The Legacy of Anne Frank

by The Legacy of Anne Frank (retail) (epub)

  As well as his business skills, Jack was well-known and respected for his philanthropic life, and had a particular interest in education. He was the Chairman of the City and Islington College and was very involved in local charities. Jack brought a fresh enthusiasm to chairing the Board meetings, which met sometimes at the Business Design Centre, but oftentimes around my Highgate dining-room table. In 2001, we shortened the name of the charity, from the Anne Frank Educational Trust, to the Anne Frank Trust UK, while retaining its principal focus on education.

  Jack soon set about introducing three of his good friends to his new cause. I duly went to meet with them: Sir David Michels, the CEO of the Hilton hotel group, Michael Hirst, the former Chairman and CEO of the Hilton group who was still very active in the hospitality industry, and Peter Galloway, a Mayfair-based accountant. David Michels was the son of a refugee from Nazism, who had actually been studying English in London when war broke out in 1939. David’s father had been brought up in a wealthy family and the young student was so sheltered from a normal life that he sent his clothes back to Germany to be laundered every week. The family’s cushioning wealth did not save David’s grandfather from being murdered in the Holocaust.

  David has summed up his long-time attachment to the Anne Frank Trust as, ‘My history forces me to do it, and the people in the organization make me enjoy doing it.’ Michael Hirst did not have such a close Holocaust connection but was drawn to the enduring personality of Anne Frank and her story. ‘The Trust brought this to life and made it as relevant today as when Anne was writing her diary.’ His initial feeling about the charity, not knowing much about it, was that if Jack Morris had invited him to get involved it had to be a cause worthy of support. However, fifteen years later he feels it is a charity he is immensely proud of and one it is almost a ‘civil duty’ to promote.

  When I met Peter Galloway for an exploratory coffee he revealed to me that his interest in the Anne Frank story had been fired some time ago by his mother’s cousin, whom he told me was passionate about the story. My ears pricked up at the possibility that his relative could be yet another potential recruit to help our charity. ‘Her name’s Bee Klug,’ he continued, ‘I wonder if you’ve ever encountered her.’

  Jack, David, Michael and Peter started to meet on a regular basis and I have always referred to them since those days as ‘Our Gang of Four’. Over early breakfast meetings at one or other of the London Hilton hotels they formulated a fundraising event aimed at London’s business community that if successful could perhaps be staged annually. Working together with the very talented and creative owners of the Hype! communications company, we decided that our lunch would be held during the week of 27 January and by doing so would give it a special focus that would be hard for guests to decline.

  On 27 January 2001 the UK had held its first-ever national Holocaust Memorial Day and thankfully it had seemed to capture the hearts and minds of the nation. As well as a major central London memorial ceremony, local commemorations had been staged around the country. A national Holocaust Memorial Day for Britain had originally been agreed at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust held in January 2000, convened by the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson to plan how the Holocaust would be commemorated in countries around the world as we moved into the twenty-first century. To ensure that Holocaust remembrance and education continued to be taken seriously, out of this conference came an international ‘task force’, now known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

  Leading up to the Stockholm conference, I had been a member of the Home Office’s advisory committee to shape what our British Holocaust Memorial Day would look like. Our committee agreed that, as well as the Shoah against the Jews, the day would commemorate other more recent genocides such as in Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica. The commemoration events would also offer an opportunity to reflect on racist and prejudicial attitudes to religious, racial and sexual difference, while not making equal comparison of attitudes with outright genocide.

  Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Home Secretary Jack Straw wished to make a high-profile announcement that the UK would henceforth mark the date of the liberation of Auschwitz as Holocaust Memorial Day. Appropriately, they came to make the announcement at the ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ exhibition staged at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. Holocaust Memorial Day, always marked around 27 January, has remained a significant fixture in the nation’s calendar ever since. Events are supported by excellent planning and educational materials produced by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which also organizes the main national ceremony in central London.

