That autumn saw Marsha and I busily preparing for the first Anne Frank Awards ceremony. In a room overlooking the Thames at Penguin Books’ head office in London’s famous Strand, the panel of judges, which included the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens; Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen, and actor Sir Ben Kingsley, deliberated over who would receive the awards.
The first Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage ceremony took place a few weeks later at the Hilton Hotel in November 2003. Over the ensuing years there were so many recipients of these awards, children, educators and community activists whose stories were each worthy of a chapter to themselves, but sadly space precludes this. One recipient, Nicole Dryburgh, is described in my chapter on Miep Gies, as she was given the special Miep Gies Award in 2009. However, the winners of the Special Award at the first ceremony must be mentioned.
When a group of five well-dressed and smiling teenagers walked on to the podium to collect their award, none of the audience would have suspected the trauma those brave children had endured in their native country of Kosovo. The oldest, and their impassioned spokesman, was 16-year-old Saranda Bogujevci. She introduced her younger girl cousins Jehona and Lirie, and her boy cousins, Fatos, and the impish-looking youngest, Genc. None of these children had a living mother. The women of the two branches of the family had been murdered in 1999 in a notorious massacre of fourteen women and children by a vicious Serb paramilitary unit. The Scorpions, as the unit was known, had been sent to the Bogujevci family’s home village of Podujevo on an ethnic cleansing mission.
Each of the children on the Hilton stage had nearly died of their gunshot wounds (Saranda had sixteen bullet wounds in her body) and Lirie, who was hit in the neck, had to be fed through her stomach for eight months. Their survival, evacuation to the UK for medical treatment and rehabilitation to a normal life of school in Manchester, would have been cause enough to merit the Moral Courage Awards, but there was more, which became the subject of a BBC documentary.
In the summer of 2003, Saranda and her cousins had flown from the safety of Manchester to the Serbian capital of Belgrade. There in turn they stood in a lonely witness box to testify in the court proceedings against Sasa Svjetan, the militia leader who had ordered and led the Podujevo massacre. They were forced to recall the details of the day they had been lined up against a wall in a neighbour’s garden and robbed of their mothers, grandmother and siblings. It resulted in Svjetan’s conviction and the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. As the citation for the Special Anne Frank Award for Moral Courage was read out to our audience, there were gasps and subsequent sobs heard around the crowded room. We knew then that the Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage had a meaning – passing on the baton of recognizing the spiritual courage and strength of Anne Frank to a new generation. And there was a rather odd coincidence in the three Bogujevci girls receiving these awards in memory of Anne Frank. When Marsha was planning the ceremony and had asked for the Bogujevci family’s dates of birth Saranda told her, ‘You may find this strange but we all three girls share the same birthday. It’s 12th June.’ June 12th is also the birth date of Anne Frank.
The Anne Frank Award for an outstanding teacher who brought moral courage issues into the classroom had been sponsored by the teaching union, the NASUWT (a much-needed acronym for the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers). My first meeting at their London office had been with their General Secretary Eamonn O’Kane. Eamonn became seriously ill between our meeting and the first awards ceremony. Following his death in May 2004, I suggested to our new colleagues at the union that the annual Anne Frank Award to a teacher could be made in his memory. Eamonn had been a well-known peace and workers’ rights activist and they readily agreed. For several years Eamonn’s widow Daphne would fly over from her home in Belfast to attend the Anne Frank Awards.
This was the start of the Anne Frank Trust’s close collaboration with the NASUWT on many projects, and they have subsequently funded our educational programmes in several regions of the UK. After the Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage programme ended in 2009, we continued to help judge the NASUWT’s ‘Anne Frank Poetry Prize’, one of their annual Arts and Minds creative awards for schools in celebration of diversity. For the poetry prize we donated a bronze bust of Anne Frank that had been commissioned in 1995 by Bee and Sid Klug, which spends a year on display at the winning entrant’s school, until the next award is made.
The Anne Frank Awards brought about some very valuable and long-lasting partnerships for the Trust, including with the NSPCC (the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), the Prince’s Trust and the Metropolitan Police. With any small and growing charity, collaborative partnerships across a diverse range of institutions and NGOs are critical, and if they also include warm and mutually admiring friendships, as ours often did, that is an added bonus.
The Trustees agreed we should bring in someone to run the Anne Frank Awards and that is how Lucy Glennon, who went on to head up our growing education team, came to join us in April 2004. Lucy had previously run the annual awards ceremony (also held at the London Hilton) for the mobile phone industry. She seemed a very bright young woman, had an engaging personality and loved Anne Frank. Around the same time, we decided that using an exhibitions company each time we put up or took down an exhibition was becoming too costly, so Doug Palfreeman, a freelance events and exhibitions manager, joined the organization to manage all the practicalities and logistics of the exhibition builds.
