In 1985 a wind of change began to blow in Moscow that would have dramatic ramifications on all the countries that made up the mighty Soviet Empire. The 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen to succeed the old school hard-liner Konstantin Chernenko as ‘Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet’, in effect becoming the new leader of the Soviet Union. Following on from three elderly and traditionalist Soviet leaders who had died in quick succession, here was a relatively young, well-educated and pragmatic man who looked to the future rather than the prevailing status quo. Gorbachev had graduated with a law degree from Moscow State University and worked his way up through the ranks of the Communist Party.
Gorbachev was conscious that the days of hard-line Communism were numbered. The Soviet economy, much of which was geared to the nuclear arms race against the USA, had been stagnating since the late 1970s. In an era of new technology, the corrupting influence of Western satellite TV had the ability to be beamed uncontrollably into the Soviet Union. Gorbachev quickly set about introducing dramatic reforms. We soon came to hear of two new words that filtered into the languages of Western countries. ‘Perestroika’, which described the reform and restructuring of the Communist Party, and ‘Glasnost’, which meant more open and increased government transparency. US President Ronald Reagan held several meetings with the new Soviet leader to discuss arms control and the UK’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that Mr Gorbachev was ‘a man I can do business with’. A Soviet leader had become almost likeable and certainly less fearsome. The West nicknamed him ‘Gorbie’ and we soon came to associate the large and distinctive red birthmark extending down from the bald top of his head to his forehead with a map of the world he wished to reach out to.
And then the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, itself began to disintegrate as its diverse groups of peoples, Slavs, Serbs, East Germans, Croats, Poles, Lithuanians and others, sought to re-establish their nationhood. From Moscow, from where the tentacles of the Communist ideology had spread out seventy years earlier, to Poland and the Baltic States in the north, across the Eurasian Steppe, to Ukraine, Belorussia and Georgia, outwards to the central and southern European nations of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and eventually the last bastion of hard-line Communism, Albania, country after country abandoned the Soviet yoke and Communist ideology and established themselves as independent nations. On TV screens all over the world, people watched in disbelief as events took place that were only recently unimaginable, including the Christmas Day 1989 execution by firing squad of the tyrannical and corrupt Romanian President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife, and finally in November 1990 the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 1991 the USSR had ceased to exist. The world order had changed and the old certainties of the Cold War were no more. Summed up in the words of Vladislav Zukov, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, ‘The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological and economic significance.’
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In those very early days of the dismantling of Communism and breakup of the Soviet Union, the Anne Frank exhibition became one of the very first cultural events to arrive in Russia from the West, and its presence had a profound impact.
From three venues in Moscow the exhibition went on to Ukraine, giving Holocaust survivors a platform to at last speak openly of their experiences for the first time in forty-five years. The project was helped by Anne Frank House International Director Jan Erik Dubbelman being introduced to a fearless Russian journalist called Elena Yacovitz, whose bravery Jan Erik was to witness for himself on one chilling evening in Moscow. Even though there had been seismic regime change, the old Soviet systems of repressive and paranoid bureaucracy had not completely disappeared, as I too discovered to my cost.
Since those early days of transition from Soviet authoritarianism, the Anne Frank exhibition has been playing an invaluable role in helping newly-independent countries throughout the former Soviet bloc address recent history and embrace pluralism within their borders. To this day, the Anne Frank exhibition continues its travels across the thousands of kilometres that shaped the map of the former Soviet Union – from the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia to Kazakhstan, from Poland to the former Yugoslavia – diverse regional histories and conflicts have been reassessed through the prism of Anne Frank.
The ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition had been invited to Moscow in 1990 through state-approved routes. It so happened that the internationally well-known Liberal Rabbi of The Hague, Avraham Soetendorp, had connections to a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Avraham was the brother of the Anne Frank Trust’s co-founder David Soetendorp, and was as equally involved in the 1980s in the international support campaign for oppressed Soviet Jews as David and I were. It was Avraham’s rather off-the-wall idea to take the Anne Frank exhibition to the rapidly-changing Soviet Union. After confirmation of the Academy of Sciences’ endorsement of the planned project, the Dutch Ministry of Culture agreed to fund a tour of the Anne Frank exhibition to the Soviet Union.
