However, we know from prison staff and prisoners alike that, as well as the delivery of knowledge and understanding of the consequences of prejudice and racism to thousands of British prisoners, the Anne Frank project has given confidence and aspiration and an enhanced sense of self-worth to those we have trained to be peer educators.
One prisoner exhibition guide from HMP Redditch in the West Midlands summed up the mission and success of taking Anne Frank into prisons, especially with those who have been removed from society, ‘What I knew before about Anne Frank was tiny compared to now but it’s not just about the history. It’s about learning confidence with the public, interacting with people, to approach, talk to and answer them.’
There are now thousands of former prisoners whose reintegration back into British society has been undoubtedly helped by learning the story of Anne Frank, and in hundreds of cases, by telling that story themselves. Many have also had a very privileged opportunity, that of meeting a Holocaust survivor in the flesh. Whenever I have closed the talk to prisoners by a survivor, I have reminded them that this privilege has also put a great responsibility on their shoulders – that of imparting this story themselves to their children and future grandchildren.
Chapter 15
Anne Frank and Stephen Lawrence
On a chilly November night in 2000, Doreen Lawrence was standing amidst the stone pillars of Durham Cathedral in front of the Anne Frank exhibition. She was staring wistfully at a series of photographs of her son Stephen. In one he was very young, dressed in his primary school uniform. Doreen pointed to it, turned to me and sighed, ‘That day he came home from school and excitedly showed me his school photo. But you know what, I told him off for grinning widely at the photographer. He couldn’t help it that he had lost the whole front set of his milk teeth and I thought it would spoil the photo.’ She paused, sighed and turned back to look at her son’s face and said, ‘How could I have told him off?’
A normal occurrence in a normal family; the child not posing for a photo exactly as his mother would like. But this was not a normal school photo – it was one that was going to be seen by thousands of people in the years to come. The curly-haired boy staring out from the exhibition panel, grinning to the camera despite a large gap where his front teeth should have been, was the six-year-old Stephen Lawrence. The same Stephen Lawrence who, just twelve years later as an 18-year-old school student, would be brutally stabbed to death on a south-east London street by a gang of locally-feared racist thugs. His story would become intertwined with that of Anne Frank’s.
Stephen was in the course of studying for his A-Level exams on that fateful night of 22 April 1993, but had gone out with his friend Duwayne Brooks for an evening off from studies. Later that evening, the pair were waiting at a bus stop in the south London suburb of Eltham, when suddenly a gang of threatening white youths appeared in the street, and like a packs of wolves coming upon their prey, ran towards Stephen and Duwayne. Duwayne heard one of them shout ‘What, what, nigger!’ before he pulled out a large knife and plunged it into Stephen’s chest. With the bloodied knife as a trophy, the howling group of youths ran away down the road. Duwayne and Stephen started to run in the other direction, but after just a few yards, Stephen collapsed in the street, bleeding heavily and fighting for breath. Despite the help of passers-by, Stephen died from his wounds there on the cold, hard pavement.
What were his thoughts in his last moments as the life drained from his body, this much loved boy who was planning to be a professional architect? Stephen’s death, and the long campaign for justice by his family, plays an important part in the recent history of Britain. The little boy had been born into a loving, religious and hardworking family. His parents Doreen and Neville had both arrived in Britain from Jamaica in the early 1960s. The couple had married in 1972 and were aspirational, especially for their three children, Stephen, Stuart and Georgina. Doreen trained to be a special needs teacher and Neville followed his love of carpentry.
Unbeknown to the original investigating police officers, their handling of the case would cause a maelstrom in the British police force. What was at first perceived as ineptitude in missing vital evidence was discovered to be, after a long judicial enquiry conducted by Sir William Macpherson, a manifestation of the deeply-rooted institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. Years later, the corruption and deliberate hiding of crucial evidence by a key police officer also came to light.
