As you can guess this letter, sent from the Oval Office of the White House, was proudly displayed on our office wall.
There were subsequent signing events at the European Parliament by the Presidents of the EU and of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and by two successive Commonwealth General Secretaries, Nigerian Chief Emeka Anyaoku and New Zealander Sir Don McKinnon, at the Commonwealth headquarters at Marlborough House, the rather grand former home of Queen Mary in Pall Mall. Mr Anyaoku said about Anne Frank:
Very few teenagers have left such powerful records of the human spirit’s indomitable will in the face of adversity . . . I feel sure that, like all truly great people, she would have been astonished if anyone had told her that we should acknowledge and applaud the magnificent example of her triumph over evil . . . It is the prerogative of young people to be passionate and intense. Thank God for those who follow the example of Anne Frank and use these attributes with a view to changing things for the better.
In 2000, Education Secretary David Blunkett invited Michael Hussey, a Trustee and former Inspector of Schools, and myself into his ministerial office to sign the Declaration. Seizing the opportunity, I asked Mr Blunkett if his Education Department would kindly consider funding a teaching pack for schools about the Anne Frank Declaration and its role in human rights and citizenship. This was duly produced, beautifully written by Michael Hussey, and promoted in schools by the Department as a recommended resource to support the introduction of Citizenship as a new school curriculum subject.
A succession of British mayors soon followed, signing up to it on behalf of their city or town, including London mayors Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. On a visit to Chicago in 2013, the city’s mayor Rahm Emanuel invited me, accompanied by my Chicago-based daughter-in-law and granddaughter, into City Hall to sign it on behalf of the city of Chicago. The Mayor was rather smitten with three-year-old Emily and the pair had a very intense and friendly chat, during which I am sure she put some of the city’s pressing social issues to rights.
The Declaration has taken on different forms. The Trust’s Head of Education Lucy Glennon came up with the idea of creating a credit card-sized version to leave behind with signers. Once they have signed the larger version, we ask them to keep the card in their wallets to constantly remind them of what they have signed up to. Lucy and I were once at a working lunch in an Islington restaurant when we spotted Lord Falconer, the Labour Government’s Lord Chancellor, sitting at a table across the room. Lucy and I looked at each other, excused ourselves to our meeting hosts and rushed across to try to persuade him to sign up. He smiled, pulled out his wallet and said, ‘But I already have. Look, I carry it in my wallet!’
In December 2014 Prime Minister David Cameron signed the Declaration at 10 Downing Street, sitting at the very table where he had hosted the last G8 summit. He signed his name and then casually pointed out to me the chairs where Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin had sat. Two months before, Theresa May, in her role as UK Home Secretary, had agreed to sign our Declaration at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. Siama Khan, our Communications Officer, and I arranged to meet her in the lobby of the Metropole Hotel, which throughout the conference was buzzing with throngs of delegates. Mrs May duly arrived, tall, imposing and as elegantly dressed as ever in a powder blue coat, black blouse and trousers.
I stepped forward and welcomed her. ‘I have actually met you before,’ I reminded her as I led her towards a quiet table where the Anne Frank Declaration was awaiting her signature. ‘It was back in 2003, when you spent some time at the Anne Frank Trust’s stand at the Conservative party conference that year.’ The Home Secretary smiled so I continued in a chatty vein. ‘I will always remember your beautiful shoes. They were leopard skin with an attractive kitten heel.’ As I said the word ‘shoes’ my eyes automatically went downwards towards her feet. And there adorning her feet were a pair of adorable leopard skin kitten heel shoes.
The words came out of my mouth in an unstoppable and far too explosive way. ‘Oh my god, you’re wearing the same shoes!’ With that Mrs May’s eyes went downwards to the floor, as did those of Siama and Mrs May’s Senior Advisor Liz Sanderson. ‘I can assure you they are different shoes,’ Mrs May firmly insisted. ‘Of course, of course,’ I spluttered. I am certain the Home Secretary would not be wearing the same shoes for some eleven years, and her fondness for the leopard skin design was well known. Siama would not let me forget this incident and each time Mrs May subsequently appeared on TV, we would discuss her shoes and the proportion of leopard skin contained in them.
