The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  In 2002, nine years after Audrey’s death, my second husband Tony and I were in Los Angeles, and paid a visit to Audrey’s son Sean Hepburn Ferrer at the offices of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund in Santa Monica. We were welcomed warmly. Sean gave me a signed copy of his newly-published biography of his mother, Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit, as well as a framed black-and-white photograph that he told me was so important to his mother that she had kept it on her bedside table until her death. The photo had been taken by his father Mel Ferrer in 1957 in Switzerland. It was of Audrey with Otto and Fritzi Frank.

  Chapter 10

  On the Road with Anne Frank

  When I helped to organize that very first exhibition in my own southern coastal town in 1989, little did I know that for the following twenty-six years I would be travelling to nearly every part of the United Kingdom setting up Anne Frank exhibitions.

  In the process of visiting so many cities, towns and regions, I have been a witness to the social, economic and demographic changes that have affected the entire country during the successive Conservative, Labour, Coalition and then again Conservative governments, and the new wave of immigration from former Communist countries as they became part of the European Union. I have seen towns deeply affected by post-industrial deprivation, by white and Asian communities living side by side but with no integration, and monocultural regions where racist attitudes are borne out of ignorance.

  For many months of each year I would find myself stepping off a train, scouring the station platform for publicity posters with Anne Frank’s vibrant face shining out and heading into town to the cathedral, library, town hall or museum that would be hosting the Anne Frank exhibition for the next few weeks. I travelled from the north coast of Wales, to the religiously-divided cities of Northern Ireland, to the Cornish toe of England, inner and outer boroughs of London, and the multicultural post-industrial cities and towns of the north of England.

  How did the Anne Frank exhibitions happen? Although many of the visitors may have thought they had fallen from the sky, or indeed arrived directly from Amsterdam to their town, the process for an Anne Frank exhibition taking place was usually something like this:

  I would identify a town, city or county council that had not previously held the exhibition, or had already done so but several years previously and would now have a new generation of pupils in their schools. In some cases, a council representative would make contact with me first, often when they had relocated from one town to another and had hosted the Anne Frank exhibition in their previous location. The same also applied with cathedrals, for example the late Dr Colin Slee, one of the Canons of St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, moved on to be appointed the Provost of Southwark Cathedral in south London, the highest position in the cathedral. He had hosted our exhibition at St Albans Abbey in 1993, and it had attracted large crowds from the whole of north London. Colin wasn’t long in his new senior position before I was invited to come and see him. It was in the magnificent Gothic nave of Southwark that we launched the new version of the exhibition, ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’, in January 1997.

  Once initial contact had been made with a civic authority through the Mayor, Chief Executive or one of the council’s other elected or professional leaders, I would visit the town to meet those senior decision-makers who could agree to fund the project, or in some cases, underwrite it pending attracting sponsorship from businesses, local trust funds or unions. Next I would meet the team who would become involved in the planning and organizing of each event, including the recruiting of volunteers from the community to help guide the public or man the exhibition book shop.

  I really loved the first engagement with each new planning team – walking into a room full of interested, enthusiastic people and bouncing around ideas on how we could make each month-long visit of the exhibition even more impactful and unforgettable for the local community. The council’s education team would offer to create some new teaching resources, often highlighting local issues such as an abusive, violent or murderous racist attack or a concerning growth of extremist groups, and would then set about ensuring every school in their area had an opportunity to visit the exhibition; the PR and marketing team would develop a publicity campaign sometimes extending to posters at bus stops and in high street shop windows; and the equalities or community engagement teams would ensure all the local ethnic and religious community groups would be informed, would supply a pool of volunteers and bring their families to see the exhibition. Over the ensuing months the local team and I would be in close contact leading up to the launch event, which I would nearly always attend to conduct media interviews, make a speech on behalf of the Anne Frank Trust, and offer advice on planned satellite events. Out of nearly 200 openings over the years, there were very few I didn’t attend in person.

  During the course of the month-long exhibition, friendships were often forged across previous community divides, and from what I have been told many times in different cities there was nothing like the Anne Frank exhibition for breaking down barriers and bringing people together. The exhibition often left behind unforeseen legacies, some of which I heard about only years later. Local people were prompted by the Anne Frank exhibition to set up a new interfaith forum as a long-term legacy of the event. Through Anne Frank, intergenerational connections were built, and even warm relationships fostered across the political and social divide (I am thinking especially of Northern Ireland).

  I remember a group of religious Muslim women who volunteered at the exhibition at Gloucester Cathedral in the summer of 1997. They were so enthusiastic about spending their days at a Christian place of worship to tell the story of a Jewish girl in the Holocaust, that they prepared and cooked their family’s evening meal at six o’clock in the morning, so as to be able to devote their day to Anne Frank.

  A memorable incident, where images of Anne Frank made a mark that resulted in national news headlines, was the exhibition’s visit to the beautiful medieval city of York in January 1998. The city council found an unusual way to use Anne Frank’s story to atone for a sin dating back 800 years. In 1190, fleeing a baying mob, the Jewish population had desperately sought refuge inside the stone walls of Clifford’s Tower, a fortification overlooking the city. Anti-Semitic feeling was running high throughout western Europe in the twelfth century, stoked by the Christian fervour of the Crusades, which had caused aggression and violence against Jews across England, France and Germany, as well as against Muslims in the Holy Land. The York mob’s thirst for Jewish blood was incited by several of the local landed gentry, who saw a convenient way of eliminating their debts to the Jewish moneylenders (moneylending was pretty much the only career permitted to Jews in medieval Europe). Realizing they had no escape, the Jews decided to end their lives by their own hand, the men slaughtering the women and children, and finally themselves. Those that demurred and gave themselves up to the mob fared no better, and the entire Jewish population of York was wiped out.

  The City of York Council came up with an unusual way of recognizing this blot on the city’s history. The ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ exhibition was to visit the city and the title of the exhibition, linking past and present, proved to be apposite. Directly facing Clifford’s Tower stands what was then the Stakis Hotel, now brought into the Hilton hotel chain. The council approached the Stakis Group’s Managing Director, a man called David Michels, with an idea to light up the long Yorkshire January nights by projecting images from the Anne Frank exhibition on to the exterior walls of Clifford’s Tower. Mr Michels agreed without hesitation and the Anne Frank ‘lumiere show’ became a traffic stopper, generating national media coverage and local interest in both the Anne Frank exhibition and the Clifford’s Tower massacre.

  I convinced myself that I had become an informal ‘expert’ on the architecture of Britain’s cathedrals, having visited so many of them with the Anne Frank exhibition. From my first view of its exterior I could tell you if the building dated from the Nor
man, Gothic, Baroque or Modern periods. On entering the nave and looking at the arches and flying buttresses I could then confirm the difference between the softer, rounded Norman arches, and the more pointed and towering style of the later Gothic period. Unlike other European and Latin American countries, the only Baroque cathedral in Britain is actually St Paul’s, and indeed this is the only example of having been designed by a single person, Sir Christopher Wren, the previous cathedral on the site having been destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666.

  I was a Jewish girl who loved spending time in cathedrals, but was always sad to think about the great loss of life and limb that must have occurred in the building of these great edifices in the centuries long before we had any Health and Safety regulations. Cathedrals took decades, and sometimes centuries, to complete. I would think about the common labourers who lifted the stones into place, the more skilled stone carvers and glass makers, who would give so many years of toil and often not live to see the finished result. In rural locations like the flatlands around Ely in Cambridgeshire, where the cathedral spire could be seen from miles away, I would imagine the power of that huge overwhelming structure during the years that no other building would have been higher than one storey. Housed in those great stone walls were the combined power of God, of the Church and of the ruling classes to inspire awe and submission in the masses.

  The cathedral staff would be welcoming and enthusiastic about acting as hosts for the exhibition, although there was sometimes what I called ‘the stroppy verger’, who paced around the floor, huffing and scowling because the exhibition and the numbers of people it attracted were an unwelcome hindrance to his or her daily duties. We also occasionally encountered our ‘stroppy vergers’ in schools (unhelpful caretakers) and in prisons (a small number of the prison officers).

  In Blackburn Cathedral in 2009, a key organizer was Anjum Anwar, who was in fact the only Muslim Dialogue Development Officer in an Anglican cathedral. As one would suspect, the launch of the Anne Frank exhibition at Blackburn Cathedral was a truly multi-faith affair, with the triumvirate of Dean, Imam and Rabbi present as well as Mrs Thea Hirst, a child Holocaust refugee to Britain, who like Anne Frank had also kept a diary during those traumatic years.

  I always maintained that the further away from London the Anne Frank exhibition was held, the more appreciated it was by the local community. And the smaller the town, the bigger the event became. Examples were Rhyl, a seaside resort on the north coast of Wales which had seen more affluent times; a shopping precinct in Dudley, on the outskirts of Birmingham, where people queued the length of the shopping aisle to see the exhibition; and some of the border towns in Northern Ireland (‘Everything exciting usually goes to Belfast’, they would tell me). In these towns there was a real buzz about the event, and you would see posters of Anne Frank everywhere, including at bus stops, displays of Anne’s diary in bookshop windows; and even overhear people talking about it on the streets.

  I heard some astonishing stories of connection to the Frank family in the most unexpected places. At St Edmundsbury Cathedral, in the rural east of England country town of Bury St Edmunds, I was introduced to an elderly local woman called Julia Donovan. Julia had grown up in the Netherlands but married an Englishman after the Second World War. Her profession as a young woman in wartime Amsterdam happened to be as a midwife. It was Julia who had delivered the baby sister of Anne Frank’s best friend Hannah Goslar, the same friend whom Anne had encountered again in Bergen-Belsen. Julia was looking after mother and baby when the Frank family had come to visit the new arrival. There among the stone pillars of an English country cathedral, the 90-year-old Mrs Donovan described to me her memories of young Anne, as she recalled a vivid, smiling and friendly little girl with very dark hair and eyes. With a twinkle in her eye, the elderly lady also divulged her dangerous night time activities in the Dutch Resistance, one of which was throwing the bicycles of Nazi soldiers into the canals.

  There were also amusing incidents along the way that I still laugh about when recalling. As I sat in Truro Cathedral, in the most south-westerly county of Cornwall, the guests were waiting for the overdue arrival of the town’s Mayor to open the exhibition. Around ten minutes after the formalities were due to start, the cathedral doors burst open and a rather agitated and dishevelled middle-aged Lady Mayor ran down the aisle to her reserved seat. Afterwards, I asked her politely what had detained her. ‘Well,’ she started to explain in a thick Cornish accent, ‘You see, I have a Saturday job in Marks and Spencer’s and the woman who was supposed to come and relieve me on my till didn’t turn up. I just didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave my till, even for Anne Frank.’

  Mayors often provided amusement, especially when grappling with facts on giving an opening address for the exhibition. There was one in a nameless seaside town who kept saying: ‘Now this Anne Franklin . . .’ with clearly no idea of her story. And another in a northern city, whose wife was complaining to me that ‘He gets a good allowance to kit himself out with new suits for his year of office. But me, nothing. Not even the cost of a new hairdo.’

  Some of the opening events themselves have been so memorable that I still run a video of them in my mind. In 1996, at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, a group of children sang a song about the Holocaust that they had written for the Eisteddfod that year. The song was sung entirely in Welsh but was so powerful that the tears were streaming down my face. It was also on that evening that I met the Holocaust survivor Ellen Davies, who told her story to a silenced audience. Silent because they had never heard a woman from their own town, and speaking in an authentic Welsh accent with no trace of European roots, describe how her parents and siblings in Poland were all shot dead by the Nazis, and how she, because of the ‘Kindertransport’ children’s rescue mission to Britain, had been the only one to survive.

