It was an unnerving experience on that afternoon waiting to be called in to the KGB office, but it was as nothing compared to the constant harassment of the ‘Refuseniks’, who at any time could be arrested. We knew that we could leave the country, but these courageous people that we had come to lend our support to, definitely could not. Once inside the cramped office, we, the two women and two men who found themselves a world away from our comfortable lives in Bournemouth, were directed by two burly KGB men to cease our activity of visiting Soviet Jews or we would be ‘on the next plane out’ of Lithuania. We happened to know that the next plane from Vilnius to Moscow was in two days’ time, the day we were due to leave, so having ensured that Carmela and Vladimir and the others were comfortable with it, we continued to do what we had come to Vilnius to do. Perhaps this was the day that my name had been added to the Soviet computer system as a ‘serious troublemaker’, resulting in the cancellation of my visit to Moscow for the Anne Frank exhibition opening eight years later.
Anne in Latvia
After its tour of Lithuania in 1998, the Anne Frank exhibition then proceeded north to the neighbouring Baltic state of Latvia, a country which was moving out of Communism but into a new and harsh form of nationalism. During the late 1980s, Latvian nationalism had worked well as a liberating force for the people and mobilized the disillusioned Soviet-ruled masses. However, once the country had become independent from Moscow, Latvian nationalism spawned the introduction of notorious post-Communist policies, such as its Citizenship Law. This measure disenfranchised about a third of Latvia’s people on the grounds that they were considered ‘Russian remnants’ of the Soviet occupation. Because of this, as well as other restrictive policies, Latvian nationalism became thought of as a classic example of ‘ethnic nationalism’, where efforts to protect what the government liked to call ‘cultural uniqueness’ in fact generated anti-democratic policies.
As well as the travelling exhibition, Norbert Hinterleitner and his colleagues from Amsterdam brought to Latvia the popular play about Eva Schloss’s life, And Then They Came for Me. Building on the success of the previous initiative in Lithuania to bring Lithuanian and Jewish teenagers together, this time Latvian and Russian teenagers were invited to participate together in the production of the play, both as the actors and the audience. For Eva Schloss, this production in the country where her own husband’s grandmother had been murdered by the Nazis was in her view ‘perhaps the most extraordinary’.
In Latvia, not only was there even more mutual understanding between the teenage actors from the different ethnic groups, but there were again a few romantic flirtations, this time between Russian and Latvian teens. Norbert never found out if their parents knew about these and, if they did, how they would have reacted. For him it was proof that ‘Ethnic division is an artificial human construction. It is weaker than the human desire for love and peace.’
Anne Goes Back to Ukraine
After its first visit to Ukraine in 1990, the Anne Frank exhibition returned in 2003. Ukraine had meanwhile become an independent state in 1991, formalized by a referendum at the end of that year. Like much of eastern and central Europe, Ukraine had a varied history in terms of its nationhood and identity. Western Ukraine had belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of the eighteenth century, although for a short time in the seventeenth century parts of the region had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire.
Eastern Ukraine had a different history, having been incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1667. During the eighteenth century the Russian empress Catherine the Great had invited European settlers to come and cultivate the lands of Eastern Ukraine, and Poles, Germans, Swiss and other nationalities took up her invitation.
Fearing the rise of separatism, during the nineteenth century Russia started imposing limits on the Ukrainian language and culture, even banning its use and study. Some Ukrainian intellectuals left the Eastern Ukraine for the Western side, while others embraced a Pan-Slavic or Russian identity. Many well-known authors or composers of the nineteenth century that we consider as Russian were actually of Ukrainian origin, notably Nikolai Gogol and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. These deep-rooted issues of national identity affect Ukraine even today, resulting in the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, pro-Russian unrest in southern and Eastern Ukraine, and the continuous deadly fighting between Russian-aligning and Western-aligning Ukrainians.
In 2000, Ukraine had been rocked by a scandal which became known as the ‘Cassette Scandal’, or ‘Tapegate’, thus named after the discovery of tape recordings of the then President Leonid Kuchma apparently ordering the kidnap and murder of Georgiy Gongadze, a popular journalist. A criminal investigation into the President’s involvement in the murder was inconclusive, but the event dramatically affected the country’s domestic and foreign policy. It eventually led to the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’, which was actually an election process rather than a revolution, which installed Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko as the new President. The ‘Revolution’ was co-led by Yulia Tymochenko, who became the country’s first woman Prime Minister, instantly recognizable for the thick blonde plait always wound tightly round her head. Mrs Tymochenko was at that time named in Forbes magazine as the third most powerful woman in the world, but this did not save her from being convicted in 2011 for an allegedly corrupt gas deal between Ukraine and Russia, for which she served three years in prison.
