The other half of the ‘Anne Frank + You’ exhibition focused on contemporary issues and expanded on five themes Anne wrote poignantly about in her diary. These were: Racial Hatred, Conflict, Inclusion and Identity, Moral Choices and Freedom. These panels were in vibrant colours, predominantly vivid reds and yellows, and each panel contained integral filmed interviews with British teenagers about the particular theme it covered.
‘Anne Frank + You’ was large and looked dramatic. It took a team of five able bodied people at least two days to build. When it was shown in a busy shopping centre or a major tourist attraction such as St Paul’s Cathedral, our Exhibition Manager Doug Palfreeman and his team would have to build it overnight, under tight pressure to have it completed by the morning’s opening time. I am reliably informed by Doug that a night spent working at St Paul’s Cathedral amongst the centuries-old tombs and below its famed Whispering Gallery is a disquietingly eerie experience.
Over the twenty-plus years I have been travelling the country with the Anne Frank exhibition, there has been no other exhibition that has had the power and ability to bring all sections of the community together like ours. People drive many miles to see it, and recall it so intensely that they often tell me that it was ‘a couple of years ago’, when in fact I know that it was many more. A fascinating phenomenon, that I have heard time and again over the years, was that children who came on school visits would bring their parents back to see it at the weekend or in school holidays.
In its three different incarnations, the Anne Frank exhibition has been seen by over three million people in the UK, that’s approximately one in twenty of the country’s population. In London I recently met a woman in her thirties who asked me how I had first become involved with the Anne Frank Trust. I told her the story, as I have done many times, about the exhibition’s visit to Bournemouth in 1989 and what it had led to. As I spoke she was nodding her head and then said, ‘Yes. I remember that exhibition too. I was on holiday staying with my grandparents in the town and they took me to see it. I was nine years old and have never forgotten it.’
Anne Frank and the Jewish Boy Shown Off to Hitler
‘You can decide for yourselves if we were beautiful or not, but Aryan we certainly were not.’ Herbert Levy
From 1991 and for the following twelve years, I had a co-traveller touring the country with the Anne Frank exhibition. His name was Herbert Levy, otherwise proudly known as the ‘Anne Frank Trust’s Principal Guide and Guide Trainer’. To be taken around the exhibition by Herbert, whether as a volunteer guide being trained by him or as a visitor, was an enlightening and unforgettable experience. Herbert used his own life story, and his love of amateur dramatics, to relate Anne Frank’s life in a unique way. His soft, well-mannered English commanded respect, interest and authority.
As a boy of 9, Herbert Levy had arrived at London’s Liverpool Street Station on a steam train used for the Kindertransport, the rescue mission for Jewish children. The little German-speaking boy stepped off the train in the midst of a crowd of other bewildered German-Jewish children, most of whom would never see their parents again. Thankfully, and unusually, Herbert Levy’s parents were able to flee Germany a few months after their young son, in August 1939, just as the doors of escape were closing tightly shut.
Herbert had been born in Berlin in 1929, the same year as Anne Frank, during the time that the Nazis were on their rise to power. By the time Herbert was four, the Nazis were the ruling party and started almost immediately to harass German Jews. He recalled a frightening night time visit by the police who went through his father’s papers and then left with a large amount of the family’s cash.
Two years later, six-year-old Herbert was to have a frighteningly close encounter with Adolf Hitler himself. Walking home one afternoon, Herbert and his mother had turned a familiar corner and found themselves in a crowd who were excitedly waiting for the Führer’s car to pass. On spotting the little blond Herbert, members of the crowd scooped him up and carried him aloft to the very front – to be shown to the Führer as an example of a fine Aryan child in their midst. Herbert could recall his own fear and that of his mother, but as Hitler’s car passed him, the bright six-year-old had the wherewithal to make the expected ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. The ‘Aryan’ little boy was then passed back over the crowd to his very relieved mother.
