The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  Having been involved with the stories of so many people who experienced and witnessed brutality, I often think about their terror in their final days, moments, seconds of their lives or their freedom, and wish that by thinking hard, I could somehow lessen that terror. I have heard their stories first hand and witnessed their determination to live as normal lives as possible. I think about 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence, waiting for a bus home, perhaps musing on how he will spend the following day and then seeing and hearing the knife-wielding mob surging towards him intent on harm. I think of Daniel Pearl, who refused sedation in his final moments before the knife slit his throat, instead defiantly declaring himself a proud Jew. I think of Nelson Mandela, a qualified lawyer and tribal prince, standing erect in the dock hearing that he will spend the next thirty years in a bare prison cell. I think of the mothers trying to shield their children from the bloodstained machetes of Rwanda, the rifles of the Einzatsgruppen killing squads, or the suffocation by poisonous fumes in the gas chambers, the despair and fear of a helpless mother or father. I think of those I personally know who experienced horror. I think of Eva Schloss, a fifteen-year-old believing she was alone in the world as her beloved mother had been gassed. I think of Zlata Filipović, now a successful documentary maker, trembling as a child in a cellar in Sarajevo while the bombs rained down, and Saranda Bogujevci, an artist and fundraiser for Manchester Aid to Kosovo, playing dead while her family really lay dead all around her. I think of Ahmad Nawaz, at 14-years-old lying in the agony of a bullet in his arm, being trampled by a gunman while having to play dead and then seeing his teacher burned alive.

  No words of compassion or understanding can ever lessen the fears and agonies of those who have suffered these atrocities. All we can do is our tiny little bit to help make the world better.

  Chapter 30

  Anne Frank and the Future

  This book has described a ‘magical thread’ that has circumnavigated the globe in the form of the Anne Frank travelling exhibition.

  As this account of the impact of learning about Anne Frank over the past thirty years draws to a close, there seems to be no sign of interest in her life abating. Currently there is a stream of enquiries to the Anne Frank House to bring the exhibitions and educational programmes even further afield. But the time may come in the future that this fast moving world will no longer share the abiding passion for a teenage girl who died before the middle of the last century. If it is to continue, education about Anne Frank will need to adapt to the evolving demands and situations of our societies. Europe is currently threatened by the rise of a new type of Fascism, that of extremist ideology and cruelty conducted in the name of religion. It has spilled into Europe’s major cities from its breeding ground in the Middle East and Indian sub-continent. People are also being drawn to the extreme right, which can erupt into the violence of Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered seventy-seven people, including sixty-nine teenage participants of a summer camp, in Norway in 2011, or Thomas Mair, who murdered the young mother and Member of Parliament Jo Cox in her own Yorkshire constituency in 2016. The belief by adherents in the righteousness and justification of the hatred fanned by both sets of views is as alarming as that of Hitler’s massed worshippers’ belief in their racial superiority.

  Whereas the nightmares of Western children during the Cold War years were about a Soviet nuclear attack, young people now fear what could happen to them at a pop concert, football match or sight-seeing trip to a European capital city. Will a fear of crowded places generate more dependence on virtual communication with friends through social media? Will young people become as isolated from human contact in their social lives as Anne Frank was in her hiding place?

  Since the economic crash of 2008, we have suffered a decade with negligible interest rates on savings and widely-fluctuating stock markets. We are currently educating a generation of youngsters who do not understand the age-old concept that money, if it is wisely saved, can actually grow, so it’s no surprise that saving money for the future is not on the agenda. And then there is the planet itself. When I was a child and learnt that we stay rooted on the ground through gravity and centrifugal force, I started to have nightmares that the Earth would slowly stop spinning and we would all be thrown into space. Then my childhood fears changed to the threat of huge meteors hurtling towards us from the stratosphere, not to mention an invasion by aliens. In hindsight it was fanciful, unlike the reality of the long-term and profound effects of climate change and global warming that are facing children now. These are scary and unpredictable times in which to try to engender hope and aspiration for the future in teenagers.

  With this in mind, I asked several of the educators whose work has been featured in these pages for their thoughts about Anne Frank’s role as the world moves further away from the middle of the twentieth century, and towards the time when the last first-hand witnesses of those times are no longer living, breathing or speaking. I will start with two women who have worked for many years with the Anne Frank projects in Latin America: Mariela Chyrikins and Joelke Offringa. Mariela is based in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, but has worked on Anne Frank projects throughout the Spanish speaking countries of the South American continent. Mariela believes that the story of Anne Frank will continue to provide unique insights into human nature, especially into the more negative aspects of ‘homo socius’. However, she knows that it will be more challenging as time passes to convince young people of the importance of this history to their own personal lives and their community. Mariela also feels that this will be the case even in those countries directly affected by the Holocaust, let alone in places where there is no direct link. Nonetheless, she believes from her experience that Anne Frank’s diary is still one of the most powerful tools that can be used to engage young people in reflection about the Holocaust and related issues, despite the fact that Anne wrote the diary before being arrested and experiencing the horrors of the death camps herself.