Even though there was high-level support, Jan Erik described the project as ‘extremely fragile’, as there were no grassroots community groups or passionate individuals who could spread the word through their networks help as volunteers in the usual way. That is, until Jan Erik was introduced to the young journalist Elena Yacovitz via a Dutch correspondent living in Moscow. Elena certainly had the passion, even if not the background knowledge of the subject. On their first meeting to discuss whether it would ever be possible for the Anne Frank exhibition to come to the USSR, Jan Erik was shocked to discover that, despite being the daughter of Jews and a well-read and curious journalist who worked for an internationally-known literary journal, Elena had never heard the word ‘Holocaust’ until he had used it in their conversation. She was then able to relate this newly-discovered word to the talk of a European genocide she had heard from her parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Stirred by the prospect of the exhibition, Elena nonetheless questioned its probability with the blunt query, ‘I feel the Anne Frank House is ready for Russia, but is Russia ready for the Anne Frank House?’ However, as an intrepid young journalist who had lived through dangerous times, Elena loved nothing more than a challenge. She promised Jan Erik she would do all she could to make it happen through her own network of grass-roots contacts in Moscow. Jan Erik had the impression that there would indeed be a new welcoming atmosphere in the capital of the former Soviet Union.
After months of planning, in the summer of 1990 the Anne Frank exhibition was set to open in Moscow in a government-owned art gallery in the city centre. I was thrilled when Hans Westra, the Anne Frank House director, invited me to join the high-level delegation that would fly to Moscow to attend the opening. On a sunny morning in June, I arrived with my suitcase at the check-in desk at Heathrow Airport excited to be joining the first-ever delegation from the Anne Frank House to the former Soviet Union. The plan was that I was to hook up with the Anne Frank House delegation and a group of Dutch high-level dignitaries in Stockholm, where we would all change flights and continue on together to Moscow.
As the check-in attendant smiled and took my passport and ticket, I felt how different times were since my last visit to Moscow in 1986. Since then I had been refused entry twice as I was considered by the Soviet authorities as an unwanted troublemaker, due to my long-time activism in the campaign to help Jews leave the religiously-repressive Soviet Union. Armed with a precious visa that had been issued to me a few days earlier by the Russian Embassy, here was I about to see for myself a transformed post-Soviet Moscow.
All was not right, though. While I stood in front of her, the check-in attendant made a call, put down the phone and leaned forwards towards me. The smile had been replaced by a serious expression. ‘I am sorry Mrs Walnes, but your visa to travel has been rescinded,’ she told me. I was shocked and despondent. Even though so much had changed in Russia, and many of the people we had worked to free had finally been granted exit visas, clearly I was still considered ‘persona non grata’ by the new regime and its Soviet-era data bank. An uncontrollably deep sigh left my body. The Anne Frank exhibition opening in Moscow was to take place without me.
Jan Erik recently recalled those heady days of the Anne Frank exhibition in Moscow, and nearly thirty years on he could still picture the dramatic scene of elderly Jewish attendees at the exhibition launch event openly and unashamedly shedding tears. This was their first experience of a public exhibition about the Holocaust. The reason for their emotional response was explained to Jan Erik as, ‘Not just what you have brought here, but the very fact that this could happen at all’. It was an indication for them that times were changing for good, a definite and irreversible change that could not be turned back. What struck Jan Erik most was the growing realization in these people that they could perhaps now even travel abroad themselves if they wished to.
The Anne Frank exhibition was a catalyst for open discussions among Jews and non-Jews on whether there was still evidence of old anti-Semitism in the new Russia. Young people felt it was no longer an issue, even though in 1990 there were still restrictions in place on Jews attending university or getting jobs. They perceived anti-Semitism to be more about violence against Jews, rather than simply professional or academic doors being closed, explaining their feelings as, ‘Anti-Semitism is when your life is in real danger’.