Against this volatile historic and recent backdrop, in 2003 the exhibition that had superseded ‘Anne Frank in the World’, the appropriately-named ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’, was taken to Ukraine. The Anne Frank House team didn’t shirk from addressing specific Ukrainian issues. The exhibition was accompanied by two smaller localized displays, one about the Holocaust on Ukrainian territory, curated by the Ukrainian Centre of Holocaust Studies. The other, called ‘Sources of Tolerance’, showed the stories of ten post-war Ukrainian heroes who had risked their lives for citizens’ rights, and teacher and guide training sessions for this exhibition focused on the issues of co-existence with minorities in the present day. These Ukrainian-focused ancillary exhibitions helped to bring in even larger numbers of visitors than expected. Norbert Hinterleitner proudly told me that it was the first international project to do this in Ukraine. ‘The Ukrainian organizers, and the visitors too, valued the fact that here was a prestigious international partnership really caring about their history by giving a public showcase to Ukrainian experiences and their national heroes. They couldn’t thank us enough for this.’ The project also left a legacy of helping some of the smaller, more fragile Ukrainian NGOs to acquire funding to develop themselves.
Young Ukrainians related the Frank family’s experience in hiding to their own growing up in Soviet times. ‘There were eight people hiding on two floors in Anne Frank’s secret annexe in Amsterdam. But this is how we grew up here.’ Young people also took part in a weekend-long training seminar about prejudice and discrimination, called ‘Who are your neighbours?’. After the seminar they were asked to look for cases of intolerance in their own locality. Their findings formed the basis of self-created micro-exhibitions about the situation of minorities and discriminated groups in their hometowns, which were displayed in the schools.
The Anne Frank exhibition continued touring Ukraine for the next seven years and in that time, it visited all twenty-five provinces of the country.
Norbert’s Story
Norbert Hinterleitner, who has spent many years running Anne Frank programmes in post-Communist Eastern Europe, explained to me what has driven his enduring commitment to the Anne Frank programmes. He traces the first steps towards his journey as a moral educator to 1986, when he was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Austria.
Kurt Waldheim had just been elected the country’s President. During the Second World War, Waldheim had been attached to the Wehrmacht, the combined armed forces of Nazi Germany, and served on the Eastern Front, in Yugoslavia and in Greece. Even if they took no active part, Wal
dheim’s units were close enough to civilian massacres and the deportations of the Greek Jews from Salonika to have been aware of them. However, in Waldheim’s memoir entitled In the Eye of the Storm, published the year before he became President, there were omissions and discrepancies about his wartime service fighting for the Nazis. The controversy surrounding this became known as the ‘Waldheim Affair’, both in Austria and around the world. It was never proved that Waldheim actually took part in any atrocities – only that he had lied about his wartime activities.
During this period in Austria, politics became the topic to talk about. Norbert describes himself as belonging to the ‘Waldheim Generation’. ‘We were a teenage generation confronted with questions and we asked those questions. At this age we learned to be critical thinkers.’ In his early twenties in 1996, Norbert joined the ‘Gedenkdienst’, the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service (an alternative to Austria’s compulsory national military service), as he wished to contribute to a movement with a clear and positive mission, that of the acceptance of responsibility.
Vienna was the city where the Anne Frank House had chosen to launch their new flagship travelling exhibition, ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’, which had been created to replace the eleven-year-old and rather outdated-looking ‘Anne Frank in the World’. Through the Gedenkdienst’s involvement with the Anne Frank exhibition in Vienna, Norbert became a volunteer exhibition guide, one of the very first to show people around the Anne Frank House’s brand-new flagship exhibition.
‘A History for Today’ had its international launch in September 1996 at Vienna’s Town Hall, overlooking Heroes Square and opposite the Hapsburg Imperial Palace. It was on the balcony of this palace that in 1938 Adolf Hitler stood and proudly announced to the ecstatic crowds in the square below the German annexation of Austria, the country of his birth. After the defeat of Nazism in 1945 this imposing palace balcony was not used again for a public speech, even for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Vienna. The first person to be invited to make an address from that balcony was the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel, but not until over half a century after Hitler had made his notorious ‘Anschluss’ (annexation of Austria) announcement. In February 1993, the 20-year-old politically-charged Norbert Hinterleitner was standing in Heroes Square below that same balcony for a mass protest against Jörg Haider, the leader of the xenophobic right-wing Freedom Party. Norbert smiled when he told me that the numbers in the square on that night, estimated to be 250,000, far exceeded the number of Hitler’s followers who were there for the Fuhrer’s ‘Anschluss’ speech in 1938.
After volunteering as an Anne Frank exhibition guide in 1996, he carried out the remainder of his Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service term in the International Department of the Anne Frank House. Pretty soon he found himself working with the Anne Frank programmes in post-war Bosnia, helping to make a difference to the lives of war-traumatized young people. He remembers thinking, ‘Wow, these people at the Anne Frank House really know how to involve young people and give them meaningful activities to put their heart and soul into. That was the starting point of a journey that I hope will never end.’
