to meet a banker at the London branch of the Israeli bank Leumi, in order to raise finance for a new venture. The banker he met was Zvi Schloss. Not being a party to the meeting, I am not sure how the professional conversation turned to family matters but in conversation Zvi mentioned that his wife was the stepdaughter of Otto Frank.
Mr Klug told Mr Schloss that his wife was besotted with Anne Frank and in 1962, not long after the Frank family’s hiding place had opened as a museum, Bee had taken her children to see it. On her return, she had not only written a poem about the experience, which she entitled ‘The Ballad of Anne Frank’, but had also indulged her other creative passion of painting by putting brush to canvas and producing a portrait of Anne in oils, copied from a photograph she had seen in a book. Zvi asked Sid for a copy of the poem that he could show Otto, who was at that time collecting people’s reactions to Anne’s diary. The poem was duly sent to Otto who then requested a meeting with its author, much to the excitement of Bee. A born hostess, she immediately invited Mr Frank and his family to dinner at their home.
Everything Otto had told Bee on that memorable evening in her home resonated strongly with her. She was determined to help him do something in Anne’s memory for Britain. ‘I first read the Diary of A Young Girl shortly after it was translated into English in 1952,’ she said.
It was then that I was fully confronted with the three faces of man. The perpetrators – who appeared human but had been dehumanized; the victims – not just those in the camps but also those in hiding; and the third face – people like Miep Gies, her husband Jan and the three other helpers who for two years risked their lives to try and save the eight occupants of the annexe. Having known about the horrors of the Holocaust and met survivors, I was dedicating much of my time giving talks to groups young and old. I was also using my poem as part of the talk to encourage people to read Anne’s diary.
Bee Klug was a person who, throughout her long life, once encountered was rarely forgotten. She was stunningly beautiful, petite but with a magnetic aura that drew people to her. As she grew older, and her hair whiter, her blue eyes seemed to shimmer even more. She had a colourful personality and equally loved to be surrounded by colour. Having left school at 14 to work for a West End couturier, she expressed her love of life through clothes. Each day, her outfits and accessories were colour-matched, even down to the umbrella often carried against the English rain. On the rare occasion she chose to wear black, it would be trimmed by a hand-sewn edging of gold ribbon or thread, as another of Bee’s passions was embroidery. Her image and personality positively gleams out of the Anne Frank Trust’s photographic archive – just look out for the lady often sporting white leather ankle boots, sometimes accompanied by a white trilby hat.
Bee’s childh
ood was spent growing up in a period of recession, depression, unemployment, poverty and the rise of fascist movements in Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain. She recalls an incident at her school in 1929 when she was just nine-years-old.
There were 35 pupils in my class, of which five of us were Jewish. Our teacher frequently made unpleasant comments about the Jews. One day she made a blatantly anti-Semitic remark which greatly upset me. However, I kept it to myself until my father noticed I was troubled. Eventually I broke down and blurted out the situation. My father went to the headmistress and as a result our teacher made a public apology. I learned two major lessons that day that have remained with me, influencing the path my life has taken – that prejudice and hatred don’t only come from the poor and uneducated and that when you are confronted with it, you have to deal with it.
In 1936, aged 16, she witnessed the famous Battle of Cable Street. This was the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley’s plan to send hordes of his Blackshirt thugs marching through the East End of London (where most of Britain’s Jews lived). It was thwarted when thousands of anti-fascist demonstrators turned out to prevent the march from taking place, declaring ‘They shall not pass’. Between 1936 and 1939, the International Brigades were fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War to stop the rise of fascism in Spain. Had their campaign been successful, the Second World War may have been averted. ‘We know that fear is usually the basis for prejudice and hatred, which so often eventually leads to world shattering events like the Holocaust and other genocides,’ said Bee when she described to me those terrible events, ‘but also in communities and even among families. If we can eradicate it maybe it will then remove the fear of “And then they’ll come for me”’ (she would often make references to the German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s celebrated anti-Nazi poem, ‘First They Came’).
The Klug and Frank families parted after their 1968 dinner party, all seemingly delighted that thanks to this fortuitous meeting, an Anne Frank inspired educational organization might soon be established in London. However, soon afterwards, despite all her good intentions to help Otto, Bee became very seriously ill, with a digestive complaint that no doctors could correctly identify.
After many months of severe illness, when this vivacious, intelligent and beautiful woman became a shadow of herself, she was eventually referred to a naturopath, who put her on a strict vegetarian diet, consisting mainly of fruit, vegetables and a little protein. Slowly she started to recover, and thankful for her return to good health, she wanted others to receive the caring treatment she had received.
So Bee set up a charity she named the Wessex Healthy Living Foundation, and funded it with money she had earned from managing a hotel her husband had bought in Bournemouth. She then set about convincing alternative practitioners, homeopaths and other therapists to donate some of their time to the centre or to give treatments and consultations at heavily reduced rates. The centre opened its doors in March 1977, housed in a bungalow the Klugs had bought near the cliff top in the Southbourne area of Bournemouth. Bee was immensely proud of the fact that the Wessex Healthy Living Centre has treated thousands of patients with its range of complementary and holistic treatments, giving them a renewed sense of wellbeing and hope.
