South Vietnam meanwhile was ruled by a government led by Ngo Dinh Diem, who was a fiercely anti-Communist Catholic. His power base was significantly strengthened by 900,000 refugees, many of them Catholics, who had fled the communist North. In the early 1960s, the South was rocked by unrest, led by university students and Buddhist monks, several of whom shocked the world by setting fire to themselves in highly-publicized protests. In November 1963, a group of young generals staged a coup backed by the United States. It was planned that the unpopular South Vietnamese leader Diem would go into exile, but the generals got over-excited and Diem and his brother were killed. A succession of military rulers followed Diem but they continued his erratic policies.
With an era of political instability following, Ho Chi Minh’s Communist National Liberation Front (NLF), which came to be known by the West as the Viet Cong, began to gain ground from the north. To support South Vietnam’s struggle against this communist insurgency, the American government began increasing its number of military advisers over there. US forces became involved in ground combat operations in 1965. At their peak their forces on the ground numbered more than 500,000, backed up by a sustained aerial bombing campaign. Meanwhile, China and the Soviet Union provided North Vietnam with significant material aid and 15,000 combat advisers.
By the early 1970s, facing an increasing casualty count, rising domestic opposition to the war and growing international condemnation, the Americans began withdrawing. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the Communists on 30 April 1975 and the following year North and South Vietnam were merged, becoming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
During the preparations for the withdrawal from Vietnam, a young American military intelligence specialist called Fred Whitehurst had been passed the war diaries written by the young woman doctor Dang Thuy Trâm. Part of Whitehurst’s brief was to destroy unwanted documents and, just about to burn one of the notebooks, was persuaded by his Vietnamese interpreter to save it. Whitehurst recalled that his interpreter had implored him, ‘Fred, don’t burn it, it already has fire in it.’ Acting against orders, Whitehurst secretly posted the notebooks back to his home in North Carolina. For years afterwards Fred didn’t know what to do with them, it was after all the personal diary of a dead young woman, and remarkably similar to Anne Frank’s diary in the matters it discussed – ideals and convictions, love and life, as well as anger addressed at her persecutors, in this case the Americans and their president, Richard Nixon. So Whitehurst kept the tiny notebooks at his home for thirty-five years, holding on to the idea of one day perhaps returning them to Thuy Trâm’s family.
Whitehurst’s search for Thuy Trâm’s family initially proved unsuccessful. After earning a Ph.D. in chemistry he joined the FBI, but was unable to get anyone from the Vietnamese embassy who could help. In March 2005, he met the photographer Ted Engelmann, another Vietnam veteran, who offered to look for the family during his next assignment to Vietnam. With the assistance of a staff member in the Hanoi office of the Quakers, Engelmann was finally able to locate Thuy Trâm’s mother, Doan Ngoc Trâm, and through her, he also reached the rest of the family.
In July of that year, Thuy Trâm’s diaries were published in Vietnam under the title Nhật ký Đặng Thùy Trâm (Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace), which quickly became a bestseller. In less than a year, the book sold more than 300,000 copies and was then translated into sixteen languages. ‘She was my enemy but her words would break your heart,’ Fred Whitehurst told the British Independent newspaper just after the book’s publication. ‘She is a Vietnamese Anne Frank. I know this diary will go everywhere on Planet Earth.’
Just as in Anne’s diary there was a terrible poignancy in Trâm’s final entries. She had written on 20 July 1970, ‘No, I am not a child: I am grown up and already strong in the face of hardships, but at this minute why do I want so much a mother’s hand to care for me, or really the hand of a close friend, or just that of a person I know who is all right? Please come to me and hold my hand when I am so lonely. Love me and give me strength to travel all the hard sections of the road ahead . . .’ Two days later she was shot dead.
