The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  Anne in Chile

  The ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition, staged in the beautiful post-colonial city of Santiago de Chile, opened its doors in September 1991. In a city of 330,000 people, one in ten of its population came to see it, waiting patiently in a queue that stretched around the block. Anne Frank House International Director Jan Erik Dubbelman told me, ‘Sometimes it happens at just the right time, like when we worked in Germany just before and after the Berlin Wall fell, and sometimes the timing can be problematic. As it happened, the timing in Chile was fortuitous. It was also springtime in the southern hemisphere, an upbeat time of year.’ The country was emerging from its difficult years of dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. The exhibition was opened by the country’s first democratic president for eighteen years, Patricio Aylwin, and several government ministers.

  Two months later, in November 1991 we launched the Anne Frank Educational Trust at the House of Commons. I recall Jan Erik describing the Chile opening with such excitement as a large group of us sat having dinner in a London restaurant just a few hours after our Palace of Westminster launch. It was still the early days of the Anne Frank exhibition travelling to the farthest reaches of the world and Jan Erik shook his head in almost disbelief as he described the scenes of people standing patiently in line.

  The location of the Santiago de Chile exhibition was significant and Jan Erik believed people came not only because of their curiosity about Anne Frank but also because it was an act of resolve for the future. The exhibition was on display in the foyer of the once-prestigious University of Chile but, as with any dictatorship, academia had been considered by the Pinochet regime as a threat, and indeed the university had in fact been a hotbed of anti-government resistance. Over the years of Pinochet’s regime, 80,000 people had been arrested, 30,000 suffering torture and over 3,000 were then ‘disappeared’ (the verb being used in the active sense of being ‘made to disappear’, i.e. murdered). Jan Erik reflected: ‘There was such a symbolic value to the exhibition venue, it was a story about the regaining of democracy.’

  In December 1998, seven years after the success of the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition in Santiago de Chile, and across the other side of the world, there was an opportunity to reflect once more on those terrible years of Pinochet’s rule of terror. The former President had arrived in London that October for a spinal operation at the exclusive London Clinic hospital, and in a watershed judicial procedure against a former head of state, was immediately served with an international arrest warrant by the British government. The legal wrangling continued for several weeks, involving the British government, extradition experts and teams of lawyers. After his operation, Pinochet was transferred from central to north London, to a private clinic in the suburb of Southgate. While he languished in his room under police guard, and lawyers and governments were debating his extradition to either Spain or back to Chile, less than a mile away Southgate Further Education College was welcoming the visit of the Anne Frank’s Trust’s new exhibition, ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’.

  The irony of an exhibition about dictatorship and its consequences being on show just around the corner from one of recent history’s most notorious dictators was not lost on any of the exhibition’s visitors. Former Chilean torture victims and British human rights activists conducted a daily vigil outside Pinochet’s clinic and would then pop around the corner to see the Anne Frank exhibition. Needless to say, the General’s name cropped up in all the opening speeches on exhibition launch night and in many of the visitors’ comments. Pinochet died in 2006, with 300 criminal charges still pending, some for tax evasion and embezzlement but most for violations of human rights.

  On the day of his passing, Barry van Driel, Mariela Chyrikins and Aaron Peterer from the Anne Frank House happened to be conducting a three-day human rights seminar at the Villa Grimaldi, the notorious former detention centre operated by Pinochet’s secret police. During the years 1974–8 thousands of people had been held and tortured within the villa’s walls, hundreds of whom then disappeared. Just as the Anne Frank House team were wrapping up on the seminar’s final day, having listened to harrowing stories of life during the dictatorship, someone came running into the room and announced breathlessly that Pinochet had just died. As if of one mind and sentiment, the people in the room started to cry, men and women alike. Aware that Villa Grimaldi was located in the pro-dictatorship suburb of Penalolan, Barry and his team started to feel very perplexed and uncomfortable. They tentatively asked one of the group why they were all so emotional. ‘Because he has died never having had to face justice for what he did. We will never have the chance to confront him.’

