Chapter 16
Anne Frank Helping to Make Peace in Ireland
In the summer of 1992, I was invited to take the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition across the Irish Sea to the Emerald Isle. I had been introduced to a man called Eddie Lawlor, an Anglo-Irish property developer and philanthropist. Eddie was looking for a new project to sponsor that could bring Catholic and Protestant young people together.
So one summer afternoon in 1992, I drove over to Eddie and his wife Ginny’s beautiful home in the Essex countryside, where we sat in their idyllic tree-lined garden. Our conversation drifted very quickly to less peaceful parts of the world. Nationalism was growing all over Europe in the early 1990s, the first Iraq war had taken place the year before and Northern Ireland was still deeply affected by a violent sectarian war euphemistically known as ‘The Troubles’.
Eddie was well known and hugely respected both in Ireland and the UK. The second eldest of twelve children of an impoverished Catholic family from County Carlow, as a second son he had been expected to take holy orders and become a priest. To his credit he studied for five years as a teenager under the tuition of the Holy Ghost Fathers but soon realized the strict and pious life intended for him would not fit his personality. He left Ireland and headed to England, with just a few Irish punts in his pocket.
After labouring in Suffolk, he managed to save a few hundred pounds and came down to London. Seeking a place to stay, he was shocked at his first encounter with racism, as in 1950s London it was permissible to display a sign in the window of rented accommodation stating ‘No Blacks or Irish’. What happened in between merits a book in itself, but when I met Eddie Lawlor he was a multi-millionaire who owned a large property portfolio that included at one time the largest independent chain of petrol stations in the UK. After his only son’s tragic death from a drugs overdose, Eddie’s attention turned from making further wealth to putting it to good use, and his foundation was tackling youth poverty and drug abuse, as well as promoting peace initiatives in Ireland.
To my astonishment Eddie told me the Lawlor Foundation would cover the costs of a four-city tour by the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition of Northern Ireland and the neighbouring Irish Republic. He then introduced me to two linked organizations he also supported, Co-operation North and Co-operation Ireland, who were doing excellent community work on both sides of the border. These two organizations would be responsible for finding the venues and the staffing for the tour. I drove back from Essex with exciting plans.
On my first exploratory visit to Belfast I soon became very aware of checkpoints, watchtowers and barbed wire. The city centre hotel I came to often use in Belfast, the Europa, was known in those days as the most ‘bombed hotel in the world’. Only a week after one of my visits, the hotel experienced one of its most damaging bombings of the conflict.
After two further planning visits to Ireland, many phone calls and faxes, in March 1993 the Anne Frank pan-Ireland exhibition tour was officially opened at the City Centre Library in Dublin by the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson. After I had shown her around the exhibition, she mounted the podium in the middle of the library floor, and with a look of serious intent she told us how, ‘Anne Frank was important to me when I cried myself to sleep reading her diary in bed as a young teenager, and she is equally important to us now.’ She ended her eloquent, and very personal, speech with the words, ‘It is really all back to this teenager Anne Frank, who brought home to the world that it is out of ordinary circumstances and an ordinary population, that there can be sown seeds of hate, distrust, fear and the beginning of an exclusion of a certain group of people for certain reasons, that become more creditable as more people accept them.’
Also present at the launch was one of Ireland’s most venerated elder statesmen, Dr Brendan O’Regan, considered to be the founding father of the global airport duty-free industry. Dr O’Regan had opened the world’s first airport duty-free zone back in 1947 at Shannon, the airport serving the city of Limerick on the west coast. Ever since, he had been a great campaigner for the duty-free airport concept, Irish tourism and, most of all, peace. He once said, ‘I will fight to the last breath helping to make peace in my country’ and he strove for that end through founding the peace and reconciliation charity Co-operation North, plus his untiring work for the Irish Peace Institute. He also believed that airports should themselves be international centres of peace. Like many men of great achievement, Brendan O’Regan was a man of quiet humility, and during the evening of the launch I was asked by several different people proudly nodding in his direction, ‘Do you realize who this is?’