In July 1988, as David Soetendorp, Cor Suijk, Jan Erik Dubbelman, Dienke Hondius and myself sat having tea at her home to plan the visit of ‘Anne Frank in the World’ to Bournemouth, Bee’s former sparkle had very much returned. That meeting around Bee Klug’s tea table can be pinpointed as the day the seed was sown for what in 1991 was to become the Anne Frank Educational Trust. Not long after the Trust’s launch, Bee took on the role of the Trust’s Honorary Life President, which, in tandem with the Wessex Heathy Living Foundation, became the bedrock of her philanthropic life.
Bee led her life according to the ethics and responsibility for mankind instilled into her by her father in the tough times of the 1930s. She was a fount of wisdom, often peppering her speech – for Jews and non-Jews alike – with the Yiddish she learnt in her childhood home in the East End of London. When Bee believed strongly in something, this petite persona in elegant high heels became a turbo-charged Rottweiler. Her most famous Yiddish catch phrase, instilled by her into us all, was ‘Brochs into Brochas’ (turn troubles into blessings), personified by the time she nearly died but was saved by complementary medicine and went on to create a health centre for the benefit of others.
No black type words printed on a white background can truly express the colour and vivacity of this amazing woman who lived a long, productive and active life. She attended all our Anne Frank Trust events of importance, many of which she and Sid sponsored, even fetching up at 7.00 a.m. in central London to help physically load the truck taking sacks of letters to children in war-torn Bosnia. She always carried the treasured photo taken around her dining table with Otto and Fritzi, and when closing an Anne Frank educational event would wave it with a flourish, look skywards and shout in dramatic fashion, ‘Can you see this Otto?’ in the hope that he was looking down and watching the success of the event. (She once did this at an event attended by the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, who immediately invited her for dinner at Scotland Yard).
In May 2012, Bee passed away at the age of 92. In her final decade she had been afflicted with blindness. She took it with equanimity, as her vision had been slowly deteriorating due to a freak accident in America many years earlier. (On a routine visit to a hairdresser in Florida, her retinas were damaged by a highly potent hairspray being negligently sprayed directly into her eyes.) Though frustrated that she could no longer write, nor indulge her lifelong passions for painting or embroidery, nonetheless she did not let it ruin her life. Classical music on the radio became her joy, while her flat on the Finchley Road became a mecca for lively and probing conversation, ranging from politics, to human rights and her personal cause célèbre of social justice. She also organized weekly poetry readings for the residents of her building and never missed an Anne Frank Trust event, hosting a reception and animatedly welcoming each of the 100 guests at the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s residence at 11 Downing Street – just one week after a major operation. A few months before the cancer she was battling finally took her, she stood in for the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, to present the Anne Frank Poetry Prize (which she had donated) at the National Association for Schoolmasters and Union of Teachers annual diversity awards ceremony. Her impassioned speech about the immense value of teachers in guiding people’s future lives was more than warmly received by the UK’s largest teaching union.
Her children continued in Bee’s fields of interest. Harold Klug became an osteopath, Dr Tony Klug was very active in human rights, becoming special advisor on the Middle East to the Oxford Research Group and vice-chair of the Arab-Jewish Forum, and Dr Brian Klug a Senior Research Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Oxford. Her much-loved and mutually adoring American cousin Sharon Douglas became a Board member of the Anne Frank Center in New York. Bee was also particularly proud that when she received her MBE from HM The Queen in 2003 it was in the round of honours that immediately followed the honour of an OBE to her daughter Francesca, a professor who had helped to draft the Human Rights Act for the UK. She believed that this ‘daughter, then mother’ royal recognition may have been unprecedented.
In 1972, Bee encapsulated her remarkable life and experiences by publishing a collection of poems under the title Reflections in Rhyme. The rhyming verses are of a rather dated simplicity but the philosophy is motivational, a belief in getting up and getting on with it, in God and in the wonder of life.
I will – treat each day as a lifetime
I will – greet it with joy in my heart
I will – balance the scales of life’s problems
I will – if hope fades, accept it in good part.
Those lines sum up this extraordinary woman, and I will end this chapter in her voice which stands as an epitaph: ‘My words to everyone who read
s Anne Frank’s diary and learns of the terrible blot on human nature of the Holocaust and other genocides, is not to be complacent. Every single one of us is a possible victim of prejudice and hatred.’
Chapter 8
Anne Frank in Latin America
Between the teeming metropolises of Guatemala City and Buenos Aires there lies a distance of 4,000 miles – a vast expanse which takes in Central American rainforests, the Amazon river, the Argentinian pampas lands of gauchos and bulls, the Andes mountains to the west and the South Atlantic Ocean to the east.
Thanks to the work of many remarkable people, the voice of Anne Frank has travelled that long journey in the continent of South America since the beginning of the 1990s. The Anne Frank exhibition has proved to be an effective tool for learning and reflection in a vast land mass which comprises many diverse cultures and countries with little connection to the Holocaust. In the course of the late twentieth century, millions of Latin Americans suffered under brutal dictatorships, and were the victims of terrorism and violence, often related to the illicit drugs trade, and almost always to poverty. This is how Mariela Chyrikins and Barry van Driel, educators from the Anne Frank House, have described the impact of their work in Latin America: ‘Anne Frank has a particular appeal to young people in Latin America who have suffered at some point from prejudice and discrimination. Her story is used as an example of a young person like them who demonstrated strength and resilience in very difficult and threatening situations.’
Climb aboard for a whirlwind tour of this huge and fascinating continent, visiting several diverse countries and their recent troubled histories, where Anne Frank has left behind an indelible mark.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 13