  That evening Barry, Mariela and Aaron were in the city centre as pro- and anti-Pinochet riots broke out. They found themselves in tears too. Barry explained that ‘this was in fact because of the effects of tear gas, so we made a very quick exit.’ In an ironic twist, the date of Pinochet’s death, of his passing from this world, was 10 December, International Human Rights Day.

  Anne in Argentina

  Anne’s birth happened in a city on the far side of the world, but the relevance of Anne’s story is perhaps more powerful in a yellow-painted villa in Buenos Aires than anywhere else.

  Located on a busy street called Superi is a charming yellow-painted villa, entered through a black decorated iron gate and along a paved path. Behind the villa is a garden with a reasonably sized lawn and several mature trees offering shade. It is owned by a Jewish businessman called Mauricio Szulman who had made money in the 1950s from food supplements. Mauricio was not a religious or even a culturally affiliated Jew. But in 2007 he was in a state of grief. Hilda, his wife of forty-five years, had recently passed away, his three grown-up daughters Gabriela, Patricia and Mariana had all fled the dictatorship that had gripped the country between 1974 and 1983, and what was once a happy home was bereft of people, laughter and good times.

  In the way that serendipity and timing often occurs, motivated by the idea to create a memorial to his idealistic wife Hilda, Mauricio donated his house to serve the cause of the moral education of Argentina’s young. Inspired by the book Testimonies for Never Again – From Anne Frank to Our Days, which combined discussion of the dictatorship with Anne Frank’s story and modern-day experiences of youths with social, ethnic and religious discrimination, Mauricio approached the book’s co-author Hector Shalom, who had previously been a volunteer for the Anne Frank exhibition on an earlier visit to Buenos Aires. Following the exhibition’s success, Hector was at that time looking for a venue to open a permanent Anne Frank education centre. Thanks to meeting Mauricio Szulman, Hector’s plan was starting to fall into place. The Centro Ana Frank of Argentina, as the Szulman home became known, opened its doors as a museum and education centre on 12 June 2009, the 80th anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth in Frankfurt. Since then, this once normal family home has served as a reminder of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

  Behind the villa’s imposing shiny black front door, the ground floor now contains a large room with a black and white photographic exhibition of the world Anne Frank grew up in many decades ago. Here visiting groups of lively and chatty Argentinian schoolchildren settle themselves down on the polished wooden floor, ready to be guided through the panels in Spanish by teenage peer educators. After they have been shown the life and death of their Dutch teenage counterpart, they climb the house’s wooden staircase and, as if transported by plane across the world to Amsterdam, they enter the home’s former bedrooms, now three rooms decorated and furnished just like the hiding place on the Prinsengracht. But after the wonder of imagining being in Anne’s bedroom and the rooms in which she spent her days in claustrophobic hiding, their visit to the home on Superi Street has more to share with them.

  The Centro Ana Frank contains one of the first public exhibitions in Argentina about the years of the country’s brutal dictatorship. The exhibition is called ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy; the Observance of Human Rig
hts’, and it demonstrates how the mechanisms and procedures of Nazism were repeated in the dictatorship. One of the first visitors to the Centro Anne Frank was the congresswoman and president of the Argentinian Human Rights Commission, Victoria Donda. The photos of Anne’s happy childhood in Frankfurt and Amsterdam had an added resonance for Victoria. In her speech to the assembled guests she described her own carefree childhood being brought up by loving parents. But in 2003, at age 26, Victoria’s world fell apart. She discovered that the man she knew as her beloved father had in fact been a torturer for the military regime, and that she had been snatched from two of its victims, a married couple Cori and Jose Donda. Cori was arrested when she was five months pregnant, and soon after giving birth to her baby, she was drugged, put on to a Fokker military aircraft and thrown while still alive into La Plata River, the fate of many of her fellow political prisoners. Not surprisingly, Victoria Donda is still an avid supporter of the Centro Anne Frank’s mission and work.

  Hector Shalom, who had co-authored the very book that had so inspired Mauricio Szulman, became the Centro’s director. Hector’s own life was very closely affected by the murderous regime. He had lost close friends who were arrested and tortured. Hector explains that, ‘A museum that works with the memory of something that occurred a long time ago and very far away is more comprehensive if it includes the state terrorism that happened closer to our time. Our exhibition guides’ uncles, relatives and grandparents experienced the dictatorship.’