However, Jan Erik told me about a frightening incident that had happened when he and Elena Yacovitz had attended a meeting at ‘The House of Writers’. This was in fact a group of intellectuals that regularly met in a room near Moscow University to talk about literature. Although the meeting was conducted in Russian, the vodka flowed freely and the assembled intellectuals had seemed welcoming. Jan Erik expected that writers, and this group seemed to be highly intellectual, would all be pro-democracy and liberal-leaning like Elena and her friends. However, he was surprised when the atmosphere in the stuffy and crowded room became increasingly heated, especially after Elena had posed a question. After their goodbyes to the group at the end of the session, Jan Erik and Elena started to walk back together through the dimly lit Moscow streets.
As they approached a road, Elena took a couple of steps in front of Jan Erik and he immediately spotted that there was something strange on the back of her coat, which she evidently hadn’t noticed when she put it on. Puzzled by this, Elena removed her coat to see what it was and Jan Erik noticed that her whole body seemed to freeze. She slowly explained to Jan Erik what the message, scrawled in lipstick, was. Elena’s coat had been daubed with a large circle surrounding a cross, like a target for shooting practice. It was not a joke and it clearly indicated violent intent. Jan Erik could see that Elena was clearly very shaken, but after a minute or so she shrugged, saying softly and calmly, ‘It happens’. The incident was not spoken of again. Jan Erik recalled, ‘This young woman was so amusing and fun to be with. Even since this deliberately threatening incident, she has continued to be outspoken in her journalism. This left a big impression on me of courage under pressure.’
What also struck Jan Erik about working in Russia in that momentous time was that he and the Anne Frank House team felt they were part of history, part of a changing world, where there was so much hope for, yet fear of, change. Jan Erik even underwent his own change in attitude towards a long-perceived enemy.
Jan Erik Dubbelman had been born in 1955, while the Netherlands was still recovering from the trauma of the German occupation and the privations it had brought. This was also a Europe where fear of Fascism had been replaced by fear of the Cold War. His recollections of a western European childhood are similar to my own, ‘We children of the 1950s were terrified of the “H-bomb” being dropped on us and the threat of “Reds under the Bed”, i.e. the spread of the Communist empire to our own country.’ Jan Erik remembers being scared seeing movies where the Soviet Army were nightmarish armed aggressors in large grey coats and fur hats. But in Moscow in 1990 Jan Erik found himself chatting warmly to, and even embracing, the former Red Army officers he had so feared as a child. These were men who were now trying to help ensure people came along to the Anne Frank exhibition.
From the central art gallery, the Anne Frank exhibition moved to the Library of Foreign Literature, just outside the intimidatingly high redbrick walls of the Kremlin. This venue was at the invitation of the library’s Director, another fearless Russian woman called Ekatarina ‘Katya’ Genieva. Katya’s personal motivation for her invitation to the exhibition is extremely interesting and serves as another illustration of the turbulent and violent times as religion was re-emerging in the Soviet Union. Under Communism Katya Genieva had not been afraid to challenge officialdom. One example of her determination to be fearless was that as a student at Moscow State University in the early 1970s she wrote her dissertation on James Joyce’s Ulysses, at that time a banned book in the Soviet Union.
Katya had been an admirer of the charismatic Russian Orthodox priest, theologian and writer Alexander Men. Among Men’s vast canon of literary and charitable works, his book Son of Man served as the introduction to Christianity for thousands of citizens in the Soviet Union who had been brought up in the atheist state. He went on to baptize hundreds, possibly even thousands, of new Christians, and even founded an Orthodox ‘Open University’. For all Alexander Men’s altruism and spirituality, his earthly reward was to be murdered early on a September Sunday morning in 1990, just outside his home in the village of Semkhoz and while on his way to conduct a church service. It was a particularly gruesome and nasty killing by an axe-wielding assassin who was waiting for the priest on a secluded country path. Bleeding profusely, Men managed to drag himself back to his cottage, but died that day in hospital. He had not been robbed so the axeman was thought to have been from, or maybe paid by, the KGB. Alexander Men’s influence in Russia and abroad is still widely felt and there have been calls for his canonisation.