When I first met Norbert in London in 1997, he was an idealistic young man with long dark hair flowing down almost to his waist. Twenty years on, his hair by now somewhat shorter, and with his head containing an encyclopaedia of educational experiences from across the continent of Europe, Norbert Hinterleitner’s journey has not ended. The young schoolboy who was stirred into action by being one of ‘Waldheim’s Generation’ is now the Head of Education at the Anne Frank House, running a team of sixteen educators and project managers.
Anne in Kazakhstan
One of the most recent and surprising countries the Anne Frank exhibition has visited is the Republic of Kazakhstan, the mysterious land of Genghis Khan. Straddling northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe, Kazakhstan is huge, covering an area of nearly three million square kilometres, and is actually the world’s largest landlocked country. Although Kazakhstan is best known in the West for the inept unsophistication of its mythical ‘famous son’ Borat, the country’s gas and oil and vast mineral resources have made it the economically-dominant nation of Central Asia, generating more than half of the entire region’s GDP.
Kazakhstan has long borders shared with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and although officially a landlocked country, actually even has a ‘shoreline’ around some of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. Such a vast country has a very varied terrain, which takes in flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Given its enormous area, its population density is low, at less than six people per square kilometre.
The lands of Kazakhstan have historically been inhabited by nomadic tribes. Genghis Khan made the country part of his Mongolian Empire, but following internal struggles among the conquerors, power eventually reverted back to the nomads. The Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppes in the eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan, treating it as part of the Russian Empire. In 1936, it was named the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although Kazakh is the state language, Russian remains the official language for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes.
Yelena Shvetsova was an idealistic young woman who had come from Kazakhstan to work as an intern with the International Youth Human Rights Movement in the city of Voronezh in south-west Russia. This is a network of young adults from more than thirty countries, all sharing the idea that human rights and individual dignity are crucial values to be nurtured and supported. Participants must be young, either in their actual age or in their heart, and agree that different people, attitudes and methods should be appreciated; only violence, aggression and discrimination are deemed unacceptable.
In 2012, Yelena encountered the ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ exhibition at a school in Voronezh. As she stood in front of its powerful imagery, she made a vow to herself, ‘I am going to make this happen in my home country of Kazakhstan.’ It just so happened that Yelena’s determination coincided with plans that were being laid by the Dutch Embassy in Kazakhstan. They had been organizing an annual Human Rights Day event in the Kazakh capital city of Astana each year, and were looking for a new way of presenting Human Rights issues. Grant proposals were duly submitted to the Embassy and in due course a Russian/Kazakh language version of ‘A History for Today’ was created.
The representative of the Anne Frank House for the Kazakhstan project was Sergiy Kulchevych, a young man who had first helped the Anne Frank House with the exhibition in Kiev while he was working at the Jewish Foundation of Ukraine. When he had first been told about the exhibition, he was sceptical about presenting another Holocaust story to the Ukrainian public, and having studied the rich Ukrainian Jewish history, felt irritated by this continued focus on the death and destruction of its community.
However, when he was invited to Amsterdam in 2008 to visit the Anne Frank House his views radically changed. Just like the Moscow historian Ilya Altman had found a decade earlier, Sergiy found the Anne Frank House philosophy of making the message of the Holocaust relevant to today an exciting ideology to apply to his own academic area, that of Jewish History with a focus on Philosophy. Sergiy returned to Ukraine and lost no time in applying to be an intern for the International Department of the Anne Frank House. In 2010 he became a paid member of Jan Erik’s team, working on the Russian tour of six cities. This included the port of Murmansk far up in the icy polar region bordering northern Norway, which in the Second World War had welcomed British and American ships bringing weapons for the Soviets to fight the Germans.
And so with this experience, in 2016 Sergiy found himself being asked to take the Anne Frank exhibition to Kazakhstan, a country tha
t, despite its economic muscle, has a reputation for human rights abuses and suppression of political opposition. The Kazakh President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has been leader of the country since 1991 and controls society in what is deemed the ‘Russian way’. The NGO Human Rights Watch reports that ‘Kazakhstan heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion’. Officially there is freedom of religion, but religious leaders who oppose the government are suppressed.
Sergiy describes Kazakhstan as ‘Certainly a central Asian country but somehow it has a different feel from its neighbours Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. It’s more multicultural than Poland and the Baltic states such as Lithuania.’ Multicultural it certainly is. Kazakhs make up half the population, with the other half made up of Russians, Poles, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, Uyghurs and over 100 other nationalities and ethnicities. In the south of the country there is a huge Korean community. Islam is the predominant religion, with Christianity practised by a quarter of the population. Many of these people are descendants of those who were exiled there by the USSR and those who had come during the industrialization campaign.
Any intolerance in such a diverse society is carefully hidden from public eye. There are no football hooligans or neo-Nazi groups in evidence and President Nazarbayev glorifies his country as a nation that is tolerant of differences. He is wary of not letting Kazakh pride in its history, and its towering statues of ancient kings that are found across the country, be seen as nationalism, the kind that brought civil wars to the Balkans after the fall of Communism.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 12