  Our first ‘Anne Frank Trust Lunch to mark Holocaust Memorial Day’ was held at the Hilton Hotel in Paddington in January 2003 with the Right Honourable Paul Boateng MP as our speaker. Boateng, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and as such Number 2 to Chancellor Gordon Brown, had been the first black politician appointed to the British Cabinet. He was also one of our founding Patrons, and had personally invited Opposition Leader Tony Blair to launch our new exhibition at Southwark Cathedral in January 1997. In January 2000, it was Boateng, when Home Office Minister, who had led the British delegation to the Stockholm Conference that had brought about Holocaust Memorial Day. The lunch committee all agreed that Paul Boateng would be an appropriate choice of speaker for the inaugural lunch.

  The lunch sponsor was the entrepreneur Rolf Schild, a staunch Conservative supporter, but as a refugee from Nazi Germany who had lost virtually all his close family in the Holocaust, he was pragmatic about our choice of a prominent Labour speaker. During the course of the lunch I was happy to spot Messrs Schild and Boateng deep in animated conversation, I am sure debating their political differences, the economy and business opportunities.

  I will always recall that day as an emotional roller coaster. Just before I was leaving for the wonderful event at the Hilton Hotel I had received a letter from the National Lottery, informing me that our application for funding to help create a new version of the Anne Frank exhibition had been declined. The disappointment was assuaged by an invitation to attend a meeting at the National Lottery’s head office to discuss how we could make the next application successful (a process which duly came to a much happier conclusion the following year).

  The high of the successful lunch continued well into that evening as I had been invited to attend the premiere of the movie Catch Me If You Can, directed by our Patron, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg had not been able to attend our lunch as he had previously committed to another Holocaust commemoration event, but the tickets for Tony, my daughter Tilly and myself to the premiere were offered as a token of compensation. It was a truly magical end to a memorable day, and at the after show party I found myself in conversation with our esteemed Patron, plus the film’s leading actors, Tom Hanks and Leonardo di Caprio. Tilly got to meet the man whom the film was based upon, the one-time audacious fraudster Frank Abignale, who gave her a souvenir of his days as a bogus Pan Am pilot, a little Pan Am airplane pin badge. Pan Am by that time had actually ceased to exist as the company never recovered from the Lockerbie terrorist atrocity in 1988 and customer fears of terrorism flying with such an overtly American brand.

  The first Anne Frank lunch had attracted over 200 paying guests and ‘Our Gang of Four’ decided it was definitely worth replicating. The lunch grew over the years, and since 2004 has been hosted continuously by Rolf Schild’s widow, my close friend Daphne Schild. There have been some wonderful speakers, including former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who told our audience of his Holocaust-related family background and how his aunt Nan Keen had been one of the first translators into English of Anne Frank’s diary. When Miliband had told his aunt that he was to speak at the Anne Frank Trust’s lunch, her face had lit up at the memory of her meetings with Otto Frank sixty years earlier.

  In 2011 the former South African President F.W. De Klerk flew to London to address our lunch about his personal journey towards the dismantli
ng of apartheid and in 2010 Judge Thomas Buergenthal, the American judge at the International Court of Justice flew from The Hague to speak to our audience. Buergenthal was one of the few survivors of both Auschwitz and an ensuing death march to Sachsenhausen camp, even more miraculous considering he was just 11-years-old. He was not reunited with his mother until two years after his liberation. In his distinguished legal career Judge Buergenthal was the recipient of many high-level awards for upholding international human rights.

  Ours is a fundraising event with an unusual degree of depth and integrity, hence the loyalty to the event shown by our supporters. Each year we start the proceedings, setting a serious and emotive tone, by a candle-lighting ceremony. The imposing on stage candelabra is lit by a small group of Holocaust survivors, survivors of other genocides and those affected by recent atrocities or acts of prejudicial violence. As each candle is lit the lighter’s story is explained to the audience. On each table around the room there is an individual candle centrepiece, and the table host is invited to light this ahead of a minute of silence to remember all victims of the Holocaust and other atrocities, historic and current.