The day following Stephen’s murder, an anonymous note was left in a telephone box for the police giving the names of four local men who could have carried out the crime. The previous year a 15-year-old Asian schoolboy, Rohit Duggal, had also been murdered in Eltham. His killer, 17-year-old Peter Thompson, was given a life sentence two months before Stephen’s murder. Thompson was said to be an associate of two of the gang members mentioned in the note.
A police surveillance camera was secretly placed in the flat of one of the gang, and sure enough the group were filmed wielding a knife while making extremely racist threats. Those who had been named in the anonymous scribbled note, David Norris, Gary Dobson, brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt, plus their friend Luke Knight, were duly arrested. But three months after Stephen’s murder the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. In 1994, the Lawrence family brought a private prosecution against the gang but this too foundered due to lack of evidence. Duwayne Brooks’s identification of two of the gang was deemed to be flawed. Years later, George Gyte, the Director of Education for the London Borough of Greenwich, described to me the atmosphere of fear that pervaded the streets of the borough in those days of the early 1990s, largely due to the activities of that small group of violent racist thugs.
The diminutive Doreen and the gentle giant Neville were perceived by the public as grieving parents who acted with remarkable dignity, and over the coming months gained huge respect for their demeanour in terrible circumstances. Doreen, supported by local community activists and the family’s lawyer Imran Khan, became increasingly frustrated by the continual use of the word ‘dignity’ to describe her demeanour in grief, while her anger was growing at the way the case had been treated by the police.
In 1996 as the Anne Frank Trust was working with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam on the development of the new exhibition ‘A History for Today’, the Stephen Lawrence murder had been long overtaken in the public consciousness by other stories. Alan Dein, a social historian whom I had asked to write a set of accompanying panels on contemporary British issues, approached the Lawrence family to enquire whether we could possibly use Stephen’s story to illustrate how racial hatred, the evil that had killed Anne Frank, was still very much alive in 1990s Britain. The Lawrence family agreed and the new exhibition was launched in January 1997 and opened by the Labour Party leader Tony Blair, just four months before the electoral landslide that was to make him Prime Minister.
Blair and his wife Cherie were guided around the exhibition by Herbert Levy and myself, and towards the end of the exhibition, waiting patiently by the panel we had created about her beloved son Stephen, was Doreen Lawrence. Herbert and I had the pleasure of introducing her for the first time to Blair, and she certainly made a strong impression on him. According to the former Home Office Minister, Paul (now Lord) Boateng, one of our founding Patrons who had arranged the Blairs’ visit to the exhibition, it was on that morning at Southwark Cathedral that Blair made a silent vow to himself. If he should win the election, he would commission an official inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. That summer in the new Labour government, Boateng became Britain’s first ever black cabinet minister. In one of his first acts as Prime Minister, Blair commissioned the retired judge Sir William Macpherson to lead an official inquiry into Stephen’s murder.
During the month that the new Anne Frank exhibition was on display at Southwark Cathedral, the Stephen Lawrence case once again became headline news. The Daily Mail, a politically right-wing newspaper, ran a deliberately provocative and unmissable front-page he
adline accusing the five acquitted gang members of the murder of Stephen. The editor Paul Dacre published their names and dared each of them to sue his newspaper, which would have resulted in a public court case. The reason for Dacre’s interest in the case was a personal one. He had recently employed Neville Lawrence to do some decorating at his home and he had got to know and sympathize with the plight of the bereaved father. Not surprisingly the gang members did not take the Daily Mail to court.
