Like so many, I had long been an admirer of the fortitude of Helen Suzman. And now here was I in the spring of 1994, listening to this rather genteel looking elderly lady, in navy blue suit and pearls, venting her anger that so many black South Africans in the countryside had not received their ballot papers in time to vote. They had waited a lifetime for the democratic exercise that we in Britain take so much for granted. Mandela remained a long-time admirer of Helen Suzman, telling her ‘the consistency with which you defended the basic values of freedom and the rule of law over the last three decades has earned you the admiration of many South Africans’. Helen Suzman died at the age of 91 in 2009, by then an Honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and I was honoured to receive an invitation from her daughter to attend her mother’s memorial service in London. But I will never forget my feeling of enormous pride when this great lady came up to me on that evening in Port Elizabeth and told me how much she had loved my speech.
The Anne Frank exhibition tour of South Africa was remarkable. In Cape Town, children from the elite white private schools went around the Anne Frank exhibition together with children from the black townships. One day a busload of children arrived from the sprawling black township of Khayelitsha, on the outskirts of the city. At the end of the visit the teacher approached Myra Osrin to thank her. ‘You will never know what it has meant for our students’ self-esteem. For the first time ever they have seen that a person could be discriminated against if they don’t have a black skin.’
The South African Legacy of the Anne Frank Exhibition
And what of the ball of energy and passion that was Myra Osrin? Did she take it easy after the gruelling months of the South African Anne Frank exhibition tour? Not a bit of it. Four years later, Myra went on to create the first Holocaust museum on the continent of Africa, the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, which opened its doors in 1999. In the small space that had been found for the centre, a beautiful exhibition was created, set up under the guidance of Dr Stephen Smith, who had created a similar exhibition in the heart of England, which had been Britain’s very first Holocaust centre too.
In 2005 Holocaust education became a mandatory curriculum subject in South Africa. The government of President Thabo Mbeki wanted South African pupils to understand the value of human rights through learning about human experiences in the Holocaust. Under Myra’s leadership the centre rose to the challenge, and also expanded operations by creating similar centres in Johannesburg and Durban. Myra understood that there was a huge potential for Holocaust education to help with the transformation process of the country. She realized that what happened a long time ago to other people could be a useful tool for educators.
The Anne Frank House International Department has continued working and playing a role in the new South Africa for many years after the Anne Frank exhibition tour of 1994 had left, particularly in underprivileged communities. Jan Erik Dubbelman and Aaron Peterer, an experienced Anne Frank House educator, visited the country many times to work with children in the townships, training them to become peer educators and empowering them to be part of South Africa’s future.
Aaron, of mixed Indian and Austrian parentage, had first joined the Anne Frank House in 2001 as a volunteer for the Austrian youth and memorialization service, the Gedenkdienst. This organization deals with the causes and consequences of the crimes of Nazism and sends young volunteers to work with relevant organizations that help Holocaust survivors or are in the field of Holocaust education.
In 2008, as part of the international team, Aaron and Jan Erik visited Durban, the third largest city in South Africa, for the opening of the city’s new Holocaust Centre and its dedicated Anne Frank section. This visit was of particular significance to Aaron, as his great grandfather had arrived in Durban from India in the early twentieth century. Durban was known as the largest ‘Indian’ city outside India, as from 1860 to the early twentieth century over 150,000 Indians had been brought to Natal to work as labourers in the sugar cane fields.
Also living in the same area of the city was an Indian lawyer called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was a regular visitor to Aaron’s great grandfather’s house. Gandhi had come to Durban in 1893 as a newly-qualified lawyer, sent on a temporary assignment to act on behalf of a local Indian trader involved in a commercial dispute. What was meant to be a short stay for the young lawyer turned into twenty-one years. By the time Gandhi left South Africa to return to India for the last time in 1914, he had already earned the title Mahatma (Great Soul) for his work in securing significant legal concessions for the local Indian population in South Africa. His strategy and form of action known as Satyagraha (truth-force), in which campaigners went on peaceful marches and presented themselves for arrest in protest against unjust laws, became one of the great political tools of the twentieth century, influencing the civil rights movement in the United States and the African National Congress in its early years of struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
Aaron and Jan Erik Dubbelman then went on to Johannesburg to set up educational workshops in advance of bringing a new Anne Frank exhibition to South Africa. Echoing what Myra Osrin had told me about the pre-Anne Frank exhibition teachers workshops of 1993, they started to bring children together who were neighbours but who would normally have never got to meet. These included children from the township of Soweto and those from elite private schools. To break down barriers of suspicion the workshops started with the kids sharing the latest music and dance moves.
Aaron recalled one particular township school they visited. The teachers were mostly drunk and the children sold their school books to buy cheap drugs. One drug they used was called Tuc. ‘It was made from a cocktail of rat poison, bleach and HIV medicine, all of which the kids could acquire for free. In that place 13-year-olds looked like 50-year-olds. Even the police considered it a no-go area. The schools themselves looked like derelict fortresses with rusty barbed wire and broken windows.’
The deprivation was such that Aaron found 17-year-olds sucking their thumbs. He found out that this was to help stave off the hunger pangs felt during the day.
