Since the Anne Frank House museum opened in 1960, an estimated ten million
people have passed through its doors. “We are getting on average one million
visitors a year now,” says its director, Hans Westra. According to Westra,
those visitors generate €8 million (around £7.2 million) a year, half of
which goes to running and maintaining the museum, and half to the causes
that he and his colleagues consider worthy of Anne Frank’s name.
Westra arrived at the house in 1974, when Otto Frank was still alive. Frank
died at the age of 91, in 1980. In keeping with Otto’s principles, the house
now directs the bulk of its profits to education projects around the world.
It also funds academic research into racism, neo-Nazism and religious
intolerance. “Our goal is to bring Anne Frank’s story to the world. The
Holocaust was such a warning. We have to watch that it doesn’t happen again.
If National Socialism can happen in one of the most culturally advanced
countries in Europe, the home of Beethoven, then it can happen anywhere,”
says Westra. There’s also a travelling exhibition that recreates the story
of the house – it has been seen by an estimated one million people, from
China to Argentina.
For Westra, Otto Frank is, in many ways, as great an inspiration as Anne. The
battles he fought, first to get the diary published, then to preserve his
daughter’s memory in the right way, were often fraught. “Otto is more an
inspiration than Anne in that sense. He faced more decisions that are
relevant to our work,” says Westra. “For instance, he had to go through a
court case to get the version of the diary that he wanted to be made into a
movie in America in the Fifties. He made the decision that he wanted as many
people as possible to know the story of his daughter. He was criticised for
that a lot,” Westra explains.
Otto’s philosophy was a driving force behind Westra’s determination
to persuade the foundation in Basle to sanction the first North Korean
version of the diary a couple of years ago. “It was tricky. They wanted it
for their schools. We knew it had the potential to be misinterpreted,” he
says. Sure enough, when a documentary- maker went out to North Korea, they
discovered a teacher briefing a child to tell the cameraman that the diary
was “proof that Mr Bush was much worse than Mr Hitler”. This only convinced
Westra even more of the value of the decision. “Otto would have said, the translation
can be misused but the text will still be read by children and it will
stimulate their minds,” he explains.
The diary’s semi-magical ability to connect to young people and their very
different modern experiences is equally familiar in the Kentish Town offices
of the UK’s Anne Frank Trust. Since forming the organisation in her North
London home in 1990, Gillian Walnes has seen it grow into a charity that is
generating close to £1 million a year in funds, to be redistributed not just
in the UK but around the world.
“If you could just see how kids respond to Anne and what a vital tool she is
in teaching them values and respect for others whatever their differences,
whether it is in Durham or São Paulo or the townships of South Africa,” says
Walnes. “A decade or so ago, we took it to Armagh in Northern Ireland. It
was the first time that Catholic and Protestant schoolchildren had ever
worked together. They created a newspaper called Anne’s Legacy.
It was a first, one of many we’ve been lucky to be involved in.”
The Trust’s current programmes range from a pioneering scheme to introduce
Anne Frank to every prison in the UK, to the annual UK version of the Anne
Frank Awards. (The US’s main charity, the Anne Frank Center in New York,
runs the similar Spirit of Anne Frank awards.) Of all the projects
associated with Anne Frank, this is perhaps the one that embodies her
idealistic blend of tolerance, hope, curiosity and courage best. Last year’s
winners included Alexander Rose, the 19-year-old Londoner who launched the
Stop anti-knife crime campaign after losing a friend and a cousin in
stabbing attacks in the capital; and Emma Speigler, herself the daughter of
alcoholics, who launched the charity COAP – Children of Addicted Parents.
“It is phenomenal. Who would have thought that when she was walking with her
father Otto past that bookshop a week before her 13th birthday, when she saw
that check diary in the window and dropped a hint, just like a child today
might drop a hint to their dad for a Nintendo, that it would have become
such a force for good in the world?” says Walnes.
Anne’s cousin Elias certainly didn’t. “She was wild and so was I,” he says of
the girl who used to visit him and their grandmother Alice in Basle in the
Thirties. “She wasn’t a wunderkind. Absolutely not. But she was playful,
intelligent and had a great imagination.” Elias remembers staging plays with
Anne at their grandmother’s house. “She loved theatre and I had a puppet
theatre. I did a play for her with a crocodile and a grandmother and a
jack-in-the-box. The crocodile wanted to eat up the grandmother and the
jack-in-the-box came up and killed the crocodile. Afterwards, she told me to
go to our grandmother’s wardrobe and put on some of her clothes,” he smiles.
“She made me put on a hat and imitate her. I did. She had a love of
fantasy.” It may have been the catalyst for Elias’s long theatrical
career, first as a professional ice dancer, then as a stage and screen
performer.
If she’d lived, Elias has no doubt that his headstrong cousin could have had a
career as a writer. “She was already a writer when she was a child. When she
was in Amsterdam, she wrote many letters to us, and we still have them. I
still have a copy of the last letter she wrote to me before going into
hiding,” he says. “She would have been a journalist or author. She would
have written with a social conscience.”
Despite her flair for writing, neither Elias nor Otto Frank was prepared for
the impact the diary made when it arrived in Basle in 1946, courtesy of Miep
Gies, one of the secretaries at the Opekta offices who had kept the secret
of the upstairs annexe. After the Frank family was taken away in August
1944, Gies had found the diaries scattered on the floor and kept them safe.
Elias remembers Otto first reading them. “It was hard for him. He only read a
few pages a day. It was too much,” he recalls. “Otto always used to say, ‘I
didn’t know my daughter until I read her diaries.’ It was the same for me. I
didn’t know Anna that way. It was completely a different person. The depth
of what she was saying. Her humanistic messages. She writes about the rights
of women. She asks why there are so many arms and not enough money for the
poor and the arts. She was a thinker. I didn’t know she had that depth.
Absolutely not. Neither did Otto,” he says.
