When Tanuj returned to India, on a high from the experience in Amsterdam, he set about organizing a programme for local children with disabilities. He called it ‘Pursuit of Happiness, Children’s Right to be Happy’. Tanuj explained what had motivated the programme:
Recently in 2014, an Indian man, Kailash Satyarthi, a children’s rights and anti-child labour activist, won the Nobel Peace Prize [jointly with the Pakistani-born education activist Malala Yousafzai]. Inspired by him, a few friends of mine and I decided on creating a project that would help young children, particularly those with disabilities. We thought it was very relevant to Anne Frank’s ideals as these children would be almost as old as Anne was when she went into hiding.
Urbi Chatterjee was another of the peer educators trained in Kolkata. She described reading Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in primary school, and how she still sees the book as an important part of her childhood. However, the Peer Guide training workshop gave her the opportunity not only to learn more about one of her favourite characters from literature, but also the larger social, economic and political situation of Anne’s era, ‘such an important and infamous time in history’. When I read Urbi’s blog, and saw that she wrote very much in the spirit of Anne Frank, I emailed her to get to know more about her experience of the Anne Frank project. She did not disappoint.
Urbi had found it an empowering experience to be guiding and teaching the story to people much older than herself. She told me how relevant issues of racism and discrimination and the persecution of minority communities were in Indian society, especially in relation to religious fanaticism. She said that
Every day one reads of violence perpetrated in the name of religion. India is notorious for virulent caste-based discrimination, and certain parts of the country seem to be constantly in near-warlike conditions, most prominently Kashmir. In today’s world, especially a world where technological advancement has given humanity access to the worst kinds of weapons, I think Anne’s story is highly relevant, and should demand in-depth study and reflection over how such atrocities affect and devastate individual human lives as well as entire societies.
Urbi felt that learning, and then teaching, about Anne Frank had made her think of social issues and problems more than ever before.
This is probably one of the reasons why I have started making an effort to study my own society and the various problems that it suffers from. Most importantly though, the experience of the workshop and the exhibition made me realize how events set in different times and geographical locations and societies can still be similar in cause and consequence, and how the study of one can help in the resolving of issues in another. Although Anne Frank and I grew up in very different socio-political environments, at heart I could empathise with a lot of her thoughts and emotions. The family problems she faced, her teenage romances and heartbreaks, her experience of puberty and her changing body, the loss of friends, her daydreams and imaginary experiences, even her fascination with books and writing were all things that I could relate to.
In her blog post written immediately after her training as an Anne Frank peer educator, Urbi described the session in emotive terms:
In every human being’s life, there are ordinary forgettable days, and some days that stand out because something really unusual happens. And then there are days that get etched so deeply in one’s heart, that whenever one closes one’s eyes one gets transported back to those days, and relives it in its entirety. The details do not fade with time; if anything, they only become brighter and sharper, and one can think back to individual incidents that made the days as incredible as they were. I can safely claim that 28th, 29th and 30th November were three such indelible days of my life, memories that I shall cherish forever.
Urbi’s recollection of a particular cultural difference she encountered between India and the Netherlands on that training day is interesting.
After we had all settled down, we were introduced to Mr Peterer, who had come from the Netherlands to conduct the training workshop. The first thing he told us was that he was not a teacher, and we should address him as Aaron, not Mr Peterer or Sir. I mention this as though it was a seemingly insignificant incident. I kept feeling distinctly uncomfortable addressing someone who was years my senior by his first name, since by Indian custom I usually refer to someone his age as kaku (uncle) or at least dada (elder brother)!
Many reports and reviews have been written by our Anne Frank educators about the reception by students to the training sessions, and many of these are written in a formal manner suitable for submission to sponsors and stakeholders. Urbi’s blog described these events in Kolkata from her own point of view as a teenage participant.
