The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  The programmes in Central America and Peru were co-ordinated by two Argentinian women working at the Anne Frank House, Erika Del Carmen Mendez Chinchilla and Magdalena Vieyra. Erika had herself come from a disadvantaged community, but nonetheless through her determination she had completed a university degree. She identified with the inequality and discrimination Anne Frank had faced, as Erika had also faced these as a child. Magdalena had an Armenian grandmother, so had a family connection to a historical genocide and a wish to help prevent such events in the future.

  The Guatemalans carry a clear sense of their individual cultural identity, describing themselves primarily as Latino, Indigenous or Mixed. The indigenous people do not feel fully accepted in Guatemalan society, and there is no real space in their everyday lives to talk about these issues. When the Anne Frank exhibition arrived in Guatemala something remarkable started to happen. Mariela noticed a discernible feeling among the young participants of, ‘Anne Frank talked about her identity, so maybe I can too.’ ‘Anne Frank was brave. I will be brave too.’ The project seemed to be making a clear impact on self-esteem as well as cultural pride.

  One of the reasons for the effective way the Anne Frank House has worked in the international sphere has been its involvement on an equal footing with local partners. In Guatemala their main partner was CALDH, the Center for Legal Action on Human Rights, and in Nicaragua it was CEPREV, the Center for Prevention of Violence. It is a win-win situation, one that has been replicated around the world, where the Anne Frank House have the benefit of local knowledge and connections, and the partner organizations widen their networks and engage young people.

  In Guatemala, the Anne Frank exhibition provided a safe space for young people to reflect about the past and present, and to connect with the local issues, presented on complementary panels developed by educators in Guatemala City. Many youngsters became aware of the presence and impact of racism, discrimination and exclusion in their society, and some came to realize that they were being discriminated against by their peers from another district. Some exhibition visitors opened up and started to talk about the conflicts in their own communities and the need to build a culture of peace and human rights.

  Anne Frank in Peru

  In Peru there is the same shared past of violence as in the Central American countries of Guatemala and Nicaragua. In 2009, Peru’s former President, Alberto Fujimori, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings during his government’s war against leftist guerrillas in the 1990s. The Peruvian establishment was unwilling to confront the country’s recent past, even intimidating those who had reported to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 2000. A monument, known as ‘The Eye That Cries’ and dedicated to the 70,000 victims from both sides of the conflict, was vandalised by Fujimori supporters on the day after he arrived back in Peru from exile to face charges.

  In March 2010, Magdalena Vieyra and Mariela Chyrikins travelled to Peru to meet with local partners on the Anne Frank project and to discuss the concept and approach to the educational resources. The tour of the Anne Frank exhibition would be a prominent event to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the regional educational authority in Lima. Together, the Anne Frank House team and the local education authority agreed to include information about Nazism in Peru in the exhibition and its educational resources, and to produce further exhibition panels dealing with the internal armed conflict in that country. They would also develop a training method which could make a connection between the history of Anne Frank and Holocaust and Peru’s internal armed conflict, with a focus on genocidal forms of discrimination and racism.

  Because the victims of the years of killings had mainly been indigenous people, Mariela recalled that exhibition visitors made a strong connection with the Roma and Sinti as Holocaust victims. Teenagers expressed surprise that Anne was discriminated against as ‘she looks white and European’. Mariela pointed out that, unlike in her own country of Argentina, anti-Semitism is very rare in Central and South American countries, where there are only small Jewish populations, as the people hardly know or think about Jews. The main source of anti-Semitism is from the Catholic Church which still deems Jews as the killers of Jesus.

  She expressed sadness that there was a feeling among young people in these post-conflict areas that violence is a natural occurrence. There was no questioning about this, just a feeling of resignation that this was how it was in their society. However, Mariela found that after the Anne Frank training sessions, young people started to ask questions about why there was violence and what could they do to stop it.

  Teachers were especially grateful to have a resource like the exhibition to help them bring up the topic of the internal armed conflict with their students, as there were little or no resources available on this very sensitive issue. A few of the comments from the young exhibition guides illustrate this, such as, ‘If a girl like her [Anne] could change the world with her diary, we can as well’ and ‘She confronted violence, we can also do it by finding non-violent methods and by preventing further violence. By doing this, we can build a better society.’ This feeling of wanting to do something extended to older members of the community. A well-dressed woman exhibition volunteer, who described herself as middle-class and non-political, started asking questions, in an increasingly vocal way, about why no justice had been done against those who perpetrated the conflict and the dictatorship.

  One of the most interesting aspects of the Anne Frank exhibition in Peru’s capital Lima was the social diversity of the visitors: both students from very poor areas as well as students from the most expensive schools in Lima. Three youngsters who were trained as exhibition guides in the previous venue of Ayacucho also came along to the Lima training session, allowing a very interesting exchange between guides from the city of Lima and the rural area of Ayacucho. They were not only able to transmit their experiences as guides, but also to share their experiences of the conflict, with many having relatives who had been killed or displaced during that time. In that sense, the exhibition helped to tear down some of the social barriers that are so prevalent in Peruvian society.