  Joelke Offringa runs the Anne Frank programmes in the huge Portuguese-speaking country of Brazil, through the NGO she set up called the Instituto Plataforma Brasil. Climate change is already having a noticeable consequence on the country’s vast but perilously shrinking rainforests, which affect the entire world’s ecosystem. In Brazil you will find extreme wealth and poverty living, but not co-existing, in surprisingly close proximity. Joelke and her team at the Instituto Plataforma Brasil believe there is a need for Brazilian young people to work closely together, hand-in-hand with all the other sectors of society, to create a better environment and tackle climate change at the grass-roots level. By doing so they will be taking their future lives into their own hands.

  Through this process of co-creating, a new Anne Frank educational project titled ‘From Ego to Eco’ has already been developed in the municipality of Cabreúva in the vast state of São Paulo. Youngsters have been working together from across differing community sectors with the joint aim of creating a just and sustainable society. As a result of this educational programme, the ‘All for Cabreúva Movement’ has emerged, an organized active community initiative that unites young people, local government and civil society. And there, at the core of this exciting new initiative thousands of miles away from her Amsterdam hiding place, is Anne Frank. The young Brazilian participants are motivated into action by learning about Anne Frank’s life and views through an exhibition entitled ‘Let Me Be Myself ’, the most recent travelling exhibition created by the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank’s plea to adults – those living with her and those unknown who persecuted her – sparked the exhibition’s poignant title and her voice is strongly reflected in a youth-driven Brazilian movement for future change.

  By using this exhibition and Anne’s plea as the starting point, the Instituto Plataforma Brasil believe that a culture of peace is first created based on the understanding of the importance of good relations: with yourself, with the other, with your environment and with the spaces of decision. The youngsters involved go through a proce
ss of empowerment, receiving ongoing training and preparation as guides, and then by producing and utilising their own videos as triggers for reflection on Human Rights dilemmas in daily life. Joelke and her team strongly believe in Brazilian youth as the solution rather than the problem. Their ultimate aim for their country is the future implementation of a permanent youth forum and other community projects where young people are drivers for improvement to their multiracial society, one which comprises the descendants of original Native Brazilians and Portuguese colonizers, as well as the waves of Black African, European, Arab, and Japanese immigrants. The demography of the country has been changing and in the past decade, black and mixed-race Brazilians now outnumber whites. As Joelke explains, ‘Our plans involve a deep process of learning how to respect individual identities and, progressively, will embrace the power of diversity to safeguard our shared future, uniting governments, civil society and youth to build a new dynamic society together’. In order to carry out and grow her vision of widespread youth civic and political engagement in a country thirteen times the size of France, Joelke will be relying heavily on the use of communication technologies. She firmly believes that Anne Frank’s role cannot be underestimated in a truly forward-looking project that encourages young people to reflect on the dangers of discrimination, racism and social exclusion, and reinforces the importance of freedom, equal rights, democracy, and respect for diversity. And perhaps Anne Frank, who wrote so movingly about her love of nature, could even have a hand in the reversal of our planet’s ecological catastrophe.

  Back across the Atlantic in northern Europe, Norbert Hinterleitner, Head of Education at the Anne Frank House, described a project he had undertaken a decade earlier that could have future implications for divisive communities that straddle national borders. Between 2005 and 2009, Norbert and his colleague Peter Hörburger from the Anne Frank Verein (Association) based in Vienna, ran a project they called ‘Crossing Borders’ along the Austrian-Slovenian border. Schools from the regions Carinthia and Styria, lying on both sides of the border, participated. These regions have both Austrian and Slovenian names; the region we call Carinthia in English is called Kärnten (German) and Koroška (Slovene), and Styria is called Steiermark (German) and Štajerska (Slovene). As in many other communities where groups from a different ethnic heritage live side by side, freedom to use one’s language can become a matter of great significance. Jörg Haider, the leader of the populist right wing Freedom Party and Governor of Carinthia from 1989–91 and 1999–2008, was against bilingualism in the Austrian region of southern Carinthia, despite the fact that an indigenous Slovene community had lived there for generations. In 2001, the Austrian Constitutional Court had ruled that road signs in areas of Carinthia which had Slovene-speaking inhabitants, should be written in both the languages of German and Slovene. Haider hatched a cynical plan to outwit this by moving the German signs a few metres to outside the jurisdiction of the court’s ruling. This triggered a wave of protest among the local Slovene minority, including some acts of civil disobedience.

  Here was an inflammatory situation in a border region between two nations where the language issue was playing a significant role. The local inhabitants approached the Anne Frank Verein in Vienna, who, as well as taking the Anne Frank exhibition to the area, facilitated open and safe discussion in schools within the community. The aim of the ‘Crossing Borders’ project was to enable exchange between the young people of Austria and Slovenia to give them new insights into each other’s lives – their interests, their understanding of history and their ideas about the future. In schools on both sides of the border, Peter Hörburger led debates on the language issue, whilst a professional film-maker interviewed one of the official representatives of the Slovenian Minority in Carinthia, which was spoken in German and subtitled in Slovenian.

