The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  Eva remains determined to live her life to the full as though she is seeing and experiencing the world through the eyes of her lost teenage brother, the boy who was afraid of dying. In the summer of 1999 Eva (and perhaps with a vision of Heinz alongside her) soared above the Mediterranean Sea on a hang glider, quite a feat of daring for a 70-year-old woman, and one which she told me she is not planning to repeat!

  Chapter 6

  Anne Frank’s Role in the Transition from Communism

  In 1985 a wind of change began to blow in Moscow that would have dramatic ramifications on all the countries that made up the mighty Soviet Empire. The 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen to succeed the old school hard-liner Konstantin Chernenko as ‘Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet’, in effect becoming the new leader of the Soviet Union. Following on from three elderly and traditionalist Soviet leaders who had died in quick succession, here was a relatively young, well-educated and pragmatic man who looked to the future rather than the prevailing status quo. Gorbachev had graduated with a law degree from Moscow State University and worked his way up through the ranks of the Communist Party.

  Gorbachev was conscious that the days of hard-line Communism were numbered. The Soviet economy, much of which was geared to the nuclear arms race against the USA, had been stagnating since the late 1970s. In an era of new technology, the corrupting influence of Western satellite TV had the ability to be beamed uncontrollably into the Soviet Union. Gorbachev quickly set about introducing dramatic reforms. We soon came to hear of two new words that filtered into the languages of Western countries. ‘Perestroika’, which described the reform and restructuring of the Communist Party, and ‘Glasnost’, which meant more open and increased government transparency. US President Ronald Reagan held several meetings with the new Soviet leader to discuss arms control and the UK’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that Mr Gorbachev was ‘a man I can do business with’. A Soviet leader had become almost likeable and certainly less fearsome. The West nicknamed him ‘Gorbie’ and we soon came to associate the large and distinctive red birthmark extending down from the bald top of his head to his forehead with a map of the world he wished to reach out to.

  And then the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, itself began to disintegrate as its diverse groups of peoples, Slavs, Serbs, East Germans, Croats, Poles, Lithuanians and others, sought to re-establish their nationhood. From Moscow, from where the tentacles of the Communist ideology had spread out seventy years earlier, to Poland and the Baltic States in the north, across the Eurasian Steppe, to Ukraine, Belorussia and Georgia, outwards to the central and southern European nations of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and eventually the last bastion of hard-line Communism, Albania, country after country abandoned the Soviet yoke and Communist ideology and established themselves as independent nations. On TV screens all over the world, people watched in disbelief as events took place that were only recently unimaginable, including the Christmas Day 1989 execution by firing squad of the tyrannical and corrupt Romanian President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife, and finally in November 1990 the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 1991 the USSR had ceased to exist. The world order had changed and the old certainties of the Cold War were no more. Summed up in the words of Vladislav Zukov, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, ‘The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological and economic significance.’

  ***

  In those very early days of the dismantling of Communism and breakup of the Soviet Union, the Anne Frank exhibition became one of the very first cultural events to arrive in Russia from the West, and its presence had a profound impact.

  From three venues in Moscow the exhibition went on to Ukraine, giving Holocaust survivors a platform to at last speak openly of their experiences for the first time in forty-five years. The project was helped by Anne Frank House International Director Jan Erik Dubbelman being introduced to a fearless Russian journalist called Elena Yacovitz, whose bravery Jan Erik was to witness for himself on one chilling evening in Moscow. Even though there had been seismic regime change, the old Soviet systems of repressive and paranoid bureaucracy had not completely disappeared, as I too discovered to my cost.

  Since those early days of transition from Soviet authoritarianism, the Anne Frank exhibition has been playing an invaluable role in helping newly-independent countries throughout the former Soviet bloc address recent history and embrace pluralism within their borders. To this day, the Anne Frank exhibition continues its travels across the thousands of kilometres that shaped the map of the former Soviet Union – from the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia to Kazakhstan, from Poland to the former Yugoslavia – diverse regional histories and conflicts have been reassessed through the prism of Anne Frank.

  Anne in Moscow

  The ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition had been invited to Moscow in 1990 through state-approved routes. It so happened that the internationally well-known Liberal Rabbi of The Hague, Avraham Soetendorp, had connections to a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Avraham was the brother of the Anne Frank Trust’s co-founder David Soetendorp, and was as equally involved in the 1980s in the international support campaign for oppressed Soviet Jews as David and I were. It was Avraham’s rather off-the-wall idea to take the Anne Frank exhibition to the rapidly-changing Soviet Union. After confirmation of the Academy of Sciences’ endorsement of the planned project, the Dutch Ministry of Culture agreed to fund a tour of the Anne Frank exhibition to the Soviet Union.

  Even though there was high-level support, Jan Erik described the project as ‘extremely fragile’, as there were no grassroots community groups or passionate individuals who could spread the word through their networks help as volunteers in the usual way. That is, until Jan Erik was introduced to the young journalist Elena Yacovitz via a Dutch correspondent living in Moscow. Elena certainly had the passion, even if not the background knowledge of the subject. On their first meeting to discuss whether it would ever be possible for the Anne Frank exhibition to come to the USSR, Jan Erik was shocked to discover that, despite being the daughter of Jews and a well-read and curious journalist who worked for an internationally-known literary journal, Elena had never heard the word ‘Holocaust’ until he had used it in their conversation. She was then able to relate this newly-discovered word to the talk of a European genocide she had heard from her parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Stirred by the prospect of the exhibition, Elena nonetheless questioned its probability with the blunt query, ‘I feel the Anne Frank House is ready for Russia, but is Russia ready for the Anne Frank House?’ However, as an intrepid young journalist who had lived through dangerous times, Elena loved nothing more than a challenge. She promised Jan Erik she would do all she could to make it happen through her own network of grass-roots contacts in Moscow. Jan Erik had the impression that there would indeed be a new welcoming atmosphere in the capital of the former Soviet Union.

  After months of planning, in the summer of 1990 the Anne Frank exhibition was set to open in Moscow in a government-owned art gallery in the city centre. I was thrilled when Hans Westra, the Anne Frank House director, invited me to join the high-level delegation that would fly to Moscow to attend the opening. On a sunny morning in June, I arrived with my suitcase at the check-in desk at Heathrow Airport excited to be joining the first-ever delegation from the Anne Frank House to the former Soviet Union. The plan was that I was to hook up with the Anne Frank House delegation and a group of Dutch high-level dignitaries in Stockholm, where we would all change flights and continue on together to Moscow.

  As the check-in attendant smiled and took my passport and ticket, I felt how different times were since my last visit to Moscow in 1986. Since then I had been refused entry twice as I was considered by the Soviet authorities as an unwanted troublemaker, due to my long-time activism in the campaign to help Jews leave the religiously-repressive Soviet Union. Armed with
a precious visa that had been issued to me a few days earlier by the Russian Embassy, here was I about to see for myself a transformed post-Soviet Moscow.

  All was not right, though. While I stood in front of her, the check-in attendant made a call, put down the phone and leaned forwards towards me. The smile had been replaced by a serious expression. ‘I am sorry Mrs Walnes, but your visa to travel has been rescinded,’ she told me. I was shocked and despondent. Even though so much had changed in Russia, and many of the people we had worked to free had finally been granted exit visas, clearly I was still considered ‘persona non grata’ by the new regime and its Soviet-era data bank. An uncontrollably deep sigh left my body. The Anne Frank exhibition opening in Moscow was to take place without me.

  Jan Erik recently recalled those heady days of the Anne Frank exhibition in Moscow, and nearly thirty years on he could still picture the dramatic scene of elderly Jewish attendees at the exhibition launch event openly and unashamedly shedding tears. This was their first experience of a public exhibition about the Holocaust. The reason for their emotional response was explained to Jan Erik as, ‘Not just what you have brought here, but the very fact that this could happen at all’. It was an indication for them that times were changing for good, a definite and irreversible change that could not be turned back. What struck Jan Erik most was the growing realization in these people that they could perhaps now even travel abroad themselves if they wished to.

  The Anne Frank exhibition was a catalyst for open discussions among Jews and non-Jews on whether there was still evidence of old anti-Semitism in the new Russia. Young people felt it was no longer an issue, even though in 1990 there were still restrictions in place on Jews attending university or getting jobs. They perceived anti-Semitism to be more about violence against Jews, rather than simply professional or academic doors being closed, explaining their feelings as, ‘Anti-Semitism is when your life is in real danger’.

  However, Jan Erik told me about a frightening incident that had happened when he and Elena Yacovitz had attended a meeting at ‘The House of Writers’. This was in fact a group of intellectuals that regularly met in a room near Moscow University to talk about literature. Although the meeting was conducted in Russian, the vodka flowed freely and the assembled intellectuals had seemed welcoming. Jan Erik expected that writers, and this group seemed to be highly intellectual, would all be pro-democracy and liberal-leaning like Elena and her friends. However, he was surprised when the atmosphere in the stuffy and crowded room became increasingly heated, especially after Elena had posed a question. After their goodbyes to the group at the end of the session, Jan Erik and Elena started to walk back together through the dimly lit Moscow streets.

  As they approached a road, Elena took a couple of steps in front of Jan Erik and he immediately spotted that there was something strange on the back of her coat, which she evidently hadn’t noticed when she put it on. Puzzled by this, Elena removed her coat to see what it was and Jan Erik noticed that her whole body seemed to freeze. She slowly explained to Jan Erik what the message, scrawled in lipstick, was. Elena’s coat had been daubed with a large circle surrounding a cross, like a target for shooting practice. It was not a joke and it clearly indicated violent intent. Jan Erik could see that Elena was clearly very shaken, but after a minute or so she shrugged, saying softly and calmly, ‘It happens’. The incident was not spoken of again. Jan Erik recalled, ‘This young woman was so amusing and fun to be with. Even since this deliberately threatening incident, she has continued to be outspoken in her journalism. This left a big impression on me of courage under pressure.’

  What also struck Jan Erik about working in Russia in that momentous time was that he and the Anne Frank House team felt they were part of history, part of a changing world, where there was so much hope for, yet fear of, change. Jan Erik even underwent his own change in attitude towards a long-perceived enemy.