In December 2014, the Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, led a business delegation to Hanoi. As well as discussions about deeper co-operation on issues such as urban planning, water management, energy and waste treatment, a French-English language version of the Anne Frank exhibition was staged as a specially-linked cultural event. It opened at the Hanoi-Amsterdam High School and went on to tour international schools in Hanoi. At the opening Mayor Van der Laan talked with young students there on the heritage of Anne Frank’s war diary and related Anne’s message of peace to the story of Dr Dang Thuy Trâm.
In the autumn of the following year, the Anne Frank House received three very special visitors. Doan Ngoc Trâm, the 92-year-old mother of Thuy Trâm, had come to see the Anne Frank House along with her two surviving daughters Kim Trâm and Phuong Trâm. Kim Trâm was the woman who, years before her sister’s diary had become known to the world, had translated Anne Frank’s diary into Vietnamese.
Anne in Hong Kong
Hong Kong Island, off the south coast of China, had become a British colony under the Treaty of Nanjing, signed after the First Opium War in 1842. At that time, opium was a legal substance in Britain, used for pain relief before the discovery of aspirin, and so a key import alongside large quantities of Chinese tea.
On 8 December 1941, Hong Kong was invaded by the Imperial Japanese Army, just eight hours after their attack on American warships stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The British colonial officials were forced to surrender to the invaders and three-and-a-half years of brutal occupation followed. Food was severely rationed and 10,000 civilians were killed.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the economy started to boom, partly due to skilled immigrants from mainland China who had fled Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong became a major industrial and manufacturing centre, and by the 1980s had become an international financial centre too as well as one of the world’s top ten economies. In July 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China and the Union Jack was lowered for the last time, rolled up and handed to the British Governor of Hong Kong, former Conservative Minister Chris Patten. Now to be known as a ‘A Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China’, the new mother country promised that the former British colony would be run under the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’.
In the summer of 2007, Jan Erik Dubbelman asked me to open the first Anne Frank exhibition in Hong Kong. It was only a year since I had lost my husband Tony, so this exciting project was a helpful distraction from my grief. An added bonus was that Jan Erik also invited our Head of Education Lucy Glennon to come with me to help train the volunteer guides.
China, already emerging from its Communist economy, seemed to be keeping its promise to treat the citizens of the dynamic business based community of Hong Kong with a degree of difference from the rest of its one billion people. Thus when Lucy and I arrived in November 2007, Hong Kong was certainly still a retail paradise. The first thing that struck me was a strange conundrum. The high-rise buildings soared into the clouds, each containing hundreds of tiny apartments, with what we were told were very compact living spaces. But everywhere, in malls or markets, Hong Kong’s residents were seen to be buying new consumer products, always carrying smart apparel carrier bags or boxes containing the latest electronics.
Shani Brownstein was a Canadian expat who had lived and worked in Hong Kong since 1992. On a visit to Chicago in 2006 she encountered the Anne Frank travelling exhibition. The following train of events, which started as a whimsical idea, she describes as the ‘highlight of my life’. It occurred to Shani when she was walking around the exhibition that here was something that could and should come to Hong Kong. She contacted the Anne Frank House and spoke with Barry van Driel and Jan Erik Dubbelman. When she realized that her first task was to find a venue she came close to aborting the project. Knowing that
Hong Kong had a massive space problem (hence it is built upwards and not outwards), she also asked herself if there would indeed be an interest in anything so obviously not Chinese.
Shani saw the challenges she would encounter, explaining,
There was a huge awareness in Hong Kong about the atrocities committed by the occupying Japanese, but an ignorance about the extent of Hitler’s crimes in Europe. Hitler was perceived as a strong leader to be admired. A famous clothing chain had used images of Hitler in its marketing campaigns, with no real understanding of how offensive this was. When our expat European and American community objected, explaining that we would not revere a Japanese oppressor, they then understood and said they didn’t realize that was the way the Nazis had behaved. There was clearly work to be done.
Shani worked on her plan to educate the children of Hong Kong about the Second World War in Europe. The board of trustees of Hong Kong’s 100-year-old synagogue agreed to underwrite the costs of the exhibition. The organizing team were made up of members of the small Hong Kong Jewish community plus ex-pat British and Americans.