We discussed why Anne Frank should be called a history for today, and why our generation would do well to learn lessons from the past. Throughout the day we were given practical advice about being a good peer guide, and at one point were asked to make a poster and jot down all the qualities essential in a good guide. We were taught how to deal with ‘obnoxious students’ who made a point of disrupting the tour, and how to keep the audience engaged and interested. We also learnt that we should not simply lecture the audience about the panels in the exhibition, but rather ask them to participate by asking relevant questions and encouraging active discussions.
After describing the training sessions, Urbi also spoke about the excitement of the forthcoming opening event.
The workshop had officially ended, but the exhibition was to be inaugurated the next day, at 5 o’clock in the evening. All the Modern High girls volunteered to come. Out of us, the Anne Frank House representatives randomly chose me to read out a passage from Anne’s diary at the ceremony. I was supposed to be there by 4.30 pm, but like the certifiable dolt that I am, I managed to lose my way and reached the building twenty minutes late! Ms. Machado quickly showed me which passage I would be reading out. I practised a couple of times, and then went to look for my classmates, who I found guiding our school’s director Ms. Devi Kar around the exhibition. The inauguration started at around five thirty, and continued for about twenty minutes. I was called to read my part, and was greatly praised by many people. Afterwards there was a violin recital, and lots of tasty snacks. A boy from La Marts and I even had a glass of red wine each, much to the amusement of the adults present! The evening ended on a sweet note with me getting a picture clicked with Aaron, and one with Ms. Machado and Loes. The time had passed all too soon, and though I was happy, I felt more than a twinge of regret when I left the building for the last time.
Am I alone in thinking that Urbi writes her blog in the spirit that Anne wrote her ‘blog’ of seventy years before? Anne, described by her maths teacher Mr Keesing as ‘An Incorrigible Chatterbox’ and who by her own admission loved to chatter, and Ms Urbi Chatterjee, whose own childhood was so marked by Anne’s writing. I believe that these two girls, Miss Chatterbox and Miss Chatterjee, living nearly a century apart and a world away, could have become the firmest of friends.
Thanks to the partnership with PeaceWorks, the Anne Frank exhibition has revisited Kolkata and also gone to Bangalore, Chennai and Pondicherry – leaving a legacy of sixty student peer guides and seventy-two trained teachers.
Priya, of Indian heritage, whose field of interest was education in rural India, was very proud to have been able to take the Anne Frank exhibition to her own home city of Bangalore, where she had first read Anne’s diary as a child. The exhibition was held at the Bangalore International School and sponsored by the Consul General of Israel, Menachem Kanafi, who told the audience, ‘We read [the diary] to remind ourselves that every teenager, every adult, every person has the right to grow, to learn, to develop in security as an individual – not as a faceless number who may be wiped out without any pang of conscience. Someone who looks you in the eye and says, “I am a person”.’
He reminded the guests that in India, Jews were welcomed to its shores over 2,500 years ago, and since then had been a part of Indian life, as eq
uals. Then, referring to Anne Frank and his own family’s Holocaust experience, Mr Kanafi’s tone changed: ‘But not all countries of the world have been so welcoming. In many places the Jew has been seen as an outsider, subject to persecution, subject to be killed at a moment’s notice.’
Despite the unusually benign experience of India’s Jews, discrimination in India’s society is still an alarming issue. Megha Malhotra, who ran the PeaceWorks initiative in Kolkata, summed up the strong connections young Indian students have themselves made to Anne Frank’s experience. ‘They see the relevance and compare it to the discrimination they see around them. The first thing that comes to their minds and their understanding is the word “ostracisation”, or “differentiation” on the basis of caste, colour or creed. The students are aware of the atrocities still committed against the Dalits [lower castes]. Skin colour is a very big factor of discrimination in India – and they see that connection immediately.’