  Jan Erik Dubbelman had been born in 1955, while the Netherlands was still recovering from the trauma of the German occupation and the privations it had brought. This was also a Europe where fear of Fascism had been replaced by fear of the Cold War. His recollections of a western European childhood are similar to my own, ‘We children of the 1950s were terrified of the “H-bomb” being dropped on us and the threat of “Reds under the Bed”, i.e. the spread of the Communist empire to our own country.’ Jan Erik remembers being scared seeing movies where the Soviet Army were nightmarish armed aggressors in large grey coats and fur hats. But in Moscow in 1990 Jan Erik found himself chatting warmly to, and even embracing, the former Red Army officers he had so feared as a child. These were men who were now trying to help ensure people came along to the Anne Frank exhibition.

  From the central art gallery, the Anne Frank exhibition moved to the Library of Foreign Literature, just outside the intimidatingly high redbrick walls of the Kremlin. This venue was at the invitation of the library’s Director, another fearless Russian woman called Ekatarina ‘Katya’ Genieva. Katya’s personal motivation for her invitation to the exhibition is extremely interesting and serves as another illustration of the turbulent and violent times as religion was re-emerging in the Soviet Union. Under Communism Katya Genieva had not been afraid to challenge officialdom. One example of her determination to be fearless was that as a student at Moscow State University in the early 1970s she wrote her dissertation on James Joyce’s Ulysses, at that time a banned book in the Soviet Union.

  Katya had been an admirer of the charismatic Russian Orthodox priest, theologian and writer Alexander Men. Among Men’s vast canon of literary and charitable works, his book Son of Man served as the introduction to Christianity for thousands of citizens in the Soviet Union who had been brought up in the atheist state. He went on to baptize hundreds, possibly even thousands, of new Christians, and even founded an Orthodox ‘Open University’. For all Alexander Men’s altruism and spirituality, his earthly reward was to be murdered early on a September Sunday morning in 1990, just outside his home in the village of Semkhoz and while on his way to conduct a church service. It was a particularly gruesome and nasty killing by an axe-wielding assassin who was waiting for the priest on a secluded country path. Bleeding profusely, Men managed to drag himself back to his cottage, but died that day in hospital. He had not been robbed so the axeman was thought to have been from, or maybe paid by, the KGB. Alexander Men’s influence in Russia and abroad is still widely felt and there have been calls for his canonisation.

  Katya Genieva was so deeply affected by Men’s brutal killing that she made a vow that to honour his memory she would never bow to pressure from the establishment. In what she felt was a positive and affirmative act, she made the approach to the Anne Frank House about hosting the Anne Frank exhibition at her Library of Foreign Literature. She even invited Archbishop Vladimir Kirill, at that time a senior official in the Russian Orthodox Church to speak at the opening – no small step in such a supposedly egalitarian, but in effect hierarchical, society.

  Archbishop Kirill agreed to attend and on the night his address started well when he spoke about Anne Frank as a brave girl. But then, from behind his thick white beard, and dressed in his flowing white ecclesiastical robes, Kirill went on to describe Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen as unavoidable, because the decision had been made by God and nothing could be learnt from it. Feeling he was doing a good deed by endorsing the event with his presence, the Archbishop had nonetheless placed Anne Frank and the Holocaust into his supremely conservative religious interpretation. This did not go down well with the Holocaust survivors in the audience who had faced forty-five years of Communist denial of their experience and were finally seeing an end to the suppression of their histories. A young Jewish man in their midst could take it no longer. He quietly removed his shoe and to gasps from the audience, threw it directly at the Archbishop.

  Vladimir Kirill is now the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the Russian equivalent of the Pope, and is respected by many. His conservative views have not less
ened, recently describing the jailed rock band Pussy Riot as carrying out ‘the work of Satan’ and some fundamental human rights as ‘contradictory to the Church and therefore heresy’.

  Ilya’s story

  Another of Elena Yacovitz’s promised contacts that she had brought in to help with the Anne Frank exhibition was the historian Ilya Altman. Ilya had been born in the same year as Jan Erik, but on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in a town near Kiev in Ukraine. Both Ilya’s parents had been Red Army officers, real examples of those images that had given little Jan Erik his dramatic childhood nightmares. Ilya’s parents had met in 1943, the year before the town was liberated from German occupation. Three thousand Jews had been murdered in that one town but miraculously all Ilya’s family had managed to survive.

  Ilya had grown up knowing he was Jewish, but not really sure what that meant. He did however learn about the massacres carried out by the Nazis at the nearby ravine of Babi Yar. Over 100,000 people – Jews, Russian prisoners of war, Roma and Communists – were shot at this notorious site. Ilya told me modestly that he wasn’t considered a top student, but had excelled at football and chess. Nonetheless, he graduated from the Moscow State History Institute and published three articles in well-read historical magazines. In a time of anti-Jewish professional and academic quotas, he had personally encountered no opposition about studying for a doctorate, although another Jewish friend of his in St Petersburg had been forced to travel three hours each way every day to a different town in order to be allowed to lecture in his subject.