For the workshops we brought in tons of cookies. But they didn’t eat them – they collected them to take home and share out among their families. The Anne Frank House paid for a full lunch for the kids so they would have the mental energy for their learning. After the lunches two thirds of the kids would fall asleep on their desks – they weren’t used to their stomachs being so full. It was really heart-breaking.
The Anne Frank House team partnered up with the Hector Pieterson Museum, named after the 13-year-old boy who was killed in Soweto by police in the 1976 school uprising against the introduction of English and Afrikaans as dual instruction languages in schools. The photo of Hector’s lifeless body being carried by another student accompanied by his distraught sister was published all over the world and Hector became a symbol of the struggle against apartheid. Members of the Hector Pieterson Museum Youth Division were trained by Aaron to act as exhibition peer guides. One of these boys, Bhekithemba Melusi Mbata, subsequently wrote about what it had meant to him to guide at the Anne Frank exhibition for a writing competition sponsored by the US Embassy. He was one of two South African winners and was sent to the US as his prize to meet other youngsters. Bhekithemba has become a great success story. He is now at university and politically active, and still insisting that his work as an Anne Frank exhibition peer guide had set his life ‘on the right road’.
Aaron summed up what he felt the impact of the Anne Frank work had been.
Every time I take a workshop, I am more inspired and satisfied. I see multipliers who will become instruments of change in their own society. Especially in the Third World where being an Anne Frank guide can really change your life. In Europe kids have chances and opportunities to become critical thinkers. But in the Third World it is a battle for survival every day.
By 2010, Nelson Mandela was hardly ever seen in public, as his health had b
een deteriorating over the months. In December 2013, I was in New York when I heard the news that Nelson Mandela had passed away after his long fading from view. The world seemed a different place with his passing.
Chapter 13
Anne Frank and her Protector Miep Gies
Austrian-born Miep Gies worked for Otto Frank’s Opekta business and was one of the five courageous people who looked after the Frank family and the four other people in hiding on the Prinsengracht from 1942 to 1944. She put her own life at serious risk every day for over two years.
‘In a town of celluloid heroes, please meet a real one,’ said the film director Jon Blair when he introduced white-haired Miep Gies to the glittering audience of the 68th Academy Awards in Hollywood, and to one billion television viewers around the world. It was 25 March 1996 and Jon had just been presented with an OscarTM statuette for his two-hour documentary film Anne Frank Remembered. He was now in turn introducing the world to Miep Gies, the woman who had risked her life to help the Frank family while they were in perilous hiding. When the audience realized who the lady on the stage was, they rose as one to their feet, and the likes of Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas and Brad Pitt broke into rapturous applause. On that Oscars night in the spring of 1996, Miep was 87-years-of-age. She went on to live to be 100 and died in January 2010, just one month before her 101st birthday.
As a teenager Miep had kept a personal journal. I am sure this is why she felt so much empathy for Anne while watching her busy writing in the secret annexe, why she had been so protective of Anne’s diary as she kept it safe in a drawer awaiting its owner’s return from the camps, and why she could not bring herself to look into its pages until two years after she had handed it back to Otto Frank, the person who had originally purchased the little red-check notebook for his daughter.
Miep had arrived in Amsterdam as a young girl soon after the First World War, sent by her parents to an adoptive family so that she would not have to suffer the privations of a defeated Austria. The Netherlands was seen as a land of milk, butter and cheese, the proteins needed for a nutritious diet. As a young adult woman living in Amsterdam in 1933, Miep was looking for work. Her neighbour, a travelling saleswoman called Sientje Blitz, mentioned that there was a temporary vacancy for an office worker in the company where she worked, and offered to introduce Miep to her boss. It was a spice and pectin firm called Opekta, whose director was the German émigré Otto Frank. Miep was duly interviewed by Mr Frank and employed. History works in strange and unforeseen ways. If it had not been for Sientje Blitz’s spontaneous suggestion to help a friend get work, Anne Frank’s diary would probably not have been gathered up and protected by that same friend in August 1944. Sientje and her family moved to South Africa before the German invasion of the Netherlands and so survived the Holocaust. Her daughter-in-law Mary and Mary’s own daughter-in-law Cara visited me at the Anne Frank Trust in 2013. In that same year Cara’s 12-year-old daughter Tali paid a visit to the Anne Frank House with her London school and surprised the staff at the museum when she explained her close connection to Anne Frank’s story through her great grandmother.
Pectin is the setting agent for jam and, as part of her role for Opekta, Miep became an expert on jam-making, advising Dutch housewives on how to use pectin for successful results. Visitors to the Anne Frank House can still see a short film clip of the young Miep demonstrating jam-making. In 1941, the year following the German invasion of the Netherlands, Miep married Jan Gies, a bookkeeper. Jan performed heroics in his own right as he was clandestinely working with the Dutch Resistance. Indeed, unknown to the eight people Miep and Jan went on to assist in the secret annexe, the young couple were for some of that time also hiding in their own home a young Dutch man who had refused to join the Nazi Party.