Sadly, the stress and pain caused by Stephen’s murder had taken a terrible toll on his parents and they divorced in 1999. Despite this, they still attended some of our Anne Frank Trust events together. In 2001, we took ‘A History for Today’ to Greenwich Town Hall, in the home borough of the Lawrence family. Prior to the opening Neville had been interviewed about the exhibition, and Stephen’s inclusion in it, by the local Greenwich newspaper, the New Shopper. According to the report, Neville had compared and equated the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust to that of his own son. This caused a furore which reached as far as several national newspapers. Neville was mortified by this attack on him, and at the exhibition launch he pulled me aside to tell me why he felt he had been so unfairly treated. I was amazed at what this Jamaican-born black man then told me. ‘Gillian, I promise you, I would never have compared Stephen’s death to the Holocaust. You see, my grandmother was actually a European Jewess.’ Seeing my mouth opening in surprise he continued, ‘She left Germany in the 1920s and arrived in Cuba. There she met my grandfather, a black man, and they married and went to live in Jamaica. I know all about the Holocaust – it affected my own distant family’. The revelation that perhaps the most well-known young black victim of murderous racism in recent British history was actually one-eighth Jewish and shared Ashkenazi DNA with Anne Frank rocked me to the core. Who really knows where they have come from, what heritage and blood and DNA? That equally applies to the racist gang who killed Stephen purely because they thought he was so different and, like Anne Frank, unworthy of the right to live.
Neville eventually returned to Jamaica, where he felt as a black man he could live out his life without the fear of racism. Stephen’s body was laid to rest in a churchyard in Jamaica, where his parents felt his young bones could lie without the threat of harm. The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust was set up in 1998 to help disadvantaged young people who had a similar interest in becoming architects. The Stephen Lawrence Centre in Greenwich opened its doors in 2008 to work with communities and local government to ensure that the lessons of fairness and justice from Stephen’s murder are acted upon.
Doreen continued the fight to bring her son’s murderers to justice. Thanks to her courage and determination, on a Friday afternoon in January 2013, some nineteen years after a knife tore into the flesh of Stephen Lawrence at a bus stop, I sat in the public gallery of the Old Bailey criminal court, watching with huge satisfaction the two young men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, who were standing in the dock. In 2005 the British government had scrapped the ‘double jeopardy’ law whereby a person could not be convicted for the same crime more than once. Forensic science had similarly moved on in the intervening two decades since the case had been thrown out for lack of damning evidence. Two microscopic spots of Stephen’s blood found on the jacket of Gary Dobson eventually resulted in life sentences for Dobson and Norris, with minimum terms of fifteen years and fourteen years respectively.
On the evening the two were finally found guilty of what the judge Mr Justice Treacy described as ‘a murder which scarred the conscience of the nation’, I received an email from Doreen Lawrence’s lawyer Imran Khan. Imran had been a Trustee of the Anne Frank Trust for three years in the early 2000s. He was sitting in his office with Doreen when my email of congratulations had appeared in what must have been a burgeoning inbox. He immediately responded to say that Doreen sent her love and that being a Trustee of the Anne Frank Trust had been one of the most significant things he had ever done.
Doreen, whom both Bee Klug and I considered a friend and inspiration, is now Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE and continues to make her mark on society as a Labour member of the House of Lords. Stephen’s younger and admiring brother Stuart is a teacher and Georgina is a young mother. Had circumstances been different they would perhaps had a successful architect in the family too. Or, like the speculation that Anne Frank would have definitely pursued a career in writing, maybe Stephen as an adult would have changed his mind about architecture and chosen another career. We’ll never know.
Like many of the parents I have met of murdered children, Otto Frank perhaps being the most globally influential, Doreen and Neville were determined that evil would not prevail and their child’s memory would be a positive force for healing some of the ills of society.
On the morning of 7 July 2015, I found myself sitting in St Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by the families of the victims of the London 7/7 bombings which had happened ten years to the day earlier. Looking around, the families seemed to me a collection of such normal-looking people, with no discernible differences from any of us: a cross section of those who could just happen to be in the cathedral to pray, who could have come inside as curious visitors or that we could have seen outside the cathedral grabbing a coffee on buzzing Paternoster Square.
I was sitting next to Mavis and Esther Hyman, mother and younger sister of one of the tragic victims of the Tavistock Square bus bombing on that terrible day, the 31-year-old artist Miriam Hyman. During the service, my thoughts turned to the ways families of murdered young people have coped with their devastating loss. Through my work with the Anne Frank Trust, a charity borne out of a grieving father’s belief in the power of education to combat hatred, I have had the privilege of spending time with quite a few of these extraordinary people, all of whose normal lives became extraordinary because of acts of violent brutality.
