The Legacy of Anne Frank

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

  In the summer of 1998, the Anne Frank exhibition arrived along with the educator and facilitator Barry van Driel, my colleague who had faxed the children’s letter from Zenica to me in 1993. During his preparations for the event, Barry came to realize that although the war was over, the conflict was still very raw. The exhibition panels could not be flown directly into Bosnia so were flown to Split in Croatia, and then hidden under blankets in the back of a van, driven across the border and on to Mostar.

  For Barry, who was in the back of the van with the hidden panels, it was pretty hairy. He had first visited the Pavarotti Music Centre while it was being built and had almost been killed by a falling beam. He lay in the back of the van considering what he was doing in such a dangerous place. But even on arrival at the Centre it was not all plain sailing. Barry’s usual method of working was to start the project off with a teachers’ seminar to discuss the level of knowledge and issues that needed to be addressed. The Pavarotti Centre was situated on the predominantly Muslim east side of the river and teachers from the west Croatian side refused to come and sit in the same room as the Muslims. And then Barry as a Dutchman became the subject of suspicion.

  The year before, in July 1995, Dutch UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica had failed to prevent a massacre of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys that had been carried out by units of the Bosnian Serb army under their noses. It was described by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as the ‘worst crime carried out on European soil since the Second World War’. Waiting to start his workshop and training session, Barry was confronted by a participating teacher with the question, ‘How can the Dutch dare to talk about human rights issues?’ A long and difficult discussion followed and after some four hours, frustratingly cutting into the seminar time, Barry was able to convince the teachers that the Anne Frank House was a non-governmental organization with humanitarian aims. The group eventually became co-operative so he asked them to walk through the exhibition and reflect on its educational value. Their response was unanimous. In the Anne Frank exhibition in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina they found a message of hope in learning about the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. One teacher said: ‘We can rebuild our society as Europe did after the Second World War, and despite all the hatred we can do it again.’

  Barry then met the young people themselves. He was shocked to find that many of the 13-year-olds were already hardened smokers, who brazenly told him that if they had the money for drugs they would take those too. ‘Often these young people could not talk to their own parents, as they too were deeply suffering. I was surprised to see my colleague Henri (drama in education practitioner Henrietta Seebohm) having a smoke with them, but I realized she was finding a way for them to feel comfortable with us.’

  In Sarajevo, Barry worked with two boys who were both called Adnan. The younger one, known as Petsa, or ‘Little One’, went on to inspire the words of the Anne Frank Declaration. The older Adnan was given the role of Otto Frank in the performance of Dreams of Anne Frank, a new play by London writer Bernard Kops. Older Adnan’s father had been killed in the war and because of the stress he had endured, Adnan was already suffering from a diagnosed heart condition. After the first performance, where he had given a wonderful portrayal of Anne Frank’s beloved father, none of the team could find Adnan. He was discovered outside crying his eyes out. Sensing it was something the boy needed to do, Barry and the other children let him be. After two hours of continuous crying, Adnan came back inside. All through the performance he had felt the presence of his own father by his side and told an emotional Barry that he had dedicated his performance to his father. The Muslim Bosniak girl who played Anne thanked Barry and the team for ‘letting her sleep again’. Being Anne Frank, even for such a short while, had helped her to process all that had happened during the war.

  Thanks to funding from Spain, the spectacular Old Bridge of Mostar was rebuilt and re-opened in 2004. And in the city’s community the Anne Frank project in 1996 rebuilt hope for the future.

  Chapter 12

  Anne Frank and Nelson Mandela

  ‘Some of us read Anne Frank’s diary on Robben Island and derived much encouragement from it. It is particularly relevant for the South Africa of today, as we emerge from the treacherous era of apartheid injustice.’ Nelson Mandela on opening the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition in Johannesburg, August 1994

  Just four months after becoming president of the country that had imprisoned him for twenty-seven years, Nelson Mandela opened the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition at the Museum Afrika in Johannesburg, South Africa. A small figure in a black-and-white geometric-design shirt, Mr Mandela took to the stage in front of the gathered dignitaries. For most it was the first time they had seen their new president in real life. They craned forward to hear his words. After the usual words of thanks to the organizers and sponsors, Mandela’s tone changed. He recalled living through the Second World War as an African: ‘My own memories of the Second World War revolve around the hopes of black South Africans that the defeat of Nazism would not only bring about the liberation of Europe but also the liberation of the oppressed in South Africa. But instead, after the War, apartheid triumphed in our country.’

  Mandela then remarked on the strong connection between apartheid and Nazism which shared

  the inherently evil belief in the superiority of some races over others. This drove adherents of these ideologies to perpetrate unspeakable crimes and to derive pleasure from the suffering of their fellow human beings. But because these beliefs are patently false, and because they were, and will always be, challenged by the likes of Anne Frank, they are bound to fail. The Anne Frank exhibition is particularly relevant for South Africans as we emerge from the treacherous era of apartheid and injustice, exploring the past in order to heal, to reconcile and to build the future.