  We have been honoured to welcome some very special guests to the lunch, thanks to the help of PR consultant Richard Leon, who gives his time pro bono. Richard had a deeply-held respect for by-now elderly British war veterans who had given so much for their country. One year he invited his friend, the iconic wartime entertainer Dame Vera Lynn, to the lunch when she was already in her mid-90s. I had fully expected to see Dame Vera arrive in a wheelchair. Readying myself to welcome an frail elderly lady, I was amazed when she came striding into the women’s cloakroom in full make-up, coiffed hair and mink coat. She looked as pretty as ever and her personality and warmth shone out of her sparkling eyes. One year Mr Henry Allingham, one of the last surviving veterans of the First World War, came from his home in Sussex and blatantly flirted with all the women gathered around him. Nearing the age of 113, he told me he was looking forward to being ‘a teenager’ again but sadly passed away soon after.

  The first fundraising lunch that we held in January 2003 led in a noteworthy year for the Anne Frank Trust. The following month I was honoured by the social services charity Jewish Care at their fundraising lunch for the business community. I was to be the recipient of their annual award presented to someone they considered deserved public recognition. As I walked on stage at the London Hilton, collected the award and began to give my acceptance speech, unbeknown to me a young businessman in the room was responding to my words in a way that would have a long-term implication for the growth of our charity.

  The young man was called Daniel Mendoza, a descendent of the famous eighteenth-century bare-knuckle boxer of the same name. Mendoza the boxer had helped transform the popular English stereotype of a weak defenceless Jew into someone deserving of respect. It was he who had changed the sport of boxing from the pugilists standing and delivering blows to each other, to one of balletic prancing, ducking and diving. The twenty-first-century Daniel Mendoza was the father of two young children and was at the stage in his life where he was making a good living from his commercial property business and wanted to give something back to society. Something I had said in my acceptance speech for my award lit a spark and he called me the following week wanting to know more about what the Anne Frank Trust did.

  As Bee Klug and I had done to Jack Morris a couple of years earlier, Jack and I duly called Daniel to come for a meeting at the Business Design Centre. Jack immediately recognized the humanitarian impetus that was propelling Daniel as something he had also felt as a young father wanting to make the world better for his young children, and it was having my own children Joe and Tilly that had equally propelled me into the world of voluntary activism and then into the not for profit professional arena. It didn’t take many minutes in Jack’s office to sign up a new Trustee in the form of Daniel Mendoza.

  Around that time too our full-time administrator was leaving and Ruth Allen, who by that time was part time, was planning to retire after eleven years with the Trust. I put an ad in a local paper for a new administrator (even by 2003 little was done digitally). One of the calls I received was from someone with a rather familiar voice – it was from a woman I had actually known since I was 11-years-old. My old school friend from Bournemouth, Marsha Selwyn, had seen the ad and although the position really interested her, her enquiry was tentative. ‘Look Gilly, I realize that it might be difficult for you to be my boss when we have known each other for so long,’ she started and then reminded me (although I needed no reminder) that our parents had been very friendly and our maternal grandmothers had actually remained the closest of friends well into old age. Marsha, who had just sold her partnership in a fitness club, certainly had all the right skills so I agreed she would be interviewed for the role, but with an open and frank discussion about how we could make this unusual relationship work. Well it seemed to work out because as I write Marsha has been the office manager and company secretary, now with the title and responsibility of Director of Administration, for over fifteen years, and has played a huge role in the growth of the organization.

  Throughout her first year Marsha and I worked hard together to bring about the inception of an educational programme for schools on the theme of moral courage. We planned that by highlighting Anne Frank’s moral courage, and of course that of her helpers too, we could encourage an understanding of its value to the community and wider world. Our aim was to recognize those who were exemplars through making awards in Anne’s memory.