  In warmer months, the visiting school groups, once they have completed their tour of the villa, and by now more subdued and reflective than when they had arrived, are taken into the Centro’s peaceful rear garden. Sitting in the shade of the trees, they are invited to share their thoughts and feelings about what they have just seen. But were they aware that the walls of the house on Superi Street had even more to share? Before the full excesses of the ‘Dirty War’ became rampant, Mauricio and his wife Hilda had been hiding in their home a young journalist who had criticized the government and was in fear of arrest, when ‘being a left-wing idealist journalist was not a good thing to be’, according to Mauricio. The journalist, Andres Alsina, had been given shelter in the house with his wife, until Mauricio helped them flee the country in a ‘semi-legal way.’ Mauricio and Hilda had also subsequently sheltered a Guatemalan escaping his country’s dictatorship in the 1980s. Like 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, number 2647 Superi Street, now the Centro Ana Frank, was itself a house of refuge and hiding.

  I spent an extraordinary week acting as an adviser to the Centro Ana Frank in April 2010, and saw first-hand the importance of the lessons Hector and his team were giving to Argentina’s children. I happened to arrive in Buenos Aires on 24 March, the annual commemoration of the start of the dictatorship. On my first ‘working day’ at the Centro I spent time getting to know the staff and the young volunteer guides, sharing our common and different experiences, speaking to a journalist from the Buenos Aires Herald and then in the evening giving a talk to members of the public, most of whom had not visited the Centro before. I was introduced to a woman called Eva Eisenstaedt, who had been a Jewish child refugee from the German occupation of Amsterdam, and whose mother had taught Anne and Margot Frank gymnastics.

  The next day over lunchtime empaňadas (tasty little South American meat pastries), the team of teenage peer educators told me how they were making what happened all those decades ago to a European girl relevant to twenty-first-century South American children. But, as with similar young peer educators in the townships of South Africa, they understood completely what the common factors were in a country that had so recently endured a tyrannous regime.

  On my return to Buenos Aires, I paid a visit to the headquarters of the Argentinian Jewish community, AMIA, the Asociation Mutual Israelite Argentina. On 18 July 1994, a car bomb had been detonated outside the AMIA building, which is housed in a densely-packed commercial area of the city. The bomb killed eighty-five people and injured hundreds and was Argentina’s deadliest bombing ever. The noise of the bomb had woken 17-year-old schoolgirl Mariela Chyrikins who lived fifteen blocks away. It was the first day of the school winter holidays and she had hoped to have a lie-in. Over twenty years later, Mariela still recalls the two reasons for her personal sense of shock. Firstly, although around the world we are now on our guard against terrorist attacks, it was only the second bombing in Argentina, and the first on a civilian target (the previous bomb having been planted at the Israeli Embassy in 1992 killing twenty-nine people). Secondly, was that just one week before, Mariela’s father and cousin had been in the AMIA building to record the death of her uncle. It was the AMIA bomb that set Mariela on a path that would lead directly to her bringing the Anne Frank exhibition and project to many countries in Central and Latin America.

  Over the years, the AMIA bombing case has been marked by incompetence and ongoing accusations of cover-ups. All suspects in the ‘local connection’ (among them, many members of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police) were found to be ‘not guilty’ in September 2004. In 2005, the city’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, whom we now know as Pope Francis, was the first public figure to sign a petition for justice in the AMIA bombing case. The finger is now firmly pointed at Iran and the Hezbollah terrorist organization, who jointly orchestrated the bombing. Anita Weinstein, the administrator whom I met inside the building on that spring day in 2010, told me she was sitting at her desk on one side of the room when her female friend and colleague called out from the other side, ‘Anita, I’m just bringing you over a coffee’. A very normal working morning. But a few seconds later she saw her friend, coffee still in hand, blown to pieces.