Shani, as the instigator, became ‘team leader’ and allocated tasks to the twelve equally enthusiastic committee members. Eventually a space for the exhibition was offered by the Government, a civic centre building in the bustling downtown area of Sheung Wan. The civic centre lobby was accessed through a ground-floor food market and after walking through surrounding stalls of pungent dried fish, one ascended in the lift to the fifth-floor exhibition space.
In November 2007, an English and Cantonese version of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ duly arrived in Hong Kong. Lucy and I spent our first evening in the city meeting the team over a memorable Cantonese dinner overlooking the harbour and the city’s dazzling skyscrapers. Excitement reigned palpably over the city, but it was more to do with the filming that week of the Hollywood blockbuster Batman, The Dark Knight, as Anne Frank was yet to make her mark.
The following morning, when Lucy and I emerged from the lift at the community centre and inspected the exhibition space, we were a little disappointed. The room was small and stark with bare grey walls and linoleum flooring and none of the atmosphere we had come to expect when the exhibition is housed in a cathedral, museum or a busy educational establishment. Shani and her team had not let this deter them. One team member, Debbie Amias, had come up with the idea of creating a full-scale replica of Anne’s bedroom. This was being completed by a local stage designer who was enjoying the task entrusted to him. Visitors would not be able to walk inside this space but instead would tantalisingly look through a window into Anne’s recreated world. With a final flourish a richly-patterned rug was laid in the centre of ‘Anne’s bedroom’, which turned out to be on temporary loan from Shani’s own living room.
Shani also happened to have a friend who was a book publisher and thanks to the can-do attitude, availability and speed of Hong Kong manufacturers, facsimiles of Anne Frank’s beloved red-checked lockable notebook were displayed in the bookshop ready for children to buy as a memento. In fact, at the close of the exhibition, the remainder of the stock was shipped over to London for the Anne Frank Trust and were hugely popular with British children too.
Eighteen months after Shani had first encountered ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ in Chicago, the Hong Kong launch day had finally arrived. That afternoon a local lighting engineer appeared and through his flair suddenly the entire room and the exhibition panels took on a sense of intense drama. The stage designer, who had built ‘Anne’s bedroom’, also produced a symbolic wooden tree-shaped installation, the ‘Leaves of Hope Tree’ for children and adults to write down and attach their thoughts onto the leaves. The reflection of the oval-shaped leaves, bathed in a slowly-rotating bright green light, covered the bare linoleum floor. A visit to the Hong Kong Anne Frank exhibition was going to be a visceral and emotive experience.
Delighted with how the exhibition space was now looking, Lucy and I returned to our hotel to await the arrival from London of her fiancé Dan and my daughter Tilly. We took our newly-arrived family out to show them the streets of Hong Kong and tried to impress them with our knowledge of downtown Hong Kong. We started to walk our visitors across the busy rainy city to the venue in Sheung Wan, trying to convince them it would be a good way of refreshing themselves after their long flight and that it was only a fifteen-minute walk. Needless to say we lost ourselves in the maze of streets and umbrellas but eventually arrived twenty minutes into the reception, to the great relief of the worried organizers.
Prior to the pre-event volunteer training sessions, Lucy and I had discussed with the team how to make the content of the exhibition relevant to the local visitors. We knew that Hong Kong teenagers, especially girls, would relate to Anne Frank on a teenage level, but as the colony was now part of China, human rights and freedom of expression were an issue where one had to tread carefully. Shani explained that the grandparents of the schoolchildren would have lived cheek-by-jowl with Mao Zedong’s aggressive Cultural Revolution.