By the spring of 1942, Otto Frank started to make plans to prepare a refuge for his family. He called Miep into his office and shared his secret with her, which at that time neither of his young daughters knew anything about. When, in early July, the time duly came for Mr Frank to carry out the planned hiding, it was Miep and Jan Gies, along with Mr Frank’s equally trusted staff members Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl, that he turned to. They did not let him down and for over two years shared the enormity of their actions amongst themselves.
On that fateful Friday morning of 4 August 1944, when the Gestapo and Dutch police came to arrest the Frank family and the other Jews in hiding, Miep had been working in the office. She recalled that it had started as a particularly beautiful sunny day and she had paid a visit to the hiding place above to collect a shopping list of requirements from Edith Frank. Just two months after D-Day, hopes were rising among the Frank and van Pels families and Fritz Pfeffer that the Allied armies would soon liberate the whole of the country and they would be free to continue their lives (in fact the first Allied forces did not enter the Netherlands until September and the country was not completely liberated until the following May). Downstairs in the office, as typewriters were tapping away, ledgers were being completed and other prosaic administrative matters attended to, Miep suddenly looked up and was shocked to see a man in civilian clothes standing in the doorway. He was pointing a loaded revolver at her and the staff. Speaking in Dutch, he told everyone not to move and then walked towards the back office where Victor Kugler was working. Jo Kleiman looked at Miep and said softly the words they had all been dreading, ‘Miep, I think the time has come.’
After several conversations with Kugler and Kleiman, the Dutch Nazi sat down opposite Miep, picked up the telephone and chillingly called for ‘a car to be sent to 263 Prinsengracht’. The Jewish families one floor above were still oblivious of what was about to happen to them. The arresting officers then signalled with their guns in the direction of the bookcase that for over two years had successfully concealed the stairs to the hiding place. The brave helpers knew at that moment there was no escape and no choice. Their care and protection of the eight Jews in hiding was over.
Miep had meanwhile recognized the German speaker’s Viennese accent and told him that she too was from Vienna in the hope of some degree of leniency. His name was SS-Oberscharführer (Senior Squad Leader) Karl Josef Silberbauer, who had been stationed in Amsterdam. To Silberbauer it was incomprehensible that a fellow Austrian would wish to help save the lives of Jews. He asked her, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of helping Jewish garbage?’ After threatening that he would arrest her husband Jan if she tried to run away, Silberbauer left Miep alone in the office while he went to get on with the business of rounding up the poor unsuspecting Jews upstairs. Soon she heard the shuffling footsteps of her friends Otto, Edith, Margot, Anne, Hermann, Auguste, Peter and Fritz slowly descending the stairs and then the revving of the police truck as they were taken away to start their journeys into the abyss. Miep sat at her desk in a traumatized state for many hours. Her colleagues Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler had also been arrested. Bep, who was able to leave the scene, eventually returned with Jan and one of the workers from the warehouse who had been totally shocked to hear their former boss and his family had been living two floors above them.
They determined to rescue whatever they could from upstairs. Using Miep’s duplicate key, they entered the empty hiding place, and saw a scene of ransacked drawers and objects overturned. In Mr and Mrs Frank’s bedroom Miep’s eyes lit upon Anne’s little notebook lying on the floor, along with the single sheets of paper Anne had used to write on when the notebook had been filled. Acting with speed, in case of the officers’ return and the expected arrival of the local Puls & Company removal firm (winners of the contract for the work in taking away the possessions of arrested Jews), Miep and Bep scooped up Anne’s papers. They took them downstairs and placed them in Miep’s desk drawer to be looked after in the hope of Anne’s return after liberation. And then in the evening of what had started as a normal working day, the two women left 263 Prinsengracht and went home.
But Miep’s heroics did not end on that Friday evening. She had heard that i
n that final summer of the war there was a possibility that the freedom of arrested Dutch Jews could be bought. She went around to those in the neighbourhood she felt she could trust and managed to raise a sum of money. With this fund she went to see Silberbauer at the Gestapo headquarters in the south of the city and explained what she wanted. He shrugged and told her to come back the next day to see his commanding officer with her request, which she did.
Again she approached Silberbauer and this time was pointed upstairs to another office. As she entered the room she saw a group of Nazi officers huddled round a table listening intently to a radio. She recognized English coming from it and realized they were listening to BBC ‘Allied propaganda’. This was considered a treasonable act for the Nazis, and for Miep to have witnessed this herself was extremely dangerous for all involved. The German officers threw her out of the room and she left the building with the money raised to buy the Jews’ freedom still in her purse. As those she had worked so hard and so perilously to protect were boarding the train to Westerbork camp in northern Holland, there was no more she could do for them. Tragically no more.
I was privileged to have spent time with Miep Gies on several occasions in the 1990s. Our first meeting was in November 1991 when Miep and her husband Jan came to London as special guests of Belsize Square Synagogue to open the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition. I recall Jan Gies as a tall, white-haired and rather shy man, who despite his own wartime heroism, was content to be the consort of Mrs Gies. He sadly died in early 1993 and Miep spent the next seventeen years a widow.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 21