As the 7/7 victims’ families hugged each other, nodding in tearful support and shared understanding of their grief, I saw people who had all experienced how an ordinary day could turn into the worst possible nightmare of any parent, spouse or sibling. Esther Hyman told me that the tenth anniversary had very little emotional impact on her – it was just a day like the 3,649 tough ones that had gone by since 2005. However, she and her redoubtable mother had used the opportunity to talk publicly through media interviews about their beloved Miriam. They also spoke about the materials for schools which had been developed by the Miriam Hyman Memorial Foundation, encapsulating Miriam’s vision of a diverse and respectful world. Those teaching tools will go on to do a vital job.
I have also spent time with Barry and Margaret Mizen, parents of 16-year-old Jimmy who was murdered by a violent bully while buying a cake in his local bakery; George and Debbie Kinsella, parents of Ben who was knifed to death on an Islington street while celebrating his exam results; Sylvia Lancaster, mother of Sophie, beaten to death in a park for offending a youth by dressing in Gothic fashion; Gee Walker, mother of schoolboy Anthony, murdered in Liverpool just for being black; and Winifred Delaney, whose 15-year-old son Jonny was set upon and left to die in the middle of a playing field for being from the Irish Traveller community. These remarkable people have all turned the most profound and unbearable tragedy, the senseless killing of their beloved children, into a tool for teaching young people about how to be empathetic and responsible human beings. Siblings have also taken up the mantle. Jonny Delaney’s younger sister Nellie received one of our Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage in 2008 for her campaigning work, and Ben Kinsella’s actress sister Brooke received an MBE in recognition of her campaign against knife crime.
Ahmad Nawaz also has a story to share with others. His adored younger brother Haris was one of the 147 victims of the Peshawar school massacre in Pakistan in December 2014. Ahmad watched in stunned disbelief as his class teacher was burned alive in front of him, and then he too was shot and wounded. He was flown out of Pakistan to the UK, and to the same hospital in Birmingham that had treated Malala Yousafzai. In Fe
bruary 2016, Ahmad stood proudly in his new Harborne Academy school blazer as he described the events of that terrible day to students at the nearby Rockwood Academy, a secondary school located in a predominantly Asian populated area of Birmingham. He told them, ‘I’ve heard many children from this country are going to Syria, I want to discourage them from doing that. I also want to convey the message that we should fight for our education. In this country, an education is a right, but in mine it is a privilege.’
Ahmad was speaking at the Anne Frank exhibition visiting the school and he spoke following Mrs Mindu Hornek, Birmingham’s last living Holocaust survivor. Rockwood Academy had previously been placed in ‘Special Measures’ by OFSTED, the schools’ inspectorate body, as some of its governors had tried to bring in an Islamicized curriculum. The newly-installed school principal Fuzel Choudhury had set about reforming the school and it was now, according to OFSTED inspectors, back on the right path. In one of his first reforming initiatives, Mr Choudhury had invited the Anne Frank Trust’s education programme to the school. Twenty of his pupils became Anne Frank Ambassadors, taking the story out into their neighbouring schools and local community. One month previously Ahmad had come to London to light a memorial candle in memory of his brother Haris and all the Peshawar victims at our Anne Frank Trust fundraising lunch. Waiting to mount the rostrum in front of 600 business people, this brave boy who had suffered so much told me that his greatest wish was to be an educator against all forms of intolerance.
After the St Paul’s Cathedral ceremony in July 2015, I told Mavis Hyman that what she was doing with the foundation in her daughter Miriam’s name was truly wonderful. She looked at me, sighed and quietly said, ‘It’s the way I survive.’ I can understand that sentiment. It is exactly the reason Otto Frank devoted the second half of his life to promoting his daughter Anne’s diary as a force for good. With such good people, turning the worst into the best, we will all surely prevail.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 24