Theresa May was the longest-serving Home Secretary for over 100 years with a reputation for being one of the toughest. She was also the first woman to take on this Cabinet position, and as I write is only our second female Prime Minister. Despite my faux pas about her shoes, Mrs May was very warm when she sat down and signed the Declaration, giving us time in her frenetic conference calendar to discuss the Anne Frank Trust’s important work in some very divided British communities and how much she and the Home Office valued it. The following year the Home Secretary agreed to speak at the Trust’s annual fundraising lunch to be held in January 2016. The Trust’s lunch took place six months before the Brexit vote was to shake up British politics, paving the way for Mrs May’s premiership. When she arrived at the London Hilton on Park Lane for our lunch, I escorted Mrs May around the ‘green room’ and introduced her to our most important guests. These were Daphne Schild, our long-time and very loyal lunch host, Holocaust survivors Eva Schloss, Leo Friedler and Lilian Levy, and some of our teenage Anne Frank Ambassadors. Even though many of our donors were jostling to catch Mrs May’s eye, she was totally focused and generous with her time with those we had chosen for her to meet, as they, especially the teenagers, were the ones she really wished to hear from.
Mrs May’s speech as Home Secretary to 600 business people in the room came at a time when the Home Office had seen hate crime dramatically increase by 18 per cent over the course of the previous year, and she described the upward trend of hate crime as very worrying. She praised the Trust’s work in schools and communities and for ‘raising awareness of prejudice and extremism of all kinds’. Referring to atrocities both in the UK and abroad, and stating that ‘Sadly today this work could not be more pertinent or pressing’, she added, ‘We’ve seen an increase in anti-Semitic attacks, the like of which I thought we would never see again in Europe.’ Later that year, following the Brexit vote to leave the EU, hate crimes in Britain spiked even further upwards.
Other well-known Anne Frank Declaration signers have included Dame Angelina Jolie in her role as UNHCR representative; the late Vidal Sassoon, who was a lifelong fighter against racism and anti-Semitism, legendary musicians Nile Rodgers and Peter Gabriel and actor Tim Robbins. Sir Paul McCartney has even endorsed it with a message of goodwill sent from the US. All these big names help to encourage others to sign up.
I realize of course that for many the signing of the Anne Frank Declaration, and the photograph of their signing, is the end rather than the means to the end. I know the words on the Declaration won’t really stop the iniquities and injustices of this world, but the Declaration has proved to be a worthy door opener to gain access to the decision-makers and influencers who can help us continue our increasingly vital work. A faded and ghostly image of Anne Frank’s smiling face stares out from the card version, her smile beseeching us to take the words seriously.
Most importantly, tens of thousands of children and young people have signed it online and at our exhibitions. And after all, they are the ones who will, or will not, make our world better, fairer and more equal.
Chapter 20
The Anne Frank Trust is Growing
How did the Anne Frank Trust grow from a one-man band to the successful and admired organization it is now? It was all about people, their belief in the power of Anne Frank’s message and their contribution to perpetuating this. I will attempt to condense a quarter of a century of
intense activity into a few thousand words about the significant milestones along the way and the people without whom it could not have happened.
After we had moved from Dorset in 1992, the Trust was run from my home in Hertfordshire, in no small part with the help of my husband Tony Bogush. A spiral staircase led from our living area up to a small bright room, which became the Trust’s first official office. Our Trustee Board was growing to encompass people from the education and commercial worlds and we were holding our Board meetings at the West End offices of one of the Trustees, David Goldstein, a commercial real-estate agent. It was exciting to be attending Board meetings right in the heart of the West End, right opposite the headquarters of the BBC.