Soon after Herbert’s parents’ arrival in the UK, the Second World War broke out. The refugee Levy family were interned by the British government on the Isle of Man, described as ‘Enemy Aliens’, and incredibly held alongside actual Nazis. On their release the Levy family settled in north London, living for many years in Hampstead among the German-Jewish refugee community. Despite having been interned by his new homeland of Britain in the early 1950s, Herbert went on to do his national service in the Royal Army Education Corps. In 1961 he married Lilian Davidson, who had been found as a five-year-old orphan in Bergen-Belsen on its liberation by the British army.
As a young adult Herbert assimilated well into British life, and with a great love of English literature, his dream was to have been an actor or theatre director. He described the stage as ‘in his blood’ as the relatives who had taken him in on his arrival in London were seasoned stage performers. Herbert set up an amateur dramatics group, putting on productions in his synagogue in Belsize Square, Hampstead, aimed at alleviating the trauma of the Continental refugee families who had recently lost so many of their loved ones in the Holocaust. In order to support his wife and two children, instead of pursuing an insecure professional life in the theatre, Herbert set up a successful hosiery business selling nylon stockings, which were in the 1960s replaced by the exciting innovation of tights. He never spoke willingly or publicly about his childhood in Germany, the trauma of coming alone as a child to Britain, or of his grandmother’s murder in Auschwitz.
In November 1991 the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition was staged at Belsize Square Synagogue, an appropriate choice as it had been founded by German-Jewish refugees (Herbert’s parents among them) and its first Rabbi, George Salzberger, had been a friend of Otto Frank in Frankfurt. Herbert was asked to be one of the team of exhibition guides, and was at first reticent and very nervous, feeling that this would be too emotional and painful for him opening up old wounds. In his memoir Voices from the Past published in 1995, he describes the ‘right to put aside these things, to forget and live a new life without bringing up these memories of fifty years ago’.
But he then talks about the choice that he and Lilian made to go ahead with becoming a guide at that time. Later on, when he found himself educating students and prisoners, the matter of personal choices became a focus of his exhibition tour.
There are many parallels and many choices. The Germans had a choice, the Dutch had a choice – it was the Jews who had very little choice . . . And today’s children in their later lives will have choices to make. I hope that something of what they saw will remain with them, so that when the time comes to make their own choices, remembering this exhibition will help them make the right choice.
After that first experience of guiding at the Anne Frank exhibition in November 1991, Herbert never looked back. In the words of his wife Lilian, ‘It was an absolute release for him’. Herbert Levy’s theatrical ambitions were finally realized when I appointed him the Principal Guide and Guide Trainer for the exhibition, and even though by this time he was well into his seventies, he travelled tirelessly all over the UK on behalf of the Anne Frank Trust. He educated thousands of young people and teams of volunteer guides in his unforgettable style, adding dramatic flourishes where required to this tragic story.
While explaining to school groups the irrationality of the Nazis’ race laws against Jews and Roma, and others not deemed to have Aryan blood, Herbert would hold up a black-and-white photo of two smiling young children, a boy with blond hair wearing leather shorts and an older girl with long blond plaits. It was actually Herbert’s aunt Charlotte Mendelssohn who had taken this photo
of her pretty daughter Ellen-Eva and her cute little nephew Herbert. When Mrs Mendelssohn went along to collect the printed photos from the local photographic shop in Berlin she was horrified to see this photo proudly displayed in the shop window. Underneath it was a sign that read: ‘TWO BEAUTIFUL ARYAN CHILDREN.’ For a number of weeks, the enlarged photo was displayed in this and several other shop windows around Berlin.
Decades later, Herbert would stand in front of the Anne Frank exhibition panel explaining the Nazi race laws and tell them the story of the photograph he was holding. He would then lower his voice and say to the pupils, ‘Now it’s up to you to decide if we were beautiful or not, but Aryan we certainly weren’t.’ After this he would explain to the often very multicultural groups of children the absurdity of the Nazi ‘science’ of race.
Despite his own experience of internment, Herbert spent much of his time as a guide trainer in prisons, giving prisoners knowledge and understanding to be confident exhibition guides for their peers. In January 1997, Herbert took Tony and Cherie Blair around the brand-new ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ exhibition at Southwark Cathedral. Blair was so moved by Herbert’s guiding that he determined on that morning do all in his power to bring about a national Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, should he become Prime Minister in the forthcoming general election of May 1997, which in both cases came about. Herbert later joked that he had also tried to convince Tony Blair to introduce proportional representation for British elections, but sadly that had not been so successful.
Even well into his seventies, Herbert was travelling the length and breadth of the country and we spent a lot of time travelling together. We were once trapped by an ice storm for eight hours at Edinburgh Airport awaiting a flight back to London. Having been sustained and emboldened by the whisky samplings in the airport shop, Herbert drew upon all his dramatic skills to DEMAND AS A DIABETIC that we were prioritized on the first flight down to London. It worked.
Lilian and I still laugh about the time I was staying in a hotel with my husband Tony. I looked across the breakfast table and said, ‘This doesn’t seem quite right, Tony.’ He asked me what on earth I was talking about. ‘Well I feel I should be looking across at Herbert!’
In 2009, Herbert returned to the Isle of Man. The Anne Frank exhibition was being shown at St German’s Cathedral on the west coast – its first ever visit to the island. Herbert was to be a Very Special Guest at the opening ceremony. And he certainly was. At the end of the ceremony, and after Herbert had spoken, the Bishop of Sodor and Man summed up the evening by saying that ‘In five, ten and twenty years’ time, people will still be talking about the opening of the Anne Frank exhibition on the Isle of Man.’
But there were other remarkable things that had happened while Herbert and Lilian were visiting the island with the exhibition. On the afternoon of the opening, a reporter from the local radio station was conducting an interview with Herbert at the gates of the internment camp in which he and his family had been held during the war. An elderly man cycled by and saw the radio team interviewing someone, and stopped to ask what it was about. When it was explained that they were interviewing a man who had been in the internment camp as a child, the cyclist went over to shake Herbert’s hand. He told Herbert that he, as a young boy, had witnessed the day of the opening of the camp and the first German-Jewish refugees being marched in. A local newspaper article about Herbert’s return to the Isle of Man was spotted online in Israel by a distant cousin of the Levy family, who had been unsuccessfully trying to trace some of her relatives. She contacted the journalist who had the very pleasant duty of putting them in touch.
As a German whose family, like that of Anne Frank, went back many generations in Germany, Herbert took a particular interest in our young German volunteers who had come to the Anne Frank Trust through the peace organization Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. When Herbert passed away aged 85 in January 2015, I was so touched to see that three of our German volunteers had come all the way to London for his funeral. In the words of one of them, Immanuel Bartz:
Our first encounter took place at his home in North London in the form of an invitation to dinner. We quickly realized that both our families originated from Berlin and that we also shared a great love of theatre. In the years following this first meeting a deep and heartfelt relationship developed. Herbert was a man full of passion, dedication and conviction. He strongly believed that each person is presented with choices and how we respond to these choices presents new ways to live a good and fair life.
Herbert Levy inspired and influenced people young and old throughout this country to be compassionate and free from prejudice. And that black-and-white photograph of little Herbert and his cousin Ellen-Eva taken in Hitler’s Berlin is still, I am pleased to say, proudly displayed on a panel of the Anne Frank exhibition.
Chapter 11
Anne Frank and the Children of Bosnia
‘We have no food, heating nor electricity, but these things we can bear. We just cannot bear the hatred around us. Anne Frank didn’t live to see peace. Will we?’ From a letter sent to the Anne Frank House in 1993 from children in turmoil in Bosnia during the war.