The 1993 Anne Frank in Ireland tour criss-crossed the border covering Dublin, Derry-Londonderry, Limerick and finally Belfast, staged at Queen’s University. As well as the sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland, it was also an opportunity to highlight discrimination against the traveller community, an issue that, unlike the ‘Troubles’, has not gone away.
Since the first visit in 1993, the Anne Frank Trust has visited the Republic of Ireland several times with different versions of the Anne Frank exhibition, but we have spent much more time working in the north. In 1997, the Anne Frank exhibition was invited to visit the small town of Omagh, seventy miles west of Belfast in County Tyrone. Richard Collins, a local architect, had a keen interest in the subject of the Holocaust and housed an impressive library of Holocaust-related books in his own home. He had called me in 1995 after watching Jon Blair’s documentary Anne Frank Remembered on the BBC. Immensely moved by the film, he was anxious to do something for the Anne Frank Trust. I mentioned that we were planning to launch a new exhibition in 1997, to which he quietly pointed out that such a prestigious project was unlikely to visit a small town such as Omagh. ‘Why not?’ I immediately responded. In a serendipitous way, it fell into place. The town had a large modern library and the regional Education and Library Board had actually been looking for a prestigious project for its exhibition space.
‘Up the main street, down the same street’, joked one of the volunteers as she drove me through Omagh’s tiny town centre in April 1997. All the Omagh volunteers were of a similarly cheerful disposition, with a keen and ironic sense of humour, something I grew to love when working in any part of Northern Ireland. The exhibition’s launch event that evening was packed with people who had come from many miles around to hear for themselves the testimony of one of Northern Ireland’s last living Holocaust survivors. It was unsurprising that the frail woman who came onto the stage to speak had a beauty and gentle elegance, but also an air of strength, about her. She was the former ballerina Helen Lewis, who had survived Theresienstadt, Stutthof and Auschwitz camps, had evaded two selections for death by the notorious Dr Mengele, had learnt of the murders of her young husband and mother in the camps, subsequently married an old friend, come to live in Belfast with her new husband and gone on to found the Belfast Modern Dance Group. Generations of Belfast’s dancers had been taught their craft under her tutelage. Helen passed away in 2009 at the age of 93 and on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2017 a plaque to honour her contribution to the arts was erected in Belfast by the Ulster History Circle.
Just over one year later, in August 1998, this town of charming and gregarious people was devastated. The Omagh bombing, cynically planned for a busy Saturday afternoon on the ‘main street, same street’, killed 29 people and injured over 200. It was carried out by the ‘Real IRA‘, an IRA splinter group who opposed the IRA’s ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement, signed over the Easter weekend of that year. This was the highest death toll from a single incident during the entire period of the Troubles. Practically everyone in the town knew someone who was killed or injured, I was told when I phoned Richard Collins to offer condolences. The bomb had inflicted damage to the town as well as to its people, and in the months and years to follow, Richard’s architectural practice would be heavily involved in the rebuilding of the bombed buildings.
In 1999, the Anne Frank exhibit
ion visited the beautiful town of Armagh with its elegant Georgian terraces. My first planning visit was early in February, yet every green space was already vividly emblazoned with open-headed daffodils. This is the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, where reside two Archbishops of Armagh, the Primates of All Ireland for both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Church of Ireland. In ancient times, the nearby Navan Fort, built into a grassy hillside, was a pagan ceremonial site and one of the great royal capitals of Gaelic Ireland. Although its county town can cite centuries of spirituality, the southern part of the county, bordering the Republic of Ireland, became known during the Troubles as ‘Bandit Country’ due to the high number of IRA operations conducted there.
The visit of the Anne Frank exhibition inspired a marvellous initiative. For the first time in the city’s sectarian history, children from two local schools, one Catholic and one Protestant, joined forces to produce a cross-community journal called Anne’s Legacy in which they recorded their hopes for a more peaceful future.