  In Britain, the Anne Frank Trust continues to garner plaudits and empirical proof of the success of its peer education methods. Mukith Khalisadar, who arrived at the Anne Frank Trust as a young project assistant in 2006 and went on to manage the Trust’s London Schools Project, is one who also believes that Anne Frank’s story is a timeless way of educating about the dangers of prejudice. He feels that her teenage writing defies time because her emotions of love, anger and frustration are what every young person feels at that age. He says that ‘Anne’s way of communicating her message in her diary will always be relevant. Although most young people don’t keep diaries now, they have Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms to communicate their message.’

  Mukith insists that in ten or twenty years’ time, Anne Frank’s life will still be relevant and her story won’t stop needing to be told. ‘I could be naïve and say that in the coming decades time her story won’t be relevant as there will be equality everywhere, but I have to be realistic. There will continue to be injustice in the world until people can accept that there will always be difference between people, and until people start to realize and respect that fact there will never be equality.’ The Anne Frank project’s ability to help bring about honest discussion on painful topics can be summed up by one London teenager who was motivated by learning Anne’s story to speak out. He told his peer group in a facilitated discussion on stereotyping, ‘It’s not a good feeling when people see me just as a black boy. They’re missing a lot of other things about me.’ Sadly, Mukith was right, Anne’s story will continue to be needed.

  In a lecture given in San Francisco in 2017, Ronald Leopold, the Director of the Anne Frank House, explored the moral dilemmas surrounding Anne Frank’s continued iconic status in the world, even referring to her as ‘a queen among icons’. Covering many of the issues that have occupied the minds of the educators, researchers and guardians of Holocaust memory who have been featured in this book, he asked,

  Must she be protected against those who would use her as a tool for their own present-day political ends? Must she be protected against comparisons between then and now? Must she be protected against those who would wish to de-Judaify her? Must she be protected against those who would prefer to ignore their own roles as perpetrators? Must she be protected against those who shared her fate, the survivors who suffered just as she did, and who look upon the ‘personality cult’ surrounding her with abhorrence and pain? Do we have to demystify her and make her an ordinary girl again (which is anything but what she wanted to be)?

  . . . And if we answer just some of these questions in the affirmative, who should do the protecting?

  He went on,

  For a long time, the Anne Frank House has felt and expressed the responsibility to counteract the misuse and abuse of the memory of Anne Frank. There were also good reasons for this: after all, what is at stake is a vulnerable legacy that is threatened from all sides. Firstly, of course, from neo-Nazi circles who have regularly denied the authenticity of the diary of Anne Frank, often as a component of Holocaust denial in general. Secondly, her memory is threatened by the pressure to commercially exploit it. Examples of Anne Frank merchandising constantly crop up, from roses and tulips bearing her name to T-shirts, caps, underwear and Anne Frank snacks on Amsterdam canal boats. This marketing does not necessarily have to lead to a devaluation of her legacy, but it does pave the way for increasing superficiality. Thirdly, the remembrance of Anne Frank is threatened by appropriations that simply have to be called into question.

  Referring to the responsibility of the Anne Frank House’s central and worldwide role in the remembrance of this girl’s life and death, he pondered on whether what could be considered ‘undesirable appropriations’ should be stopped. His conclusion, for several reasons, was that they should not. Ronald was looking to the future when he came to this conclusion. He reasoned that,

  More than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the greatest threat to the remembrance of the life story of Anne Frank and the history of her time is that no appropriations will be made of them at all. In other words: that this history is in danger of becoming ever less releva
nt to current and future generations. It is precisely the fact that Anne Frank remains a source of inspiration, in whatever context, that her life story does not lose relevance, even if we might raise our eyebrows at the ways in which the connection with today’s world is made.

  A contentious issue, particularly among academics in the field of Holocaust studies, has been using Holocaust history for tackling social issues such as bullying in school, and more recently online. Ronald felt that even though the Anne Frank House were not proponents of using the life story of Anne Frank for anti-bullying programmes, citing the big difference between bullying on the one hand and persecution on the other, he did understand the reasons for doing this, and that this could even ‘add more colour to the palette of the remembrance of Anne Frank’.

  In saying so, he was, however, adamant that in order to diversify the use of Anne Frank’s story as a vehicle for addressing social issues, the history must be reliably and authentically presented. He pledged that the Anne Frank House would never relinquish its role in taking a stand against attacks on the authenticity of the diary of Anne Frank and attempts at Holocaust denial.

  Professor Tony Kushner of the Department of History at the University of Southampton, and one of the Anne Frank Trust’s first board members, reflected on how Holocaust education had moved on over the past three decades since the Trust had been set up. ‘Even just twenty years ago we were fighting tough battles to get the Holocaust taught, but now it’s so established, it’s easy.’ He compared the Conservative government’s plan for a new Westminster-sited Holocaust memorial for Britain, and its £50,000,000 cost, to the unsuccessful campaign to get a similar memorial for slavery, which in fact had a closer connection to several British cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol.