Once our charitable status was achieved, we started to plan the official launch of the Trust. By then I had a part-time administrator, Janey Mitchell, whose other job was as a news presenter on the local Dorset radio station. We worked together in the study of my Victorian house in the historic Dorset town of Wimborne, ten miles north of Bournemouth. Thanks to our new colleagues at the Holocaust Educational Trust, it would take place at the House of Commons in November 1991. Bee and Sid Klug, generous as ever, kindly agreed to host the event but were rather surprised when more than 300 people turned up, politicians, educators and activists – all curious about the new Anne Frank Educational Trust. The proceedings were chaired by the recently retired Speaker of the House of Commons, Lord Tonypandy, who to our delight called for ‘Order, Order’ in his booming and very distinctive Welsh accent. Coming just two and a half years after I had watched the Anne Frank exhibition truck roll into Bournemouth Art College, sitting on the speaking panel in that parliamentary setting was perhaps the first, of many times, I have said to myself, ‘How the hell did we get here?’
But I had a reason for such strong motivation. I was born in 1951, just six years after the end of the Second World War. Though I wasn’t really aware, my father Harry Goldblatt went away to do his obligatory National Service when I was a small child and my rather glamorous mother, Eileen, was still struggling to ‘make do’ from the post-war rationing. It’s odd that when I look back to those 1950s childhood days, I see everything in black, white and various shades of grey and beige. Maybe it’s because the few cars we saw around the streets as children were mostly black. An exception was our brightly flower-bedecked rear garden, my father’s labour of love each Sunday,
My father came from a large Polish émigré family, indeed my grandparents Rebecca and Abraham Goldblatt spoke with thick Polish accents, so much so that when my father started his primary school, his teacher called him Eric for a few weeks. Eventually one afternoon he burst into tears and wailed to the teacher that his name was really Harry. She apologized to the distressed child and explained that his name Harry had sounded so much like Eric when his Polish mother had introduced him to her, that she took this for his name. My grandmother used to swear and curse in Yiddish if she ever heard mention of the Russian Tsar and his family, as it was intimidation by his Cossacks which had forced them to flee their town of Sziedlce, cross Europe and embark on a ship to London.
As a growing and curious child in the mid-1950s I soon became aware of family ‘whisperings’. I vaguely understood in my childlike way that there had been some kind of catastrophe. I had no idea what the catastrophe was, or even what the word really meant, but eventually I discovered that this ‘catastrophe’ had affected our paternal grandparents’ remaining family in Poland, both on my paternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s sides.
I was around seven or eight when I was told by my mother that my father was planning to take a trip to Poland to see if he could locate any family property and, even more importantly but more unlikely, any news about ‘surviving’ family members. I was really not sure what all this meant. However, my mother firmly put her foot down about this impending expedition as she was very worried she would never see my father again if he should disappear behind the impenetrable Iron Curtain.
I can’t actually remember how old I was when I discovered what the catastrophe actually entailed. I guess for protective Jewish parents of that generation it was too difficult to sit a child down and tell them the truth. I do remember reading the French lawyer and diplomat Samuel Pisar’s autobiography Of Blood and Hope as a young teenager, and then reading it again as what he described was so difficult to comprehend. Years later I met Samuel Pisar when he was a still handsome elderly man and was able to show him my torn and much-thumbed copy of his book. Pisar sadly passed away in July 2015.
Through the following years I read more, saw more in films, TV and articles, and heard more from others I encountered, as no Jewish family in Europe was untouched by the catastrophe. Although I have been asked in many interviews when I first read Anne’s diary, I actually think it was many years later. The American TV miniseries Holocaust starring the young actors Meryl Streep and James Woods, was a watershed, and many adults, astonishingly including British Jews, told me they had only really learnt about the Shoah from that series, made in 1978.
In the early 1980s, as a young mother myself at home with my two small children Joe and Tilly, I decided I wanted to become involved with human rights issues. I think having children does that to you – you have the need to make the world better for your own children’s future, and indeed many of the Anne Frank Trust’s most passionate activists have joined us when they have become new parents. I joined my local Amnesty International branch, but found its global human rights mission too all-encompassing. I soon felt I would be a small cog in a very big wheel that was trying to change too many of the ills of the world. Years later I was in fact to work closely with Amnesty International again on several projects, including the development of a joint Amnesty International and Anne Frank Trust teaching pack called Writing in Impossible Circumstances.
In early 1981, I was invited to attend a talk in Bournemouth being given by Avital Sharansky, who was travelling the world, telling the story of her young husband Natan, then known by his Russian name of Anatoly. Sharansky had been a charismatic and influential leader of the Jewish movement to leave the Soviet Union, and along with the renowned physicist Andrei Sakharov, was calling for greater human rights in his country. Of course he could not be allowed to do so for long, and in 1978, in a show trial reported on throughout the free world, Sharansky was sentenced to nine long years in the Siberian gulag. He and Avital had been married for just one day when he was imprisoned, and she was exiled soon after.
Hearing Avital speak, I was overcome by a feeling of ‘this could have been me’. I joined the Bournemouth Committee for Soviet Jewry and, for seven years as its Chair, the cause became my passion and mission. Our very active campaigning group wrote supportive letters to ‘Refuseniks’, but these were usually intercepted on arrival in the Soviet Union and not delivered to their intended recipients. ‘Refuseniks’ was a term given to Soviet Jews who had applied to emigrate but had had their request refused by the authorities (very few requests were actually approved). Our little group also lobbied those with power in the West to put pressure on Leonid Brezhnev, and then Yuri Andropov, the hardened and intransigent Soviet leaders, to allow the Jews who wished to leave the Soviet Union to do so. Bournemouth was a well-known conference town so we were fortunate in being able to get to meet powerful political leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, and we were constantly thinking up sensational new ways to attract media coverage for our cause. One time, when Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were due to hold a summit in Reykjavik in 1986, we had sticks of Bournemouth seaside rock candy specially made for us in a local factory with the words ‘Let Our People Go’ printed inside. They were duly delivered to the Soviet and US embassies in London with a request to be sent on to Iceland in advance of the summit meeting.
Many of the campaigners went on missions to the Soviet Union, travelling as ‘bona fide’ tourists with Intourist Travel, the Soviet travel company. We visited beleaguered Refusenik families, many of whom had a family member in a labour camp, taking them much-needed supplies, as once they applied to leave they were denied a means of work, medical treatment and essentials to live on. This is how the word ‘Refusenik’ came about – refused emigration, and as a consequence of applying to leave, then refused work and benefits. The term ‘Refusenik’ had been coined by a London activist and Russian speaker called Michael Sherbourne, and has gone on to be universally used by the media in describing people who doggedly reject the status quo.
In advance of my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1982, I started to learn Russian and sailed through the first few lessons as it is such a lyrical language to speak. My confidence grew with my ease of reading the Cyrillic text, that is
until my teacher started on all the exceptions to the grammatical rules I had learnt. The exceptions started to outnumber the rules, and I decided that Russian is a language best to be learnt from early childhood.
By the late 1980s, our dynamic campaign was losing its momentum. Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced Glasnost and Perestroika and the door of emigration for our plucky ‘Refuseniks’ was creaking open. I was starting to feel bereft. But then I received the call from David Soetendorp and less than two years later I was running the Anne Frank Educational Trust.
What a different world it was at that time in so many areas, social, political, technological and demographic. In 1990, the most innovative technical device in the Trust’s office was a fax machine, which spewed out shiny cream-coloured paper that had to be read and noted within three weeks before the type faded away. I struggled with a basic computer and the Locoscript programme (no Windows, Word, Macs or tablets in those far-off days). The internet was yet to take over our lives, and we conducted our business through posting and receiving letters, or for urgent matters, using the fax machine or making phone calls.