There was a new ‘half’ too. Ruth Allen was a lovely, caring woman who lived around the corner in Bushey. She was an old-style loyal, efficient and dedicated secretary, new technical innovations were not her interest, but she would not hesitate to help on all fronts, often collecting my children from school or activities. When we had a big mailout to get through, Ruth would be sitting round my dining-room table at weekends or late at night, often calling in her friends and family to help out.
A great status boost to the fledgling charity came in April 1994. The Dutch premiere of the movie Schindler’s List was being held at one of Amsterdam’s most iconic buildings, the lushly Art Deco style Theater Tuschinski. This was a poignantly appropriate venue as its visionary builder, the Polish immigrant Abraham Tuschinski, had been murdered with his family in the Holocaust. At the drinks reception prior to the movie, I had been introduced to the film’s director, Steven Spielberg. Naturally, I found the same words spilling out of my mouth that had done so when I had met Audrey Hepburn in 1991. ‘Would you agree to be a Patron of the Anne Frank Educational Trust?’ I asked him. ‘Of course,’ came the reply from Mr Spielberg. To this day I wonder if he thought he was being asked to be a Patron of the Anne Frank House, but nonetheless his name went immediately on to our headed notepaper.
I have met Steven Spielberg several times subsequently and always found him to be a remarkably humble man. He was respectful of the fact that although he would have loved to have made his own movie about Anne Frank, he ‘would not do anything to upset the Frank family’. By this he meant Otto Frank’s nephew Buddy Elias, the President of the Anne Frank-Fonds, as the foundation had already sold the rights for a potential new movie elsewhere.
My continuing work with the Anne Frank travelling exhibition is covered separately, but while I was criss-crossing the country with the exhibition, other educational activities were simultaneously taking place. By 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Anne Frank and the end of the Second World War in May 1995 was getting to be a matter of months away. At that time the rights to publish Anne Frank’s diary in the UK were held by Macmillan Books, who had held them since the 1950s. However, the CEO of Penguin Books, the publishing legend Peter Mayer, was desperate for his company to acquire the rights to publish Anne’s diary in the UK; one of his staff described to me his tenacity in terms of ‘I think he would even sell his own child to get it.’ (Penguin did not succeed in getting the UK rights until 1997 when they published the full ‘definitive’ version of the diary. This edition had the one-third of the content that had been removed by Otto Frank and the original 1947 publishers, Contact, reinstated.) Despite not being able to publish a version of Anne’s diary, Penguin was publishing two Anne Frank-related books to mark the fiftieth anniversary.
I arranged separate meetings with both companies, Macmillan and Penguin, to discuss how we could work together to mark the impending anniversary, and on receiving positive feedback from both of them, we finally all met together to talk about what could be a special and fitting commemoration. Then we heard that the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral, its governing body, had agreed to host the Anne Frank exhibition throughout April 1995. Additionally, they would host a Memorial Service for Anne Frank, which for the first ever time in the cathedral’s 300-year history, would use both Jewish and Christian liturgy. The service was sensitively written by the Deputy Director of the interfaith organization, the Council of Christians and Jews, a Catholic nun called Sister Margaret Shepherd.
Penguin and Macmillan offered to jointly fund the exhibition and the cost of poster advertising in central London Tube stations. The memorial service duly took place on 15 April 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, in the OBE Chapel of St Paul’s and in the presence of the Frank family’s wartime helper, Miep Gies, who had come from Amsterdam; Fritzi Frank, Otto’s widow, and Buddy Elias, Anne Frank’s first cousin, who had both come over from Switzerland.
My spine still tingles when I recall that morning. The procession was led into the packed chapel by two esteemed and much-loved clergymen, Auschwitz survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn (who was sadly to die the following year) and the Dean of St Paul’s, the Very Reverend Eric Evans, who passed away just two months after Rabbi Gryn. Such was the significance of this ground-breaking and inclusive ceremony that it merited a whole item on the BBC’s evening news programme and a full page of coverage in the London Evening Standard, as well as coverage in the next day’s national papers.