Much had changed by the time we returned for an extended Northern Ireland tour in 2010. The city of Belfast was flourishing with flagships stores, exciting hotels, enticing waterside apartments and the Titanic Quarter, housing a world-class museum about the building in the city’s shipyards, and subsequent sinking, of the ill-fated liner.
The exhibition visited several towns, the names of which had become so familiar during the time of the Troubles, including Strabane in the west, Lisburn, Newry and also Enniskillen, scene of the notorious Remembrance Day bombing of 1987 which had killed eleven people paying their respects at the town’s Cenotaph. By 2010, the checkpoints and watchtowers had been dismantled and there was none of the discomfort I had felt in the early 1990s whatsoever. Former IRA leader, and by then Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister, the late Martin McGuinness, even opened one of the exhibitions.
In Belfast, we were hosted by the Spectrum community centre in the Shankill Road, in the heart of Protestant Belfast, with some of its famous militant wall paintings still in taunting evidence. The event got off to a worrying start – the truck bringing the exhibition over from Strabane was in fact owned by the Gallagher Brothers, a clearly Catholic name that was emblazoned on the vehicle’s side. Once parked outside the community centre a crowd of local Protestant Loyalists started to gather round it, and our Exhibitions Manager Doug told me he had never seen the exhibition unloaded so fast by a removal company. Then off down the road sped the Gallagher Brothers and their truck, hardly waiting to check that all had been properly unloaded. However, once it had been set up, the exhibition was proudly manned by volunteers, young and old, from both sides of the Belfast community. Such is the power of Anne Frank to bring people together.
Even as I write, two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, most communities still live apart, divided along religious lines. Despite excellent cross-community work, there are very few Protestant/Catholic integrated schools, so children can spend their entire school life in segregated schools, never meeting someone from the ‘other side’. Communities live, work and shop apart. The Irish tricolour flag still flies in Catholic areas and driving round the province for several days in July 2010 during the Loyalist Protestant marching season, I drove through entire streets of towns and villages bedecked with the red, white and blue of the Union Jack flag.
In the spirit of Anne’s Legacy, the school newspaper published in Armagh back in 1999, Anne Frank can perhaps still have a role to play in this sectarian society.
Chapter 17
Anne Frank and her Secret Hero
Anne’s first cousin Bernhard (‘Buddy’) Elias was born in Frankfurt on 6 February 1925. He was the second son of Otto Frank’s younger sister Helene, known as ‘Leni’, and her banker husband Erich Elias. Bernhard’s name was soon shortened to Bernd, by which Anne always referred to him, but the world came to know him by his nickname of ‘Buddy’. He was Anne’s secret hero.
During her childhood Anne spent happy holidays with her cousin Bernd and his family in Switzerland. He is also seen, sometimes with his older brother Stephan, in many of the photos taken of Anne and Margot as young children sharing happy times in Frankfurt. The fun they were having together seemed to jump out of the black-and-white photos. On one memorable occasion he even accidently tipped baby Anne out of her pram by pushing it too fast.
The families were so close that when Anne’s friends heard in July 1942 that the Frank family ‘had fled to Switzerland to stay with the Eliases’ (when in fact they were still in Amsterdam in hiding), this untruth was never questioned. According to Melissa Muller in her book Anne Frank, The Biography, Anne and Buddy were very alike. They were ‘sassy, playful, imaginative and tireless. They were constantly thinking up new pranks and inventing new games.’ The two loved playing hide and seek and years later Buddy reflected ironically that Anne ‘was very good at hiding’.
Anne certainly admired older cousin Buddy for his bubbly personality and in particular his prowess at ice skating, a skill that was to shape his future life. Anne wrote to him from Amsterdam in January 1941, eight months after the German invasion, when anti-Jewish measures were rapidly increasing. She tells him excitedly how she is taking skating classes and is up at the local ice rink every spare minute. She ends the letter by saying: ‘Bernd, maybe we can skate together as a pair someday, but I know I’d have to train very hard to get to be as good as you are.’ By her next letter to Buddy a few weeks later, the ice rinks and other sports venues are forbidden to Jews so there is no further mention of her skating lessons.