On a more serious note, many Holocaust survivors were just in the process of ‘coming out’ in a public way about their experiences, having suppressed their personal stories for many years while rebuilding their lives and bringing up well-adjusted children. Once they had taken the courageous step of speaking publicly, many survivors found a vocation and mission to educate, and went on to become superb educators and role models for young people.
When we started the Trust, Stephen Lawrence was a bright South London schoolboy with hopes of becoming an architect, and terrorism was something associated most usually with the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Britain was a member of the European Union, but along with just eleven other countries. Immigration from European countries was the exception rather than the norm. Immigration to the UK was much more from former Commonwealth countries, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the islands of the West Indies. British Asian-born or Asian-heritage women, were depicted in their colourful saris. Muslim women’s headscarves and burkhas were not often seen around our city’s streets, except on Arab tourists in the West End of London.
There have been waves of refugees arriving to our shores in the ensuing years, reflecting the world’s unrelenting conflicts and persecutions, Rwandans, Kosovans, Liberians, Zimbabweans, Somalis and Sudanese, Afghanis, Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Kurds, and most recently Syrians. Many young refugees have been involved with our work as educators, been recipients of our Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage and spoken at our fundraising events. One young man who came to speak, the son of a murdered doctor, had fled for his life from Guinea Bissau, a country I had hardly even heard of until we were told his terrible story.
Over the past ten years the Trust has changed the way it works, from one major travelling exhibition that visited a city for a month, to more intensive work in individual schools for a two-week period. From its humble beginnings in my own home, the organization now has over 30 staff members, educating over 30,000 young people a year about the damaging effect of prejudice. Later I will describe how it grew from one person to the flourishing organization it has become.
Chapter 5
Anne and Eva Schloss – the Girl who Became her Stepsister
As a refugee child in Amsterdam, Eva Geiringer Schloss had played with Anne Frank before both their families were forced into hiding for their lives. One of the girls managed to survive and the other didn’t. Their lives crossed again when Eva’s mother married Anne’s father Otto. Eva became Anne’s ‘posthumous stepsister’ and many years afterwards she became a co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK.
I first met Eva in March 1989, when she came to Bournemouth to open the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition, the first I had been involved in. I was a little in awe of the prospect of meeting Anne Frank’s ‘posthumous stepsister’, but little did I know how our paths would conjoin for the following three decades.
Eva had only ‘come out’ three years earlier about the pain she endured in the Holocaust. It took her a full forty years after her liberation to be able to speak publicly about things she had buried deep in the recesses of her mind, and this was not something she had volunteered to do. Like so many Holocaust survivors I have met, after the terrible times she had been through, she chose to lock the door of that compartment in her mind and throw away the key. Eva had a busy post-war life, relocating to London where she studied photography, met and married a young man called Zvi Schloss, brought up her three daughters Caroline, Jackie and Sylvia, and then made a successful and fulfilling business from her passion for antiques. After four decades of silence about her early life, Eva had finally opened her wounds to her husband and children. She had spoken about the separation and deaths of her father Erich Geiringer and teenage elder brother Heinz. ‘I left feeling that I was walking on a precipice between my current life and the one I had left behind,’ she recalls in her memoir After Auschwitz. ‘Suddenly my mind was full of memories of Pappy and Heinz, our life in Amsterdam, the terrible train journey to Auschwitz, and saying goodbye on the ramp. I remembered how cold and dirty it had been in Birkenau, the frostbite cutting into my toes and the pain of starvation.’ She had ‘let the story tumble out’ and couldn’t stop the memories even if she had wanted to.
It happened in an unplanned way in March 1986 at the Mall Galleries in central London, located along the tree-lined avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace. The occasion was the VIP and media launch of the very first British showing of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank in the World’. As she entered the crowded room with her mother Elfriede ‘Fritzi’ Frank, Eva, who at the age of 56 had never been in the public eye before, was rather overwhelmed by being at such a high profile event. The two women were welcomed by Ken Livingstone, who was at that time the Leader of the Greater London Council and was acting as the chairman of the evening’s proceedings. He had done his research and knew the women’s close connection to the Anne Frank story, so cordially invited Eva and Fritzi to join him at the top table. Livingstone indicated to Eva to sit alongside him, which she duly did – even though she had no idea who he was. She explained that, ‘In those days my world was around my family and my antiques business – I wasn’t so interested in politics.’