  In 1996 the Anne Frank House created a successor to their first travelling exhibition ‘Anne Frank in the World’. In January 1997, the English-language version of ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ was launched at Southwark Cathedral. The Anne Frank House had capitalized on the new historical material that was being made accessible after the fall of Communism across Eastern Europe. ‘A History for Today’ contained many ‘stop you in your tracks’ colour photos, which made the Nazi period seem all the more real. With its structure of five adjoined hexagonal ‘pavilions’ and domed roof sections, the exhibition was beautiful to look at, but because of the way each pavilion had to be slotted together, it was not easily adapted to different shaped spaces.

  One of the first venues for ‘A History for Today’ was quite unusual – a large marquee in the busy tourist destination of Camden Market in London. It resided there for two months in the summer of 1997, alongside a second marquee which housed lectures, concerts and theatrical productions, including a week-long run of the play Dreams of Anne Frank. In Camden Market, the exhibition attracted a very diverse range of visitors, including one afternoon Oasis founder Noel Gallagher and his wife, but one unwelcome one – a small hole in the marquee’s roof let in rain and a bucket was duly positioned under it. It was fun to be right in the heart of the action of Camden Market, but because of the practical problems of being in a marquee, not one we decided to replicate. On the final day of the exhibition, the last Sunday in August, Nic Careem, who had been very helpful in the organization of the exhibition, arranged a thank-you party for all the volunteers who had helped over the two months. Nic worked until very late the night before to collect and prepare all the food, a generous gesture to thank and celebrate the volunteers. However, on the day of the thank-you party the mood was very subdued. Princess Diana had died in the early hours of that morning.

  By 2004, we were again in need of a new exhibition. The Anne Frank House agreed to work in tandem with the Anne Frank Trust to create it and I started the fundraising process. Funding came from the National Lottery Community Fund (now known as the Big Lottery), the Home Office, the Association of Jewish Refugees,
the Claims Conference in New York, and many individual supporters. Jon Blair, who had made the Oscar-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered led the team, working with award-winning design company Metaphor, and educators from the House in Amsterdam and the Trust in London. On its completion in 2005, the new exhibition ‘Anne Frank + You’ looked fabulous – unlike any other exhibition that was touring the UK.

  ‘Anne Frank + You’ was created for young people and the ‘You’ was about them and their lives, making strong and often surprising connections with Anne’s writing. The exhibition’s launch took place in June 2005 in the very hip area of Brick Lane in East London, attended by comedian David Baddiel, BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane and one of the UK’s most recognizable artists, Tracy Emin, who happens to be a huge fan of Anne Frank.

  ‘Anne Frank + You’ comprised two distinct sections representing ‘then and now’. The historical section on the life and times of Anne and her family, from her birth in 1929 until her death in 1945, was appropriately shown on panels of monotone shades of grey and black, broken up by the occasional coloured Holocaust-era images as well as bright red illuminated showcases housing the Frank family photo collection. From these panels visitors would progress through the intimidatingly dark ‘Holocaust and Genocide’ tunnel. This explained the fate of the Frank family, plus other images of the Holocaust. At the end of this tunnel visitors were confronted with the question ‘Never Again?’, the answer supplied on a screen with disturbing moving footage from the genocides that have occurred around the world since 1945.

  Visitors then take a step into Anne’s world, by entering an almost life-size reproduction of Anne’s bedroom in hiding. In this empty space, children loved to spend time, sitting cross-legged on the floor and listening to the recording of a young actress reading from Anne’s diary. Through a replica window on the far wall, they look at images of the inside and outside of Anne’s hiding place.