After the post-First World War economic hardship in Germany and the Wall Street Crash, the Michael Frank Bank, which Erich Elias, the founder’s son-in-law, had worked for, collapsed. Erich went to Switzerland, got a job with a company called Opekta, and in 1931 when he was ready, Leni and the two boys, Stephan and ‘Buddy’ duly followed. Although the move to Switzerland was a financial risk, it later saved the Elias family’s lives. For a few years after the Elias’s move to Switzerland, Anne and Margot lost touch with their cousins but got to see more of them from the mid-1930s when Anne and Margot (sometimes separately) were taken to visit their grandmother Alice Frank, Aunt Leni, Uncle Erich and the two boys. Although Buddy was nearer in age to Margot, he found her more serious and less on his fun-loving and mischievous wavelength than the younger sister.
By 7 October 1942, Anne is already in hiding and busy with writing her diary. On yet another interminable day in the claustrophobic annexe, her imagination flies off to a future post-war trip to stay with her cousins in Switzerland. She decides that her generous father will give her a sum of money to buy herself new clothes. She makes a long list of the clothes (and makeup!) she needs, including of course a skating dress and a pair of skates. Off she goes on the longed for shopping trip with none other than Bernd. Anne’s last mention of Bernd in her diary is on 30 June 1944 when she mentions that they have heard from Basel that he has appeared in a play in the role of an innkeeper (he must have been heavily disguised as he was only 19 at the time). She notes that her mother comments ‘Bernd has artistic leanings’. The Frank family’s excitement about Bernd’s acting was to be short-lived – five weeks later came their arrest.
In the book Treasures from the Attic, the Extraordinary Story of the Frank Family, Buddy describes the horror of learning the eventual fate of Anne, Edith and Margot, and why Otto was so driven when promoting his daughter’s diary. ‘It took time for the significance of the diary to become clear,’ recalled Buddy:
I think at first he felt he wanted to make it up to Anne. He felt bad that he had never really known her and thought he should have treated her differently. They had divided up the children – Anne was Otto’s child and Margot was Edith’s, not exactly but you know what I mean. You could tell from when Anne was very young. Margot was a wonderful girl, but very quiet and introverted. I always see her in my mind with a book in her hand, always. Anne, on the other hand, was a bit wild, funny and cheeky, as you
can tell from her diary too.
After the war Buddy studied acting in Basel and Zurich and started a career down that road appearing in several plays. Then an opportunity arose to go back to his childhood love of ice skating. He became a professional ice dancer touring the world for ten years with a show called Holiday on Ice, first the British show, then the Danish version. How delighted Anne would have been – imagine her probing of her cousin each time they met as adults and when he returned from international tours. She would have giggled at his antics as one half of the skating and clowning duo ‘Buddy and Baddy’. When ice dancing became too physically demanding, Buddy’s complementary acting skills took over. He appeared on stage with some of the most famous actors in the German-speaking world, such as Maximilian Schell. In 1965 Buddy married Gertrude ‘Gerti’ Wiedner, a beautiful Austrian actress whom he had met in a production two years earlier. He fondly nicknamed her ‘Bambi’ and together they had two handsome boys, Patrick and Oliver, both of whom also became actors.
The first time I had met Buddy and Gerti in person was in 1995 when the Anne Frank Trust marked the fiftieth anniversary of Anne Frank’s death with a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral followed by a reception at the nearby Stationers’ Hall, one of London’s medieval merchant guildhalls. The dinner on the preceding evening was rather special. Around the table with them were Miep Gies, Fritzi Frank, Eva and Zvi Schloss, the film-maker Jon Blair and Bee and Sid Klug. It was as if the rest of the Frank family were palpably in the room with us. I went on to spend many wonderful times in the company of this devoted couple in London, Amsterdam and memorably on our trip to New York when Kofi Annan signed the Anne Frank Declaration at the United Nations headquarters.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 25