The atmospheric crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral housed the Anne Frank exhibition. Due to restoration works being carried out at that time on the main cathedral doorway, all visitors had to exit the cathedral via the crypt, thus ensuring that over the course of the month we were in situ approximately 100,000 people were exposed to all or some of the exhibition panels. The crowd waiting to make purchases at our Anne Frank bookshop was at times ten people deep. Ruth and the team of volunteers took the continuous crush of people in their stride, happily ringing up the cash machine.
In the months preceding the St Paul’s exhibition in 1995, the Trust worked with Penguin Books to stage a national writing competition called ‘Dear Anne Frank.’ Children who were old enough to compose letters were invited to write a letter to the deceased Anne Frank, describing to ‘her’ their lives and hopes. The competition resulted in a lovely book of the best letters published to coincide with the opening of the St Paul’s exhibition. Five winners were taken on a trip to the Anne Frank House, funded by Penguin Books, where they were fortunate enough to sit in Otto Frank’s private office with Miep Gies present to answer their questions.
This was one of many wonderful writing campaigns and competitions the Trust has staged and the start of a long and fruitful association with Penguin Books and its team of publicists and editors. Sadly, Sally Gritten, who was the instigator of the competition in her position as Penguin Children’s Books’ Director of Marketing, and who became a dear friend, passed away in September 2102 after a long battle with leukaemia.
In the summer of 1996, we introduced a new educational event, to be known as ‘Anne Frank Day’. On the anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth, 12 June 1929, we would offer teachers an opportunity to reflect on the moral lessons of Anne’s short life. We would provide teachers with specially written classroom materials and assemblies, suggesting they take a little time out from the usual curriculum demands to mark the day. This was still before we could send materials out by email and in the earliest days the Royal Mail would send a special van to our house to collect all the packs going out to British schools. Our Trustee Michael Hussey, a brilliant educator and former English inspector for London schools, set about writing a marvellous teaching pack for both primary and secondary schools, linking Anne’s story across secondary level curriculum subjects. For the youngest pupils, who could not be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust, Michael introduced accessible themes, such as the value of friendship and the importance of celebrating birthdays.
Michael Hussey had an intriguing life story. He had been born to an African mother and white father in colonial Rhodesia, and had been a freedom activist in both South Africa and pre-independence Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Michael had a natural warmth, charm and empathy as well as flair for creating beautifully-written teachin
g materials, and if I dare say it, was one of my favourite ever members of our Board of Trustees. He was forced to step down in 2000 after suffering a major stroke, which thankfully the dedication and determination of his former music teacher wife Margaret helped him to overcome.
For many years we continued to encourage Anne Frank Day school activities and created new assemblies with different themes for each year. If Anne Frank Day happened to fall on a Sunday, we would create a special service for churches and on one year we discovered our ‘Anne Frank Sermon’ had been used by many English cathedrals after being featured on the home page of the Church of England’s own website. By that time Ruth Allen had retired and the administration team had grown by 100 per cent to two people. They manned the office while I was often away travelling around the country setting up new exhibitions, raising money or attending openings. In 1996, Tony and I had bought a new house in Highgate in a leafy and historic area of north London. My desk would be at one end of the L-shaped living area and an adjacent room became the administrative office.
By 2000, David Soetendorp had been our Founding Chairman for ten years and the time was coming for him to relinquish the reins to someone new. Our President Bee Klug and I remembered that in 1993 we had staged an Anne Frank exhibition at a venue owned and run by a dynamic and charismatic young man called Jack Morris. Like so many people we encountered over the years, there was already a connection to Bee. Jack’s mother Gilda and Bee went back as friends a very long way and Bee often recounted that she had first met Jack before he had even been born. Jack Morris was the fifth son of Gilda and her late husband Sam, a visionary entrepreneur who had transformed a near-derelict Victorian livestock market building in Islington, known as the Royal Agricultural Halls, into a zinging modern exhibition and events centre, renamed the Business Design Centre. Bee and I paid Jack a visit in his office and within twenty minutes we had our new Chairman.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 28