In 2006, Lucy successfully applied for the newly-created role of Head of Education. I suggested that perhaps she consider expanding her knowledge of the Holocaust, never intending that she would enrol for a Master’s Degree in Holocaust Studies. Over the following four years she spent her days working on our education programmes, and her evenings and weekends immersed in her studies of the Holocaust. Once, on a study trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was confined to bed with a nasty stomach bug, her hotel window directly overlooking the watchtower of the entrance to Birkenau camp.
Meanwhile our new Trustee Daniel Mendoza had been busy. He was so enthused by his new cause that he started speaking about the Trust at any opportunity – which included his business and social interactions. One of the property companies Daniel was doing business with was the Hampstead-based William Pears and Co, whose founders had built up one of the largest property portfolios in the UK. After his death in 1984 Clive Pears’s three sons, Mark, Trevor and David, took over the company and in 1992 set up a charitable trust which the middle brother Trevor gradually took over running. When I was first introduced by Daniel to Trevor in 2003, he was still relatively new to the world of philanthropic management and was feeling his way. One often thinks it must be easy to distribute philanthropic funds when there are almost unlimited resources to give away but Trevor wanted to use the Pears funds wisely and with the widest and most profound effect.
Daniel took me to Trevor’s office at the top of the Pears’ company headquarters in north London. We talked about Otto Frank, his educational vision and our work around the UK to carry out this vision. Trevor expressed his surprise when I told him that it was all operated out of my home. After our meeting he set about doing some of his own research and contacted Stephen Smith, the founder – along with his parents and younger brother James – of the National Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire. Trevor had started to financially support the Smith family’s centre and already felt he could trust Stephen’s opinions in the Holocaust education arena. What were Stephen’s thoughts about the Anne Frank Trust? What did he know of the woman who was running it? Stephen thankfully gave our organization, its work and me a glowing reference, because Trevor Pears came on board.
One afternoon I was sitting at my desk when Trevor called me. I will never forget what he said and have often quoted it when asked about critical turning points in our organization. He told me that with his new role and responsibility for the family’s philanthropy
he wanted to ensure that every penny donated meant something. ‘Rather than give money widely and indiscriminately, I would prefer to invest in five or six small charities I believe in so as to help them flourish and grow. This I feel would have a real impact, and I think you should be one of them.’
Unusually for a philanthropist, Trevor was not so interested in putting his name to a number of sexy new projects but wished to invest longer-term into the core revenue costs needed to give charities a sound infrastructure for growth. This is music to a charity’s ears as this is the area that is often the most difficult to get funded. In this respect Trevor was a visionary and a saint and in our case paid for two new much-needed full-time posts, a Director of Resources (i.e. operations manager) and a Head of Fundraising. In the early days of our relationship meetings were always held with Trevor himself, often attended by Daniel too. The Pears Foundation itself started to grow into a highly professionally-run operation employing a Director and team, and funding a very wide range of charities in the UK, Israel and Africa. A few years later Trevor Pears’s philanthropy was deservedly recognized by being appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, and in 2017, he became Sir Trevor Pears.
Always offering his candid views, in 2004 Trevor told Daniel and me that he wished to see the Anne Frank Trust move out of my Highgate house into proper offices. It was certainly getting towards that time. Sometimes lack of indoor space meant that if the weather was good enough staff members held meetings around my garden table. We also had a new team member, a trained lawyer who had worked for a very large City law firm and now wanted to work in the not-for-profit area. Emma couldn’t shake off the habit of working very long hours and sometimes Tony and I would return home from an evening out to hear her still at work upstairs in the office. Much as I loved the very short commute to work, Tony and I agreed that we finally needed our home back.
A colleague suggested that I speak to Sir Sigmund Sternberg, a Holocaust refugee from Budapest who had built a business and property empire which had started from dabbling in scrap metal. Sir Sigmund, widely known as Siggie, had turned his energy to interfaith relations becoming President of the International Council of Christians and Jews and then setting up, along with his friends Reverend Marcus Braybrooke and Sheikh Zaki Badawi, the Three Faiths Forum. He had even been honoured by Pope John Paul II by being appointed a (Jewish!) papal knight, and the portrait of Siggie displayed in the National Portrait Gallery depicts him proudly in his uniform of the Papal Order of St Gregory the Great.
One of the properties Siggie owned was a 1960s office building in Kentish Town, which was mainly occupied by philanthropic organizations close to his heart. The ground floor contained his own Sternberg Foundation, the hub of his and his wife Hazel’s interfaith activities. The second floor housed the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, set up by a former nurse who had tended to victims of Bergen-Belsen, the much-admired Helen Bamber. The Medical Foundation was moving to larger premises and so the space had become available. It was perfect for the Trust’s needs and offered us adequate room to expand.
So on 11 August 2004 the Anne Frank Trust moved into Star House where it is still located. We had ‘nice neighbours’, as we shared the second floor with the expanding Three Faiths Forum and its dynamic director Stephen Shashoua, who was busy creating a hub of interfaith charities. Once a year our joint organizations came together to stage a party to celebrate what we collaboratively termed ‘Christnak-Eid’ – Christmas, Chanukah, and when it fell reasonably near, Eid Mubarak.