During the evening, Livingstone asked Eva to tell him some more about her life and how her mother and Otto Frank had met. Leaving behind the warmth and comfort of that splendid room in the heart of springtime London, Eva’s mind took itself back to the winter of 1945 and the days immediately after the liberation of the death camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II/Birkenau. After the Soviet army had entered the camps and announced that the inmates were now liberated, some of the women who were still alive and strong enough made the 3km walk across the fields from Birkenau to Auschwitz I camp in search of any surviving male relatives. Forty-year-old Fritzi had been too weak, but 15-year-old Eva went in search of news of her father and brother. Entering one of the Auschwitz barracks, she had spotted a familiar face. There, lying on the top level of a wooden bunk, wrapped in a blanket and staring sadly in front of him, was the father of her Amsterdam playmate Anne Frank. Mr Frank raised himself up as Eva approached and she reminded him that she was Anne’s playmate. But he had no news of Erich and Heinz Geiringer to give to Eva, he was awaiting news of his own wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot. Eva shook her head to indicate she had not seen any of his family and left the barrack.
After three weeks, a group of survivors boarded trains out of Auschwitz, escorted by their Soviet liberators. Instead of taking those who had come from western Europe homewards, all the trains headed eastwards behind Soviet lines, as war was still raging further west. Although these transports were in fact open trucks, they were almost comfortable compared to the packed and sealed cattle trucks used to bring the prisoners to their fate in the camps. The journey home was long and tortuous, taking three to four months of travelling across eastern Europe. Every so
often the train would stop, the passengers would get down and stretch their legs or relieve themselves and use the opportunity to mingle and search for news of loved ones. Eva recalled that people would come from the nearby villages to see who was on the train and would try to sell them items of food such as eggs and potatoes, but the newly-liberated prisoners had no money to buy anything with – except perhaps a woman’s headscarf that could be traded for a few eggs.
On one such stop, Eva spotted Mr Frank again, looking forlorn and tired. This time she took her mother over to talk to him. The two adults had in fact met before in Amsterdam as they were near neighbours, and had similar-aged children. Standing on that remote railway line chatting, Otto, Fritzi and Eva all desperate for news of their families, who could have anticipated how close their three lives would become? Then the train’s whistle sounded and all the passengers got back on board, each to their designated carriages, but Eva was about to have a new worry.
Somewhere further along the journey, on another stop, Fritzi had got off the train to relieve herself. Eva was back on board when the whistle sounded, but the train slowly started to move off before Fritzi could get back on. Some passengers in a similar plight were able to hurl themselves back on, but as the train gathered speed Fritzi was left screaming and waving by the railway track. The train continued its journey across Eastern Europe and days and nights slowly passed. Eva could not believe that, after all she and her mother had been through together and against all the odds come through, finally after their liberation they would be torn apart. The joy of freedom was replaced by utter despair, as 15-year-old Eva was alone in the world.
Eventually, after a week, when the train stopped in the city of Czernowitz (at that time in Romania but now in Ukraine), mother and daughter were somehow miraculously reunited. Fritzi had been doggedly determined to find the train from Auschwitz, and after days of travelling across former Austrian lands and staying with a returning Jewish family, a group of freed British prisoners of war had helped her find the Auschwitz convoy. Meanwhile, further along the same train as it pushed on towards Odessa on the Black Sea, Otto Frank had encountered another woman from Amsterdam, Rootje ‘Rosa’ de Winter. She had the sad task of gently telling him that she had been with his wife Edith when she had died on 6 January. Just three weeks later the Soviet army had arrived, but it was too late for Edith Frank, overtaken by starvation and worry about her precious daughters Anne and Margot.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 8