The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  She met with the International Director Jan Erik Dubbelman and convinced him that she could make it happen for the Anne Frank exhibition to come back to Argentina. He believed and trusted her and a few months later 21-year-old Mariela Chyrikins found herself addressing a meeting of the Dutch Embassy and the ‘rather conservative and totally male’ leaders of the Buenos Aires Jewish community. By then Mariela was working for the university. In the days before scanning documents and digital correspondence were in common use, she used her salary to pay for hundreds of colour photocopies of the stunning image taken of the new exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ at its UK launch in the nave of London’s Southwark Cathedral. Finally, after two years, her perseverance paid off and the funding was in place to bring the Anne Frank exhibition from her grandfather’s embarkation port to his future home. The exhibition toured twenty Argentinian cities over the next two years.

  In line with Otto Frank’s philosophy, Mariela made sure there was a clear connection between the ‘then and now’. ‘My childhood had been affected by my father’s fear of talking about politics, and that the dictatorship would come back. Because of what had happened to his father’s family, the Holocaust was also too painful for him to talk about with us. But in the Shoah Museum in Argentina I met a lot of Holocaust survivors, and they were the same age as my grandmother whom I loved. Meeting them affected me greatly.’ One of the Holocaust survivors, Sara Rus, was particularly inspirational for Mariela. Sara’s son, who had been working on a government atomic programme, was murdered during the dictatorship. One day he had been arrested and simply became one of ‘the disappeared’. Another survivor, whom I also met at the Centro Ana Frank, was Monica Davidowicz, who chose to hide a young fugitive from the dictatorship in her home.

  During the Anne Frank exhibition tour in the first two years of the twenty-first century, Mariela felt that the dictatorship was a constant ‘elephant in the room’. Teachers would make the connection for themselves and this would lead them in turn to making real connections with survivors of the dictatorship. Through the story of Anne Frank and the Holocaust, contemporary discrimination and human rights were openly explored.

  At one of the exhibition openings, the Minister of Internal Affairs happened to ask if the Anne Frank House did anything to educate police officers. Jan van Kooten, the Head of Education at the Anne Frank House, was duly informed by his colleagues about this interesting enquiry, but was not convinced it was serious, as he thought to himself that the Argentinian police had very difficult problems to tackle. Two weeks later an official letter from the Ministry duly arrived on his desk, and he soon found himself on a plane to Buenos Aires. ‘It turned out the police were serious about exploring new ways to police their society, including the way they handled football hooligans. The officers were notoriously aggressive and had no connection with civil society.’ Jan described the first meeting they held where officers were brought together with community representatives to discuss issues of human rights in an open and candid forum. The meeting was attended by a group of women from the ‘Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo’ (the mothers and grandmothers of the ‘disappeared’ who, wearing symbolic white headscarves, conducted a weekly procession around the large square fronting the Presidential palace). ‘I asked them why they were sitting in a room with the police, who had historically been their tormentors. One of the women told me that it was because the Anne Frank House had invited them. I realized at that moment the immense power of Anne Frank to bring people together.’

  Jan van Kooten visited Buenos Aires four subsequent times and worked with police trainers and naval police, helping them to create a new training curriculum for effective policing in civil society. Twenty senior Argentinian police officers then visited Amsterdam to learn new ways of working with drug addicts. ‘These were tough guys’, said Jan, ‘but some shed a tear in the Anne Frank House.’

  Mariela said that there are now many other organizations in Argentina dealing with human rights and memory and also using young people as peer educators and she has no doubt it is because of the effectiveness they have seen by the work with Anne Frank. Each year the Centro Ana Frank receives over 35,000 visitors and also runs a training institute which offers five different courses.

  And in a country with a tragic recent history of dictatorship and brutality, National Law 26809, implemented in 2013 by the Ministry of Education and twenty-four provincial authorities, has designated 12 June, Anne Frank’s birthdate, as the Argentinian ‘Day of Adolescents and Youth: for social inclusion, coexistence, against all forms of violence and discrimination in commemoration of the birth of Anne Frank’.

  Anne Frank in Brazil

  In April 2010 I arrived in Rio de Janiero, sent by the Anne Frank House to help in the planning of the first ever visit of an Anne Frank exhibition to the city. The following day, I had thrown off the jet-lag the night before, helped no doubt by a churrascaria barbecue dinner washed down by several caiparinhas (the fiery Brazilian national cocktail) and the pure excitement of being a two-minute walk from the famous Ipanema Beach.

  My associate in Brazil was Joelke Offringa, a Dutch woman who had come to São Paulo in 1993 to study and practice architecture, the final push to follow her long-time dream having come from her dying father. Once she had settled in Brazil, Joelke became drawn to social projects, especially those linked to architecture and city planning. On her own initiative she set up an office for architecturally-based social work, which led to her creation of the Instituto Plataforma Brasil, a Brazil-Netherlands linked cultural association that encouraged young Brazilians to raise their aspirations through sport and cultural projects and thus promote Joelke’s vision of ‘human development and opportunities’. Having met Jan Erik Dubbelman and Mariela Chyrikins, who were impressed by her enthusiasm and range of activities, Joelke was asked by them to represent the Anne Frank House in Brazil.