During the years of Communism, Yugoslavia had been firmly controlled by its leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito. As a 1950s child the name ‘Tito’, when I heard spoken by my parents, put me in mind of a cuddly teddy bear. Later I was aware through photographs of a military-uniformed, be-medalled and strong-faced man who ruled an Iron Curtain country located in the south of Europe. Tito was described by many in the West as perhaps the most ‘benevolent dictator’ of the Soviet bloc. But, as a former brave and ferocious partisan fighting against the Nazis, he ruled his country with an iron fist. Marshal Tito died in 1980 but it was not until Communism started falling apart, and the lid on the Yugoslavian pot was lifted, that the boiling ingredients contained underneath started to come to the surface and escape.
By 1990 Tito’s former Yugoslavia had started to break up into many countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Montenegro. In the turmoil following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, backed by a people’s referendum. The population of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims who came to the region as a result of the Ottoman conquests in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians who have close cultural ties with neighbouring Serbia), and Bosnian Croats (Roman Catholics who have close cultural ties with neighbouring Croatia). Having been spurred on by a speech given in July 1989 at the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo by Slobodan Milošević, the President of Serbia, the Bosnian Serbs saw their future as part of ‘Greater Serbia’, and resisted the referendum. In early 1992, following conflict in neighbouring Croatia, violent incidents started breaking out in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By April 1992, this had escalated into a full-blown ethnic war which lasted until December 1995. Over 100,000 people were killed, 80 per cent of whom were Bosnian Muslims.
In March 1993, as the war in Bosnia was raging, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam received a letter sent by fax from a school in Zenica, Bosnia’s fourth-largest city. For eighteen months, Zenica (pronounced Zenitsa) had been isolated from the rest of the world, suffering considerable civilian casualties from sniper fire, shelling and also hunger. Most of Zenica’s people had no water or electricity, and with few food supplies, life for its inhabitants was becoming unbearable. The heartfelt letter, accompanied by a pencil drawing of Anne Frank writing at her desk, was from a fifth grade class of 12-year-olds. They had been reading Anne’s diary in their English lesson and were profoundly affected by it. They wrote:
Our teacher has told us about Anne Frank, and we have read her diary. After fifty years, history is repeating itself right here with this war with the hate and the killing, and with having to hide to save your life. We have no food, heating nor electricity, but these things we can bear. We just cannot bear the hatred around us! We are only t
welve years old. We can’t influence politics and the war, but we want to live! And we want to stop this madness. Like Anne Frank fifty years ago, we wait for peace. She didn’t live to see it. Will we?
Barry van Driel, a close colleague at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, was not quite sure what to do with it, so he faxed it over to me at the fledgling eighteen-month-old Anne Frank Trust. Earlier that week I had been chatting to two women Holocaust survivors at the opening night of the play Kindertransport. The women were distraught to see children suffering in Europe again as they had done fifty years before, and asked me if there was anything the Anne Frank Trust could do. I explained that we were a small educational organization and what we could do was limited. Besides, our remit was education – we were not an aid charity.
Driving home from the theatre that night, the voice of one of the Holocaust survivors and the shocking fact she told me was echoing, ‘To try to break the spirit of the children in the concentration camps, the Nazis told them that they were not wanted by their families anymore and that the only way out was up the chimney.’ When I got home I couldn’t sleep. I read the fax from Barry over and over again and then discussed it with my husband Tony. The thought that children were suffering from hunger again in Europe could not leave me and there had to be something to do about it. It’s what Anne Frank would have wished. How could we allow this horror to happen again? I could see the desperation in the eyes of those two Holocaust survivors pleading for some help for the children of Bosnia. My heart could relate to that plea. I felt that through this conversation an opportunity had fallen from the sky to help the children of Bosnia. Perhaps we could run a campaign with an educational element to encourage the children of Britain to support the children of Bosnia. I was thinking of a way of how to harness the media to create public awareness. I was virtually a one-man band, with only the help of a part-time administrator, how could I get something started?
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 18