  But first came the materials. Although we had no in-house education team at that time, a teaching pack for schools and youth organizations called ‘Moral Courage – Who’s Got It?’, accompanied by a VHS video, was funded by the Department for Education and created by a team of educators and civil servants we had previously worked with and trusted. Our planning meetings were held in the Department for Education’s Westminster offices, leading up to the launch of our teaching materials, officially flagged by the Department as a recommended resource for their introduction of Citizenship as a new curriculum subject in September 2002.

  We had started to develop a close working relationship with what was then called the Department of Education and Employment (it has changed name several times during the lifetime of the Anne Frank Trust) after one of its Education Secretaries, David, now Lord, Blunkett, had visited the Anne Frank exhibition in Westminster in January 2000. Two weeks later Michael Hussey and I visited his office where he duly signed the Anne Frank Declaration. A kind and empathetic man, Blunkett became a great endorser of our work. It was Blunkett in his next ministerial role as Home Secretary, who gave the Anne Frank Trust its first major Government grant of £50,000 in 2004 towards the creation of our planned new exhibition, ‘Anne Frank + You’.

  Life had not been easy for David Blunkett. Born blind due to a genetic disorder, when he was 12 his father died from a horrific work accident, after falling into a vat of boiling water. Compensation for the struggling family after this terrible tragedy was hard fought for as apparently David’s father had been working beyond his official retirement age. Blunkett’s own stellar political career, overturning all expectations for a blind man from such a tough background, was tragically felled in 2004 through his doomed affair with a married woman and a debilitating public battle for access to the son born of that relationship.

  In the autumn of 2002, the Trust had taken a small exhibition stand at our first (of many to follow) party conferences. In this first instance it was at the conference of the then Labour government, held in the well-known seaside resort of choice for northern British working people, Blackpool – a highly appropriate destination for the Labour Party. Party conferences have always been an opportunity to capture all the strands of a charity’s network under one roof, journalists, politicians and leaders of other NGOs. If you are prepared to throw yourself head-first into them, they can provide a great return on investment of time and expense. After only a
day I realized that being at the conference was even more exhilarating than a ride on the town’s famous Big Dipper – a never-ending round of important visitors to our stand, bumping into crucial government leaders and making sure a follow-up meeting ensued, running to fringe meetings and watching with undiluted glee as famous and usually serious politicians and journalists would make complete fools of themselves on the dance floor at the late night wind-down parties.

  In 2003, Jack Morris stepped down as Chair of our charity, but continued to chair the lunch committee as both the event and the committee were growing. His role as our charity’s Chair was taken over by one of the founding members of the Board, the South African-born publisher Dr Gillian Klein. Her company Trentham Books specialized in books and journals that promoted multicultural education in schools and universities. I guess it was somewhat confusing having a charity run by two women with the relatively uncommon first name of Gillian, and who both ran their companies from addresses in Highgate, but we managed well and collaboratively, even while chairman Gillian was undergoing exhausting treatment for breast cancer.

  By the summer of 2003 we needed to ramp up the publicity for the Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage, but had a limited PR budget. The Department for Education was getting the message out to schools and Penguin Books was helping too through their school book clubs. One morning I was travelling by Tube into central London and having nothing to read, started reading the advertisements on the train. An idea started forming in my mind and within a couple of weeks I was sitting in an office at the headquarters of the London Underground. Sadly, the name of the senior manager I met escapes me, but I detected he was very interested in the moral courage programme. ‘If you were to give me a cheque today for £100,000 or offered to publicize the Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage at every station on the Tube network,’ I brazenly suggested, ‘I would not hesitate in taking the latter.’ And yet again the chutzpah seemed to work as that’s exactly what happened. In July 2003, huge posters appeared on the platforms and escalator walls of nearly every station of the entire London Underground network, spotted from the outlying suburbs to the West End. They showed a Tube platform swarming with people and above it the headline, ‘Sometimes it takes courage to stand out from the crowd’. The cost of the production of the posters, paid for by London Underground, plus the value of this prime advertising space, was inestimable.