Katya Genieva was so deeply affected by Men’s brutal killing that she made a vow that to honour his memory she would never bow to pressure from the establishment. In what she felt was a positive and affirmative act, she made the approach to the Anne Frank House about hosting the Anne Frank exhibition at her Library of Foreign Literature. She even invited Archbishop Vladimir Kirill, at that time a senior official in the Russian Orthodox Church to speak at the opening – no small step in such a supposedly egalitarian, but in effect hierarchical, society.
Archbishop Kirill agreed to attend and on the night his address started well when he spoke about Anne Frank as a brave girl. But then, from behind his thick white beard, and dressed in his flowing white ecclesiastical robes, Kirill went on to describe Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen as unavoidable, because the decision had been made by God and nothing could be learnt from it. Feeling he was doing a good deed by endorsing the event with his presence, the Archbishop had nonetheless placed Anne Frank and the Holocaust into his supremely conservative religious interpretation. This did not go down well with the Holocaust survivors in the audience who had faced forty-five years of Communist denial of their experience and were finally seeing an end to the suppression of their histories. A young Jewish man in their midst could take it no longer. He quietly removed his shoe and to gasps from the audience, threw it directly at the Archbishop.
Vladimir Kirill is now the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the Russian equivalent of the Pope, and is respected by many. His conservative views have not lessened, recently describing the jailed rock band Pussy Riot as carrying out ‘the work of Satan’ and some fundamental human rights as ‘contradictory to the Church and therefore heresy’.
Ilya’s story
Another of Elena Yacovitz’s promised contacts that she had brought in to help with the Anne Frank exhibition was the historian Ilya Altman. Ilya had been born in the same year as Jan Erik, but on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in a town near Kiev in Ukraine. Both Ilya’s parents had been Red Army officers, real examples of those images that had given little Jan Erik his dramatic childhood nightmares. Ilya’s parents had met in 1943, the year before the town was liberated from German occupation. Three thousand Jews had been murdered in that one town but miraculously all Ilya’s family had managed to survive.
Ilya had grown up knowing he was Jewish, but not really sure what that meant. He did however learn about the massacres carried out by the Nazis at the nearby ravine of Babi Yar. Over 100,000 people – Jews, Russian prisoners of war, Roma and Communists – were shot at this notorious site. Ilya told me modestly that he wasn’t considered a top student, but had excelled at football and chess. Nonetheless, he graduated from the Moscow State History Institute and published three articles in well-read historical magazines. In a time of anti-Jewish professional and academic quotas, he had personally encountered no opposition about studying for a doctorate, although another Jewish friend of his in St Petersburg had been forced to travel three hours each way every day to a different town in order to be allowed to lecture in his subject.
In the 1980s, Ilya had worked in the main Russian historical archive, at that time called the State Archive of the October Revolution. He even presented a Soviet TV programme called Lessons from History which made him quite well known. Some time later he heard through other historians about the existence of an ominous-sounding document, published in Jerusalem in 1980 in Russian, that was known as The Black Book. This attracted Ilya’s curiosity and he decided to find out more. He discovered that The Black Book had been compiled by Vassily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, two Jewish journalists who had served as war reporters with the Red Army. From as early as 1943, these two journalists had started documenting the atrocities they had witnessed. Grossman and Ehrenburg were part of the unit that had entered Treblinka and Majdanek death camps and their testimonies had been used at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials of senior Nazis. Under its full and explicit title, The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the German Nazi Death Camps established on occupied Polish soil during the War 1941–1945, their testimony was partially printed in the Soviet Union immediately after the war. However, when it came to the attention of the Soviet censors, the writers were pressed to conceal the anti-Semitic character of the atrocities and downplay the role of Ukrainian collaborators in the murders. Although translated copies did appear in the US and other countries, publication in the Soviet Union was forced to stop in 1948. Ilya Altman’s discovery of the horrors that were contained in The Black Book started his mission to document the Holocaust, even within the restrictions of the last years of the Soviet regime. It resulted in his role in the eventual publication of The Black Book in Ukraine in 1991. Ilya’s influence on Holocaust knowledge and understanding in the immediate post-Communist era cannot be underestimated.