Anne in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, a beautiful teardrop-shaped island nation located approximately 32km off the coast of south-east India, a diverse and multicultural country, a home to many religions, ethnic groups and languages, has been scarred by a bloody thirty-year civil war. It ended in 2009 when the Sri Lankan military defeated the ‘Tamil Tiger’ rebels. It was actually the Tamil Tigers, ferocious in their cause, who had first introduced the concept of suicide bombing in 1980. Later they developed a unique suicide vest, which is now employed by terrorists around the world. This deadly tactic was carried out by a brutal armed unit known as ‘Black Tigers’, who terrorised the subcontinent by bombings and assassinations, including carrying out the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Sri Lanka’s geographic location and deep harbours made it of great strategic importance from the time of the ancient Silk Road all the way through to the Second World War. The island was first colonized by the Portuguese in the year 1505. Over one hundred years later, during the reign of King Rajasinghe II, Dutch explorers arrived on the island. In 1638, the King signed a treaty with the Dutch East India Company to oust the Portuguese who ruled most of the coastal areas. In 1793, with concern about Napoleon’s expanding empire, the British found no difficulty in occupying Sri Lanka’s eastern coastline and eventually took over more and more of the island. The British called the island Ceylon and it remained known as this until 1972, twenty-four years after it achieved its independence.
In 1997, one week after the funeral of Princess Diana, my husband Tony and I had spent two weeks travelling around Sri Lanka. Due to the continuing civil war between the Lankans and the Tamil Tigers, we were not permitted to visit anywhere on either the northern or eastern parts of the island, including the reputedly beautiful coastal city of Trincomalee. Something that had particularly struck us driving round the island was the respect people gave to education. The Sri Lankan school uniform is almost always white. Even in the smallest and poorest villages, where domestic washing machines were an unthinkable luxury, we saw children walking to and from school, along dusty or muddy roads, with their white uniforms dazzlingly pristine.
It was tragic to see a country that had so much potential and inherent beauty so riven apart by internal conflict. Upon my return to the UK, I started a series of discussions with my colleagues, analysing the situation in Sri Lanka and trying to come up with an idea about how to take the Anne Frank exhibition to the wonderful people of Sri Lanka. Many years later, an opportunity finally arose.
The Sri Lankan Ambassador to the Netherlands made, as many dignitaries do, a visit to the Anne Frank House. While walking around, he was informed that the Anne Frank exhibition had recently been taken to India. The Sri Lankan Ambassador was now very keen on bringing the exhibition to his own country, so duly informed the Dutch Embassy in Colombo about this. It took just a few more meetings between the Dutch Embassy in Colombo and the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the Netherlands to find wider support for the idea of an Anne Frank project in Sri Lanka. Funding and logistical support was soon found.
So in 2015, 400 years after those first intrepid explorers, the Dutch arrived in Sri Lanka again. A team from the Anne Frank House arrived in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo to set up a pilot project for future work. The Anne Frank House’s goal was to stimulate engagement on issues of social cohesion and tolerance among students, teachers and the general public, but done in the context of Sri Lanka’s recent past.
The Anne Frank exhibition visited the capital city of Colombo first and after a gap of a few months went on to Jaffna, one of the largest cities in Sri Lanka. The visit to Jaffna was not easy. As I had found on my holiday in 1997, during the years of the long civil war Jaffna and the north of the island, the stronghold of the Tamil Tigers, were out of bounds to foreign visitors. Even though the conflict was over, when the Anne Frank House’s Aaron Peterer arrived in Sri Lanka to set up the exhibition in December 2015, he had to wait for several days in Colombo for travel restrictions to be lifted in order to travel up to the north.
Anne Frank in Colombo
The Colombo exhibition was opened at the Goethe Institute on 27 January, the international Holocaust Memorial Day that marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The Anne Frank House’s representatives Priya and Loes noticed that when delivering educational activities in Colombo the similarity between the war in Europe and the civil war in Sri Lanka had come up spontaneously on several occasions. For instance, a teacher in Colombo told them, ‘It brings back memories, because our situation was the same as for people living in the war areas in the north. I say to myself every day, we are humans, respect differences and keep in mind that you can harm other people’. One of the teacher-training sessions was focused on personal identity. A brief introduction explained that understanding your own identity can be a key to understanding the world. The differences between people, such as ethnicity, origins, customs and lifestyle that are the causes of discrimination were looked at.