We also spoke about relating the experience of Holocaust victims to those of the notorious ‘Rape of Nanjing’. In December 1937, and for six following weeks, the occupying Imperial Japanese Army unleashed a wave of violence and cruelty on the people of Nanjing (then known as Nanking). It was thought to be in retaliation for the unexpectedly long campaign they had fought in the previous months against the Chinese in Shanghai. It has been estimated that up to 200,000 citizens of the Nanjing area may have been murdered.
As it happened, we didn’t need to worry about the need for making explicit Chinese relevances. The people of Hong Kong supported the exhibition and 6,000 visitors, of which 4,500 were local and international students, made the journey up to the fifth floor of the Sheung Wan community centre. For many it was the first time that they had heard of Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
Midway through the event, watching Chinese children engage with the story, Shani came to a deep understanding of what Anne Frank represented to people. Having come to the Anne Frank story through her own personal connection to the Holocaust, Shani recalls that she suddenly experienced Anne Frank ‘in a different way. In her diary Anne Frank talked about all people – and she herself speaks to all people.’ According to a report in the Jewish Times of Asia, young people ‘walked away forever changed from the experience.’ Messages written on the ‘Leaves of Hope Tree’ included, ‘Anne Frank is my hero’, ‘There should be no more hate’, ‘I wish I could have known her’, ‘We cannot kill people anymore just because they are different’.
After the end of the month-long exhibition, it was packed up and transported across the border, and thence 2,000km northward to the Chinese capital of Beijing. But as in so many countries of the globe, it had left something behind. There is now a Holocaust and Tolerance Centre in Hong Kong offering training for teachers within their own schools. It marks Holocaust Memorial Day each January by inviting survivors and other speakers, including the son of the heroic Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara.
Shani summed up: ‘With the Anne Frank exhibition in 2007, we had created something. It’s easy to talk about an idea, harder to make it happen. But we did make it happen.’
Anne in China
Like many visits of the Anne Frank exhibition to countries around the world, China came about through one person happening to mention it to another. In this case it was suggested by a local Chinese woman staff member at the Netherlands Embassy in Beijing who happened to have a friend who worked at the National Library of China. This chain resulted in the Anne Frank exhibition paying its first visit to China in December 2007. Opening first at the prestigious National Library, it was then shown in the Children’s Library of Beijing. And now as I write plans are underway to take it back again to China with a different emphasis for a changing world.
Michael Liu is a Chinese academic whose field of interest is human rights related to criminal justice matters. In 2015 he founded the Chinese Initiative on
International Law to engage and support communities in the Greater China Region to understand, critique, engage with, and eventually promote international law and justice. The organization has offices in both Beijing and The Hague as Michael believes that ‘Any international justice without Chinese participation will not be a true global effort’.
In August of the same year Michael took a group of ten International Law students to the Anne Frank House where they met with Jan Erik and Stefan Vervaecke to learn more about the Anne Frank programmes in the Far East. Michael could immediately see a huge potential for the Anne Frank project in China, where a surprisingly large number of young people know Anne Frank’s diary. For one of his own friends it was the first foreign language book she had read.
He described why he felt Anne Frank would have a future in China, ‘It’s not easy to sell international stories as there is usually politics in the background. Even talking about the recent experience of the teenage Malala Yousafzai, people would be asking about what would cause the Taliban to behave as they did. But because of the distance in both time and location, Anne Frank is seen to be non-threatening. Her story is primarily one of humanity.’ Unlike in Hong Kong, there would be no connections made between individuals who suffered in the Holocaust and China’s own history, such as the Cultural Revolution or the Nanjing Massacre, as these too were considered political stories.
In 2017, there was a new pilot Anne Frank project in China, starting at the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum. The city of Shanghai has its own Holocaust-related story. There is evidence that Jews have lived in China since the seventh century AD, often mistaken for Muslims by other Chinese. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo described the prominence of Jewish merchants in Beijing in the late thirteenth century, who had arrived in China through trade along the Silk Road. Over the centuries these Jews became very assimilated. Many Jewish White Russians also arrived in China following the Russian Revolution in 1917.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 37