  As a memorial to the victims of the bombing, there is an arresting and fluid artwork created by the renowned Israeli artist Yaakov Agam. But there is also another memorial in the heavily-gated grounds of the building, this one a simpler plaque mounted on the wall within the heavily gated grounds of the organization. It is to commemorate the 1,900 members of the Argentinian Jewish community who were murdered during the years of the ‘Dirty War’ of 1974–83, or the ‘Process of National Reorganization’ as the military dictatorship described their work. The number of Jewish victims was hugely disproportionate to their population figure: it is estimated between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of those who disappeared were Jews. I was told that the Jewish victims of the regime’s henchmen were tortured twice before their murder, ‘Once for their political crimes and again for being Jews’. Recordings of Hitler’s speeches were played during torture sessions. ‘I remember when I was arrested in 1977 there was a giant swastika painted on the wall at the federal police central headquarters where I was interrogated,’ Robert Cox, the British former editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, recalled in an interview in The Guardian newspaper in 1999. Nazi ideology had indeed permeated and inspired the military and security forces during the country’s dictatorship.

  The first Anne Frank exhibition, ‘Anne Frank in the World 1929-1945’, had visited Argentina in 1992, having crossed the Andes following its presentation in Santiago de Chile. Thanks to the efforts of Mariela Chyrikins, its next incarnation, ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’, came to Buenos Aires in June 2000. The AMIA bomb in July 1994 had both physically and spiritually woken Mariela. She had grown up aware that her family was Jewish, but as they were liberal Jews she had little Jewish education and was scared by any mention of the Holocaust. Her best friend’s sister had read Anne Frank’s diary and was talking about it, but Mariela determined she would not read it. One of the first things Mariela did after the bomb was to get hold of a copy of the diary of Anne Frank. She immediately connected with the similarly dark-haired Dutch teenager. ‘I liked her so much that I just didn’t believe she was going to die,’ she recalled.

  Mariela’s fear of knowing more about the Holocaust was no doubt caused by her close family history. Her grandfather Noah Hirik had been born in Ukraine. When he was a teenager a pogrom happened in his village in the
Podol province. As the executioners were seen entering the village, Noah and his brother ran and hid at the top of a barn, from where they watched in terror as all their family were shot. Between the two world wars, Noah became an anarchist and moved to the city of Kiev. One day in the library he noticed a book about emigration to Argentina. It sounded the sort of exciting adventure he needed, beckoning a new life. He made his way to Amsterdam where the ships sailed far down the world to Uruguay, and then made the short crossing over the Rio de la Plata to Buenos Aires. On the ship Noah had met the woman who was to become his wife and Mariela’s beloved grandmother. And on arrival in Buenos Aires the immigration officer, just like those in London or New York who had anglicized unfamiliar Eastern-European names, gave Mr Hirik the more Spanish sounding name of Chyrikins.

  In 1995, a year after the AMIA bombing, an economic crisis hit Argentina, caused by the country’s fixed exchange rate against the dollar and President Carlos Menem’s policy of heavy borrowing. By this time Mariela had left school and was working in her father’s accountancy office. One day at home, she happened to find a 1970s leaflet about the Anne Frank House, kept as a souvenir by her parents of their visit to Amsterdam before she was even born. She was fascinated to read that many teenagers were writing to Anne’s father, Mr Otto Frank, and he had actually replied to them. Despairing and frustrated at the slow pace of the investigation into the bombing, and the impunity given to the Buenos Aires police who had been shown to have assisted with the materials used for the bomb, Mariela decided she would write to Mr Frank about the anti-Semitism and discrimination she felt was happening in Argentina.

  A courteous reply duly came back from the Anne Frank House. ‘Thank you for your letter to Mr Frank. However, we are sorry to tell you that he sadly passed away in 1980.’ But Mariela, though saddened, was not deterred by learning of this. Every March, the anniversary month of Anne Frank’s death in Bergen-Belsen, Mariela sent her own report and videos about the latest on the AMIA investigation across to the Anne Frank House. And in 1997, having saved money from her accountancy job and armed with a determination to challenge the discrimination she saw in Argentina, Mariela made her way to Amsterdam, the city from where her grandfather had left the anti-Semitism of Europe for a new life in South America.