  ***

  The work of the Anne Frank House and its partners in Latin America continues, especially through the Centro Ana Frank in Buenos Aires. Jointly summing up the continuing need for the work in Latin America, the Anne Frank House educators Mariela Chyrikins and Barry van Driel explained:

  While introducing the history of the Holocaust, many teachers and students start to make certain connections to their own history of human rights violations, especially if the lens of human rights is introduced either directly or indirectly. Holocaust education, in general, has the potential to make a major impact in Latin America because it functions as a ‘mirror’ on society. The history of Nazi persecution not only focuses on the erosion of human rights, persecution and mass murder, but also on histories of discrimination, racism and exclusion. These are not uncommon themes in Latin American history. The history of the Holocaust, as a ‘distant European history’, acts as a kaleidoscope where ‘close and distant’, and ‘past and present’ histories of discrimination, racism, antisemitism and intolerance dialogue with each other.

  They continued,

  The Diary of Anne Frank occupies a special place in educational work about the Holocaust and related themes in Latin America. Anne was a gifted writer who not only wrote about the persecution of the Jews but about a variety of themes that young people then and now struggle with. She was a typical adolescent and found love in difficult times. She argued with her mother and dreamt of a better life safe from the dangers around her. Her reflections are deep and strike a chord with those trying to manoeuvre through adolescence. Equally important from an educational perspective is that she never stopped writing. She was a young girl with an opinion and would not be silenced. Latin American youth, especially girls, are inspired by this.

  The Anne Frank projects in Latin America build o
n this activist element of Anne’s diary to empower local youth. By encouraging youth to write about their own emotions, fears and dreams a further connection is made between past and present, between distant and local histories. By developing an awareness of human rights and providing youth with opportunities to engage in human rights activities the life and times of Anne Frank serve as a catalyst for both reflection and civic engagement.

  Through their wide range of experiences, Mariela Chyrikins and Barry van Driel have thoughtfully summed up the power and relevance of the Anne Frank work in Latin America.

  It mirrors other more local histories and realities, yet provides the temporal and geographical distance to address issues that might otherwise be too controversial, painful or threatening. Anne and her family were migrants. She suffered discrimination and oppression and she suffered due to the violent actions of a dictator. She had to hide. This is why young people from minority groups and relatives of political refugees particularly relate to her life.

  Chapter 9

  Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn

  ‘As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.’ Audrey Hepburn

  Eva Schloss and I were standing in Audrey Hepburn’s dressing room at the Barbican, the concert hall and arts centre in London, talking to a woman dressed in black. Yes, it really was her. AUDREY HEPBURN! It was May 1991, the Anne Frank Trust was barely a few months into its life and its official launch was still six months away. I was completely star struck by this astonishingly beautiful woman. She had walked onto the stage a couple of hours earlier to read from Anne Frank’s diary, which had been set against a musical accompaniment by the American maestro Michael Tilson Thomas. This first performance was a special concert in support of UNICEF. As she walked towards the centre of the stage, a black folder containing the readings under her arm, the audience let out a tangible gasp. Audrey was already 60 but glided into view like a black swan, graceful and sylphlike on that large stage.

  Audrey has described what reading Anne Frank’s diary meant to her:

  Anne Frank and I were born in the same year, lived in the same country and experienced the same war. Except she was locked up and I was on the outside. Reading Anne’s diary was like reading my own experiences from her point of view. I was quite destroyed by it. An adolescent girl locked up in two rooms, with no way of expressing herself other than to her diary. She was in a different corner of Holland but all the events I experienced were so incredibly accurately described by her. Not just what was going on on the outside – but what was happening on the inside of a young girl starting to be a woman . . . all in a cage. She expresses the claustrophobia but transcends it through her love of nature, her awareness of humanity and her love – real love – of life.

  Once we had been introduced in her dressing room, Eva told Audrey that her stepfather Otto and her mother Fritzi had so wanted her to be the actress to play Anne in the 1960 George Stevens film, The Diary of Anne Frank. As they talked, both women pronounced Anne’s name in the Continental way of ‘Anna’. Audrey responded: ‘Eva, you do understand why I couldn’t play Anne, don’t you?’ ‘Well, I assumed you had filming commitments,’ Eva said. Audrey looked Eva directly in the eye. ‘No,’ she almost whispered. ‘It wasn’t that. It was just too hard for me. It was too close to my life for me to do.’