It was planned that there would be a surprising connection to the Anne Frank story at the Colombo exhibition launch event. But sadly due to ill health, the award-winning poet Anne Ranasinghe was unable to attend the event. Ranasinghe had actually been born Anneliese Katz in Essen in Germany into a Jewish family in 1926, sharing a first name and nationality with Anne Frank. In November 1938 her happy childhood was curtailed when she witnessed the Kristallnacht pogroms. The following year, at the age of 13, Anne Ranasinghe was sent by her parents to an aunt in England to escape the persecution. That year Germany and Britain declared war. After the war ended, Anne learned what had happened to her parents; they had been sent to the Lodz ghetto in Poland and later gassed in Chelmno death camp. All their relatives had also been murdered by the Nazis. As an only child, one can only imagine her feelings of isolation.
Anne Ranasinghe trained first as a nurse and then as a journalist. In 1949 she married a Sri Lankan medical professor she met in London and went with him back to his home country, where for the next forty years she had another form of isolation, as the only known Jewish woman living in Sri Lanka. Since the 1970s she has been writing powerful and unforgettable poetry and prose, which has been translated into seven languages. Ranasinghe has received many literary awards, including Germany’s Order of Merit. On hearing of the forthcoming Anne Frank exhibition, Anne Ranasinghe explained how she identified with her German-born namesake, ‘Both Anne Frank and I went to Jewish schools, wore the same kind of teenage fashion and had the same hairstyles. And we were both given identical diaries. Hers was in a lovely red cover – mine was in green. I still have it. She got hers on her 13th birthday; I got mine the night before I escaped to England on 26th January 1939. Diaries must have been a teenage speciality. Perhaps because they could be locked!’
Anne Frank in Jaffna
One of the most emblematic places the Anne Frank exhibition has been taken has to be the city of Jaffna, which had been so affected by the long civil war. The exhibition was on display at Jaffna Publ
ic Library for a week in December 2015. It was brought via a partnership with Shanthiham, the local Association of Health and Counselling, which provided psychological services for the war-weary community.
Teachers in Jaffna said they felt that the exhibition was especially valuable to them because of the connection with the hardship the people in the Northern Province had experienced in the civil war. It was described as an ‘outlet for our emotions’ and provided a catalyst for people to document their own experiences in the hope of creating a similar kind of exhibition for the future, with its content based on the Sri Lankan war. An anonymous exhibition visitor wrote, ‘It has truly inspired us to be more sensitive and aware of discrimination that has existed, while at the same time appreciating the current intercultural society we live in.’
Priya and Loes described the pre-exhibition training they had given to Sri Lankan teachers, starting with the historical background to Anne Frank’s life and writing. One aspect they discussed was how, as your situation gets tougher, your true character can be formed. As in India and Pakistan, Anne Frank’s diary is taught in Sri Lankan schools. Former British Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion’s five-stanza poem ‘Anne Frank Huis’ is on the syllabus in Literature classes, and the ‘Life Competencies’ syllabus also deals with Anne Frank and her experience, which teachers find useful for explaining about different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka.
Something that resonated with how Anne Frank’s story is used in other parts of the world and in other recent conflict situations, was that Anne Frank provided a platform for children to speak about their past in an indirect and safe manner. I have heard this so many times over the years not only from educators, but also those in the political arena.
The Sri Lankan teachers felt that the Anne Frank project could create more understanding and empathy for other people and their past and teach them not to oppress others. One teacher pointed out that reading Anne Frank’s writing helps young people to understand another person’s state of mind. And conversely, it would show students how to act if they were ever faced with oppression.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 40