As well as donors, there is no doubt that passionate and dedicated volunteers have played an invaluable role in our growth. Jack Morris’s wife Susan organized several wonderfully successful fundraising events. Trevor Pears’s wife Daniela pulled a group of her friends together to stage a sponsored cycle ride to Amsterdam, an event others have since replicated for the Trust. Lynn Winton has given us the benefit of her PR experience and we worked side-by-side on many ideas and projects. She also brought many of her friends into the fold. After Jack stepped down from chairing the Anne Frank Lunch committee, the responsibility was taken on by other fantastic people and thanks to them the event continues to flourish. In 2006, the social entrepreneur Dr Ann Limb brought her huge experience of building successful organizations (such as the Helena Kennedy Foundation and the e-learning initiative learndirect as well as many others) to chairing the Anne Frank Trust and guiding the next few years of growth. Daniel Mendoza took over as Chair in 2009.
Since the first days of Board meetings in David Goldstein’s West End office, the Anne Frank Trust has had the benefit of the ideas and support of over forty different Trustees, bringing backgrounds and skills to reflect the diversity of our programmes and our beneficiaries. Robert Posner joined the Trust as Chief Operating Officer in 2009, we worked in close tandem with our complementary skills for seven years and in 2016 Robert succeeded me as the Trust’s CEO. There have been changes too at the Anne Frank House, although because the work is such a vocation, most of the Anne Frank House team spoken of in this book continue in post doing their wonderful work. The Anne Frank House Director Hans Westra, the man who gave me his full confidence and trust in 1990 by appointing me as the Anne Frank House British Representative and then Anne Frank Educational Trust Executive Director, retired in 2011 after thirty years with the organization. He was succeeded as director by Ronald Leopold.
By the end of 2005, Tony and I were really enjoying the division of our work and home life. But then fate decided to deal a bitter blow. Tony, my beloved partner, was diagnosed with lung cancer. We received a tidal wave of love and support, including a handwritten note from Prime Minister Tony Blair telling us he and Cherie had been praying for Tony in church. Tony was blessed with an optimistic outlook and was determined that positive thinking would help him conquer the depressing odds of surviving a 3B size tumour on his lung.
But Tony did not make it. The end came very fast and he died at 7.00 a.m. on the morning of 24 August 2006. I was at his hospital bedside as he took his last laboured breaths. One hour after he left us, his daughter Susha and his new baby grandson, who Tony had been so excited about meeting, walked into his hospital room straight off a very early flight from their home in Spain.
Widowed at age 55, a new stage of my life was about to begin, which my real family, and my large surrogate family of the Anne Frank Trust and the Anne Frank House, undoubtedly helped me through.
Chapter 21
Who Betrayed the Frank Family?
On a warm bright summer morning, 4 August 1944, it is believed that a telephone call was made to the Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam informing them that, despite it being over two years after the start of the round ups and deportations of Dutch Jews, there were ‘Jews hiding on the Prinsengracht’. A Viennese Gestapo member, Oberscharführer Karl Josef Silberbauer, was attached to Sektion IV-B4, a unit recruited from Austrian and German police departments and which handled arrests of hidden Jews throughout the occupied Netherlands. Silberbauer, accompanied by three Dutch Nazi police officers, made their way immediately to Number 263 Prinsengracht, where Anne Frank, oblivious to what was about to unfold, was experiencing her 760th morning in hiding.
One floor below Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Viktor Kugler were going about their daily office duties. At around 10.30 a.m. the door burst open and Otto Frank’s trusted team found pistols being pointed directly at their heads. The intruders signalled towards the bookcase, and the office workers had no choice but to open it, revealing the staircase behind. The arresting party made their way stealthily up the steep stairs and into the main room of the hiding place, catching unawares first Otto, who was tutoring Peter van Pels, and then the other six people who had woken that morning to what they thought would be another tedious day of awaiting their liberation.
Over the past quarter of a century I have often been asked whom I thought had betrayed the Frank family. I cannot answer this question with any certainty as al
l those who know the truth are long dead. However, after twenty-six years of immersion in Anne Frank’s story, spending much time in Amsterdam meeting people who were her contemporaries, hearing rumours and whispers from those who knew the family and their wartime circumstances, I will analyse the various theories that have been put forward as to the betrayer’s identity, and describe the situation in Holland in 1944 that would have prompted the informant’s actions and give my own view on whom I believe the betrayer could have been.
By August 1944, two months after D-Day and with the Allied troops slowly advancing across northern Europe, hopes were high that the eight people who had hidden themselves from the world for two years, would, against all odds, soon be able to walk downstairs, open the door concealed by a bookcase, and finally step out into the fresh air to resume their lives. However, it would be another nine months until victory over the Nazis was secured, and of the eight frightened captives taken that morning only Otto Frank would live to see it. After the war, it was estimated that only 5,000 of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944 survived.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 30