  On my first morning in Rio, Joelke and I paid a visit to the Dutch Consul. He was a charming man who originated from the Dutch Antilles island of Curaçao, situated in the western Caribbean, which I told him I had visited in 2001. Otto and Fritzi Frank had also visited Curaçao in the 1970s, marked by a photograph of them proudly displayed in the tiny local synagogue there (which happens to be the oldest in the western hemisphere). The Consul was enthusiastic, promised to do all he could to help the project happen in Rio and then kindly offered us a trip back to my hotel in his very comfortable diplomatic limousine.

  As we drove back along the promenade with its five-star hotels and plush apartment blocks, I looked up at the overlooking hillside. It was shocking to see that the ‘favelas’, the notorious Brazilian slum areas which were rife with poverty, drugs and murderous gangs, actually overlooked the affluence of Ipanema and Copacabana. There was no way for each demographic to avert its eyes from each other’s circumstances – tourists and residents on the seashore would sit on their balconies looking up at the slums and the poor had their noses rubbed in the overt wealth of the much more fortunate. Another unsettling sight was that the more affluent residences were fronted by high security walls and their windows by impenetrable iron bars.

  The Dutch consul was as helpful as he had promised to be and the Anne Frank exhibition was staged in Rio a few months later. It was shown in three very different locations – one in the centre of the city, one on the outskirts and finally in one of the most violent gang-ridden favelas. After two days of meetings in Rio, I flew down to Buenos Aires and two weeks later came back to Brazil, but this time to the sprawling city of São Paulo which, with a population of twelve million people, is by far the largest city in South America. There I was to open and speak at the Anne Frank exhibition in one of the country’s flagship community schools.

  To get to the ‘Centro de Educação Unificado Paraisopolis’ we drove through the wealthy area of Morumbi, with large villas set amidst lush gardens, but as I had come to expect, protected behind heavily secured walls and gates. Suddenly, without a noticeable change
in the surroundings, we were driving into a favela, with its slum buildings and crowded, noisy litter-strewn streets. As we entered the modern school building within the favela, there was a real air of excitement in the school’s large entrance hall. The Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen was to be the guest of honour at the opening and the peer educators, trained by Joelke and her colleague Adriana Rachman, were tasked to guide him around the exhibition. I was startled when I saw that these guides were as young as 11, and hoped that the Dutch Foreign Minister would not be patronising towards what I expected to be their limited knowledge.

  Verhagen duly arrived, gave a speech, and then the microphone was handed to me. As with speeches I had made at many previous openings I had read and re-read it and timed it according to the minutes allotted by Joelke, who had explained I needed to factor in the time the interpreter would need to translate my words into Portuguese. I thought I had done this to perfection by simply reading through my speech and doubling the time. Half-way through making my speech, having flown across the world to make it, I saw Joelke pointing to her watch and making ‘time to stop’ gestures. On that day I learned a useful lesson: that when making a speech that needs an interpreter, you must allow at least three times the length of the speech, as the interpreter needs to (i) mentally translate your words, (ii) listen to make sure it is the right time to take over, (iii) pause to figure out the best way of presenting what you are trying to get across, (iv) take a breath, and (v) say what they need to say. When they have finished, you need to nod to show your approval, take a breath and then continue. Each of these actions takes up valuable seconds which substantially eat into the speech’s allotted time.

  After the speeches the crowds of students, teachers and dignitaries made way for the start of Mr Verhagen’s guided tour. I will never forget one of the guides, a small and charming girl who was all of 11-years-old, confidently and patiently, and with no sense of adult irony, explaining the aftermath of the First World War in Europe, the subsequent economic crisis in Germany and the rise of National Socialism – to the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, who was beaming in appreciation. I hope she has remained immensely proud of herself.

  The other passion of Joelke and her institute was to promote confidence and personal growth in these challenged kids through sport, and the second half of the afternoon was devoted to an exhibition of Panna, a form of street soccer that is played throughout Brazil. Some of Brazil’s greatest footballing World Cup-winning heroes, including Neymar, Ronaldo and Rivaldo, learnt their skill through playing Panna on the streets. Mr Verhagen, his inhibitions I am sure broken down by the charming Anne Frank peer guides, removed his jacket, tie and shoes, pulled on a football shirt and enthusiastically joined in.

  For my last night in South America, Joelke and I met for celebratory drinks in the rooftop bar of the architecturally spectacular Hotel Unique, with a 360º panorama of the endlessly sprawling city of São Paulo. Joelke asked if she could bring one of the volunteers with her, an educationalist who was going to help develop an Anne Frank project for São Paulo schools that would recognize the Brazilian curriculum requirements. I of course agreed preparing myself to spend the evening with an earnest and worthy civil servant.