  And then to the surprise and fascination of the audience, Mr Mandela explained that he had read The Diary of Anne Frank while incarcerated on Robben Island for eighteen of the twenty-seven years of his imprisonment. ‘It kept our spirits high and reinforced our confidence in the invincibility of the cause of freedom and justice.’ He said that he had first read Anne’s diary even before he went into prison, but felt that what he derived from books he had read before his incarceration was totally different from what he received from the same book read while in prison.

  The lessons of that tragedy sunk more deeply into our souls and encouraged us in our situation. Her life was one on which young people could model their own lives. What we took away from Anne Frank was the invincibility of the human spirit which expresses itself in different ways in different situations. By honouring the memory of Anne Frank we are saying with one voice, ‘never again’.

  Mr Mandela went on to relate the astonishing story of what the prisoners had done at great personal risk to rescue Anne’s diary when it had nearly been destroyed. In the 1960s, while kept in Robben Island prison, 12km off the coast of Cape Town and yet clearly visible to its residents, Nelson Mandela had set up what he has described in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom as the ‘Robben Island University’, a learning forum for the prisoners to be well-equipped to continue the struggle for democracy on their long-awaited release. A group of political prisoners confined for decades in the harshest of conditions built a centre of learning not of bricks and mortar, but of intellectual debate.

  Spearheaded by Nelson Mandela, the ‘University’ allowed prisoners to lecture on their respective areas of expertise and debate wide-ranging topics including homosexuality and Marxism. In a barren limestone quarry on a secluded island, lectures and animated discussions were carried out during the short periods of rest, despite the attentions of the warders who guarded the imprisoned men and oversaw their long days of labouring in the quarry. The lectures and debates took place in snake-infested caves around the quarry during the men’s brief respite from breaking stones to take food and shade. One of the books they read and discussed had been Anne Frank’s
Diary of a Young Girl. It had somehow found its way into the collection of books in the small prison library. Mandela had encouraged the prisoners to read her teenage writing as a testament to the strength of the human spirit. After several years the little paperback book had been passed around and thumbed so much that its pages fell out and it became an incoherent and incomplete collection of papers. But the prisoners, avid for the message of hope for a better future that Anne envisioned, took turns to clandestinely copy out the pages by hand and collate them back together, so that the younger prisoners could continue to draw strength from Anne’s words. This was a dangerous act performed secretly by candlelight in the various cells at night. What happened to this volume we do not know, but it is one of the most remarkable examples of the place in history of Anne’s diary.

  I had been told this story myself a few months previously by South African anti-apartheid hero Govan Mbeki. A co-defendant at the notorious Rivonia trial, Mr Mbeki had spent twenty-four years, eighteen of them along with Mr Mandela, as a political prisoner on Robben Island, and was one of the political leaders of the prison. Mr Mbeki and I, along with courageous and long-standing anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzman, were together as speakers at the opening of the exhibition in the city of Port Elizabeth, which was taking place just a few days after the first ever democratic election in the country. Mbeki, by then 84-years-old, with a shock of white hair and stooping from his years of hard labour, took me aside as I showed him around the exhibition and quietly told me the story about Anne’s diary on Robben Island, and about his own many years as a political prisoner. Mbeki died in 2001, and lived long enough to see his own son Thabo succeed Nelson Mandela as the second President of democratic South Africa.

  In 2008, I took the ferry boat across Cape Town Harbour to Robben Island, where former political prisoners from those terrible years act as guides for visitors. Looking into the small cell where Mandela had spent so many years of his remarkable life, I imagined Anne’s diary secreted in a place only he would know where, emboldening him with the belief that things could one day change. Later that morning a coach took us to the infamous lime quarry, where the ‘Robben Island University’ had actually been held. There on the parched ground, I spotted an ominous-looking coiled and glossy black snake baking itself in the sun, a reminder that many of the prisoner labourers had actually died from the venom of snake bites.

  The Important Role the Anne Frank Exhibition Played in Helping to Create the New and Free South Africa

  The timing of the first-ever tour of the Anne Frank exhibition to South Africa in 1994 was accidental. But it proved to be fortuitous, as it played a role in the transition of the country from its difficult past to a new democratic nation.

  Back in 1991 a dynamic ball of energy called Myra Osrin was visiting London from her home in Cape Town. Myra, who at the time was co-ordinating the Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council, had heard about the Anne Frank exhibition that was touring the UK and that I was the person in charge. She was interested in bringing it to a fast changing South Africa. When Myra and I first met we both felt that the timing would be absolutely perfect. Nelson Mandela had been freed from incarceration just a year ago in February 1990, apartheid had been dismantled and the first democratic elections were by then just a couple of years away.

  I knew immediately that Myra was going to make the Anne Frank exhibition happen. Her enthusiasm brought in many people who became major sponsors, including the Dutch Embassy and Nedbank, a bank with Dutch roots based in South Africa. After months of planning, many international phone calls and faxes, the first ever tour of the Anne Frank exhibition to Africa was about to happen and would take in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein and Pretoria. To my huge delight I was asked by Anne Frank House director Hans Westra to open the exhibition in Port Elizabeth, planned for May 1994.

  One of the reasons for my excitement was because I have my own personal connection to South Africa, but did not wish to visit this beautiful country during the years of apartheid. My maternal grandfather, Sidney Cohen, who was born into a family of impoverished immigrant Polish Jews in the East End of London, had found a job as a cabin boy on a ship sailing to Cape Town a year or two into the twentieth century and just after the Boer War had been fought. Despite the fact that young Sidney was just 13-years-old, he had devised a rather cunning plan. The ship sailed from London Docks, and a few weeks later as Table Mountain came into sight, he went around the ship’s crew collecting money for their tobacco needs and kindly offering to go ashore to get their supplies. Once ashore, and with the money in his pocket, he fled. He hid in Cape Town until he saw the ship heading over the horizon to head back northwards up the coast of Africa. The young teenager managed to get a job taking him up-country peddling New Testament bibles in African villages. After several years working in customs and excise at Cape Town harbour, the adult Sidney came back to England, met my grandmother Kate and duly settled in Cardiff.

  The months leading up to the opening of the Anne Frank exhibition tour coincided with the country preparing for its first democratic election and the expected transfer of power from white to black. Myra Osrin recalls:

  Before the election we were busy running Anne Frank workshops and for the first ever time black, white and coloured educators were in the same room and engaging with one another. This gave one of the most important sectors of the community, the educators, an opportunity to share with each other their experiences. I don’t say the Anne Frank exhibition was the only thing to help with the transition of the country, but I do believe it was one of them. The project had two primary intentions. First, to educate people about the history of the Holocaust; second, to use the Holocaust story to teach people about the evils of discrimination and the importance of human rights.

  The timing for me turned out to be perfect. I arrived in Port Elizabeth just a couple of days after the election on 27 April, and in time for the announcement that there would be a government of ‘national unity’. The new multi-coloured flag reflected what Mandela hoped would become the rainbow nation. Mandela showed an estimable degree of pragmatism in putting the needs of the new nation first, over and above any feelings of bitterness towards his former oppressors, by including in his new government representatives of the previous white status quo who had much-needed skills and experience.

  After spending a few days in Port Elizabeth training an enthusiastic team of volunteer guides, I flew to Johannesburg to meet up with Tony, as we were heading on for a holiday at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. We had been warned by concerned friends that we should cancel our Johannesburg leg of the tour, as there had been violence and bombings in the run-up to the election. I flew back from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg and met Tony’s flight at the airport. We arrived at the Sandton Sun Hotel, and had been in our room unpacking for barely thirty minutes when I noticed a note slipped under our door. It was from the hotel management apologizing for any disruption to our stay. The security would be very tight as they had forty-nine heads of state and presidents arriving at the hotel for the period of Mr Mandela’s inauguration. Security, disruption – who cared? I certainly didn’t.

  Over the coming days you could not sit in the Sandon Sun hotel lobby without coming across a president, a head of state or maybe several in earnest conversation over coffee. I left a welcoming note with the hotel’s friendly public relations lady addressed to Ireland’s President Mary Robinson, who had opened the Anne Frank exhibition in Dublin the year before, and she promised me it would duly be delivered.

  The following day, despite having checked out of the hotel, we had taken up our usual people-watching positions in the lobby when Tony spotted Mary Robinson, her husband Nicky and a woman aide heading for the lobby café. We caught up with the presidential party just by the café entrance and had a chat about Anne Frank touring South Africa and the President’s memories of the Dublin opening. Just as we turned to leave, Mrs Robinson’s aide told me, ‘We got your kind note and I’ve re
sponded to it. The President would like you both to attend her reception this evening.’ It appeared the note had been delivered to the reception desk after we had checked out, so the desk staff had ignored it. Tony and I duly appeared at the Irish Ambassador’s reception for his President, and started mingling with the predominantly Irish guests. When President and Mr Robinson arrived we were asked to form a line so the President could receive her guests. We felt somewhat like infiltrators as Brits in the long line of Irish people. As we approached the President she looked at us and said laughing: ‘Ah you two! I have decided to make you both honorary Irish citizens.’ To this day I am not shy about using this great ‘honour’ whenever visiting Ireland or meeting Irish people.

  In that post-election period of May 1994 the atmosphere on the South African streets was electric and euphoric. Everyone we met, whether white, black, or mixed race, told us of their optimism for the future of the country and its new President.

  We returned to Port Elizabeth for the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition opening at the King George VI Art Gallery. Now known as the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, the gallery is surrounded by lush tropical gardens where Athol Fugard had written several of his acclaimed books and plays. For the journey down to the venue from our hotel, we were crammed into a minibus with the courageous white fighter against apartheid, Helen Suzman. For some thirteen years Mrs Suzman, a petite English-speaking Jewish woman in an arena dominated by Calvinist Afrikaner men, was the sole white voice of conscience in the South African parliament, speaking out against the injustices and humiliations the black, coloured and mixed race people were subjected to. While some of her political enemies came to admire her, most loathed her, and tried to drive her from their presence. In Parliamentary sessions, they jeered her interventions with sexist, anti-Semitic and domineering abuse. She was often harassed by the police and her phone was tapped by them.