  Audrey Hepburn had been born in Brussels on 4 May 1929, one month before Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt. Her birth name was Audrey Kathleen Ruston, her mother a Dutch aristocrat and her father a British businessman. Sometime later her father decided to add the ancestral name of Hepburn to all the family’s names. Joseph Ruston Hepburn walked out on his family when Audrey was just 6-years-old and she bore the scars of that rejection throughout her childhood and adult life. Audrey’s mother never remarried and moved her young family back to Arnhem in the Netherlands, where her own father had been Mayor of the city. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 Audrey was 11. Her mother wisely changed her daughter’s English-sounding name so as not to put any of the family under suspicion. Ruston Hepburn was reverted to the family’s own very Dutch sounding name of van Heemstra, and Audrey became Edda. Early on in the occupation, Audrey’s maternal uncle Otto van Limburg had been executed by the Nazis in revenge for a Resistance ambush. One of her half-brothers was sent to a labour camp in Berlin and the other went into hiding. As a strategic crossing-place of the Rhine, Arnhem was a difficult place to be, especially after the Allied advance into the Netherlands and the fierce battles for control of its bridges. The family moved to the grandparents’ home in the suburbs. Like many Dutch children who were seen to be skipping or running through the streets, their playfulness masked a dangerous secret, as on some occasions Audrey was actually running errands for the Resistance, carrying secret messages in her shoes.

  The Dutch suffered privations throughout the German occupation and war, but the final months of 1944 and into 1945, after the German blockade of food and fuel to the farms in the occupied areas of the Netherlands, became known as the ‘Hunger Winter’. What little food was produced was sent to the Dutch troops. Around 20,000 civilians starved to death and others survived on eating raw tulip bulbs. It was a rare case of famine taking place in Europe in modern times.

  After the liberation, 16-year-old Edda van Heemstra was one of the children helped by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was soon to become known as UNICEF. She described herself as ‘not starving but severely malnourished’. Throughout the rest of her life, as her star ascended, Audrey Hepburn never forgot the help those kind and caring people from the United Nations gave her in those days immediately after liberation, when they were distributing food, clothes and health care.

  In 1988, having decided to retire from making movies, Audrey was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. Her first field trip was to Ethiopia which had suffered a terrible famine in the mid-1980s. On taking up her role she noted that: ‘Since the world has existed there has been injustice. The more so as it becomes smaller and more accessible. There is no question that there is a moral obligation for those who have, to give to those who have nothing.’

  Edith Simmons-Richner, who had helped me with the Anne Frank Children to Children Appeal for Bosnia in 1993, was also the UNICEF Information and Social Mobilization Officer in Ethiopia, and accompanied Audrey on her first mission as a newly appointed UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. On a trip to the north of the country, they visited an orphanage where young children who had lost their families in the three-year famine between 1992 and 1995 were cared for. Edith described to me what happened there:

  It was lunchtime, and we watched the children queuing up in silence for their meal. Then Audrey left our group and sat, alone, on the ground, at a distance, watching the children. Suddenly, a little girl left the ranks and ran spontaneously towards Audrey hugging her and nestling on her knees. It was a totally impromptu and very moving moment as we watched this little girl, and Audrey Hepburn, both survivors of terrible famines, holding and comforting each other in silence. I shall never forget it.

  Later, Edith received a letter from Audrey Hepburn in which she wrote, ‘Ethiopia is in my thoughts every day sometimes nights! I have really fallen in love with that country and their people. I have gone halfway around the world since I saw you, talking and talking about Ethiopia. I pray that our efforts will make some difference.’

  While the conversation between Eva Schloss and Audrey Hepburn was taking place in her dressing room at the Barbican, I was standing with Audrey’s long-time partner and the love of her life, the Dutch actor Robert Wolders. Like Audrey, Wolders had also been living in Arnhem during the war, in another suburb of the city, but their two paths had never crossed until they finally met at a party in 1980.

  ‘Is there anything Audrey could do for you?’ Robert asked me. Without hesitation and employing the utmost chutzpah, I ventured forth, ‘Well, would she consider becoming a patron
of the Anne Frank Trust?’ He smiled and nodded. Yes of course she would. And so with great pride the name Audrey Hepburn was added to our notepaper.

  Less than two years later, on 20 January 1993, Audrey died from a rare form of abdominal cancer. She was still astonishingly beautiful at the age of 63. She had not long returned from a gruelling visit to Somalia in her role as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Her terminal illness and the speed of its progress came as a huge shock to her and her family; doctors had assumed her severe stomach pains were from a temporary infection she had picked up while in Somalia.

  Edith told me about the final project Audrey had undertaken for UNICEF in the autumn of 1992, after returning from her mission in Somalia, and already very ill and close to death. This was a radio announcement to be broadcast to all factions in the war in the former Yugoslavia and asking them to put down their arms for the UNICEF ‘Week of Tranquillity’, during which much-needed items could be distributed to children on all sides of the conflict before the harsh winter set in. Speaking as a UNICEF colleague Edith said, ‘Wherever she went, Audrey Hepburn’s efforts made a huge difference. Her death was a big loss for us all, and especially for suffering children worldwide.’ In the words of Audrey’s great friend and revered fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, ‘She was an enchantress, inspiring love and beauty, and fairies don’t disappear altogether.’