  Marceo Camargo Oliveira turned out to be anything but, and the story he told me became seared into my memory. Marceo had come from a very simple background growing up in one of São Paulo’s poorer areas. When he was a young teenager, after his school day had finished he would walk to the local brick factory and spend the evening firing bricks to earn some extra money for his family. One day he spotted a book that had been thrown into the kiln, and carefully retrieved it. Instead of the book being destroyed by fire, it lit a fire within him. The book was about education and he found himself drawn to the contents of the singed pages. This started Marceo’s path to becoming a teacher of History and Philosophy and a member of the Board of the Instituto Plataforma Brazil.

  In the rooftop bar Marceo told me how he was volunteering as a guide for the Anne Frank exhibition in São Paulo and once the exhibition had finished he planned to help Joelke explore the best way to introduce education about Anne Frank into the local state school system. This they duly did, but it didn’t have the positive reception Joelke and Marceo had hoped for. Although several companies were willing to financially support the Anne Frank project, as they also believed it was a way to help diminish the alarming level of violence in state-run schools, the local education authorities were not so welcoming. The education authorities would normally employ one person to handle a project that would cover 1,000 schools. But to implement the Anne Frank programmes successfully, with the level of training needed to have a really positive outcome, the local education authorities realized it would require 12 people to cover 500 schools, and even that would just give a 10 per cent reach of the local schools.

  Joelke decided that to be implemented, the Anne Frank schools’ projects would require a bottom-up approach. So she started with a pilot project in six schools, creating a team of ‘Anne Frank Pioneers’ in each school, similar in nature to the UK’s ‘Anne Frank Ambassadors’ scheme, whereby these young pioneers, aged between 11 and 18, would do local projects to help in their community.

  Joelke said that

  . . . these youngsters can really take their lives in their own hands and are changing their own communities. It starts by them getting sensitised to Anne Frank’s story and they reflect on how they see their own future. They connect their needs to what they want for their community. The ‘Anne Frank Pioneers’ are promoting projects in sport, education, and making connections to Pioneers groups in other schools, through a WhatsApp group. It is giving these young people the confidence to approach the authorities themselves with ideas for improvement – the local departments for Education, Agriculture, Sports and even the Police.

  Another area that the Anne Frank Pioneers are tackling is that of climate change. Joelke told me that this is very much felt in daily life in Brazil, where the winters are getting noticeably shorter and the summers longer and hotter. As one of their first activities the Anne Frank Pioneers are taken into the woods together to engender a feeling of the importance of the natural world. In Anne’s writing she too describes her wonder at the beauty of nature. On 23 February 1944 she wrote:

  The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be for ever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.

  Joelke feels that where Anne’s story will continue to have perhaps the most relevance in Latin America is in motivating and empowering Brazil’s next generation of change-makers to create a good living environment. Describing how Brazilian youngsters have engaged with the programmes, she concluded, ‘No other voice has such an appeal for young people as that of Anne Frank.’

  Anne Frank in Central America

  Central America was a notoriously violent region in the later years of the twentieth century with bloody civil wars taking place in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

  The civil war in the tiny country of El Salvador lasted for twelve years between 1980 and 1992, during which time 75,000 people were killed. The Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Romero, had spoken out against poverty, injustice, assassinations and torture and in the early days of the war was himself assassinated while conducting Mass in the chapel of a local hospital. Romero had been a friend of the UK’s Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who, when Bishop of Stepney in 2001, spoke at the opening of the Anne Frank exhibition in London’s Bethnal Green, proudly but poignantly wearing a large colourful wooden cross that Archbishop Romero had given to him. In 2015 Romero was beatified by Pope Francis as a martyr.

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nbsp; In neighbouring Nicaragua, what was known as the ‘Nicaraguan Revolution’ involved thirty years of bloody complexity. The revolution took several forms, from opposition to the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in the 1960s and 1970s, the campaign led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to violently oust the dictatorship in the late 1970s, and the Sandinistas' efforts to govern Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, during which time there was a war raging between the Sandinista government and the Contras, right-wing guerrillas backed by the US.

  Guatemala suffered an even longer civil war between 1960 and 1996, in which over 200,000 people were killed by their national army. The conflict was between the government and various leftist rebel groups supported chiefly by ethnic Mayan indigenous people and Ladino peasants, who together make up the country’s rural poor. According to a UN commissioned report of 1999, 83 per cent of those killed were Mayans. Human rights defenders were attacked and threatened and in the aftermath of the conflict young people increasingly became involved in gang activities. By 2009, one in six murders were being committed by minors.

  The Anne Frank House’s touring exhibitions and educational programmes in Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Peru that took place between 2007 and 2010 had clear hopes for some influence in countries with such tumultuous recent histories (only Costa Rica, a historically peaceful country of lush rainforest that does not even possess a permanent army, was spared from conflict). By the end of the tour it was hoped that, by bringing new educational resources and learning methods, there would have been reflection on the importance of democratic values, human rights and cultural diversity, and an awareness by the young people of the human rights violations that took place during the internal armed conflicts in Guatemala and Peru. Groups of partner bodies would have the opportunity to discuss and exchange different ways of addressing racism, discrimination, human rights and historical memory.