Ilya told me that the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition that travelled around Russia in 1990 astonished visitors and project partners by the level and quality of its hardware, design and presentation of information. Looking back now, and comparing it to current digitally-produced and easily-transportable exhibitions, it seems like a technological dinosaur in its monochrome simplicity of heavy metal and plastic.
As a historian looking back over a quarter of a century, Ilya reflected that, ‘At the time I was frustrated that the Russian authorities and museum curators in the various cities seemed much more interested in the partnership with a prestigious international organization than in presenting the facts about the Holocaust.’ He continued, ‘Now I understand more about the difficulties they were encountering just organizing such an event, and I believe the exhibition actually opened a new chapter in Russian understanding of the history of the Holocaust.’
After Moscow, the ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition had then travelled 850km southward to Kiev in Ukraine. It was set up in no less an institution as the Museum of Lenin, with its vast rooms and high ceilings overwhelming the 200m2 and 2m-tall Anne Frank exhibition. In the entrance lobby stood a colossal and all-dominating 6m-high statue of Lenin, carved in white marble. Times were changing in Ukraine but some potent vestiges of Communist society still remained intact.
As the doors of the launch event were thrown open, a throng of chattering people entered the room, fascination and curiosity visible on their faces. During the course of the evening, and after all the formal speeches, Jan Erik was to make an astonishing discovery. Dozens of the people standing among the exhibition panels, which depicted the effect of the Holocaust on a Western European family, were themselves survivors of the brutalities carried out by the Nazis in the east of Europe. Jan Erik found himself talking to middle-aged women in their 50s and 60s who had hidden this traumatic chapter in their lives deeply within themselves throughout the intervening years of Soviet rule, but here at the Anne Frank exhibition were opening up about their experiences for the first time.
The ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition displayed some distressing images of the mass shootings of Jews carried out by the ‘Einzatsgruppen’ execution squads in the forests and ravines of Eastern Europe. Set against the stark white panels, these blurred black and white images had a particular power to shock exhibition visitors. Men, women and children were photographed by their executioners as they stood terrified, arms in the air, in the full knowledge that their lives were ending and they would be joining the tangled masses of bodies in the open pits below their feet. One young woman in a dark dress and coat clutches her baby tightly to herself and, with an imploring look at her killers, prepares for their two lives to be extinguished. Men, women and children who just a few hours earlier had awoken from their night’s sleep, and dressed themselves for the possibility of another full day spent alive. Their agonized pleas and screams have fallen silent as we look at the two dimensional images printed onto white plasticised panels, their pitiful faces carefully rolled up after each exhibition and transported on to the next venue.
Like many of us who have seen those images of highly-efficient firing squads, Jan Erik had not realized that there had actually been a small number of people who had survived them. One such person was Clara Vinakur, who told Jan Erik what had happened to her. Clara was just 12 years old when she crawled out of a mass grave that contained the bodies of all her family and hundreds of others. The young girl, despite the agony of bullets in her body, had the presence of mind to play dead until the men of the killing squad had left the scene, probably to spend the evening washing away the vision of the day with tumblers of strong vodka. But there was no vodka-soaked relief for little Clara who grew up with this memory seared into her mind. She had to wait over forty years, until she came to see an exhibition about a Dutch teenage girl, to tell others what had happened to her.
After Moscow and Kiev, the Anne Frank exhibition rolled onwards to the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev, then to St Petersburg and the Black Sea port of Odessa. While the exhibition was touring Ukraine, the Anne Frank House unexpectedly received a manuscript written by a survivor of a little-known concentration camp in nearby Moldova, where the inmates had been abandoned to rot away by their guards. No one from the Anne Frank House team had ever heard about the existence of this camp before. Jan Erik felt that, with the opening-up of the Soviet Union and the Anne Frank exhibition encouraging people to come forward and speak, this added to the feeling that ‘we were entering a world of Holocaust experiences and testimonies that we in the West had hitherto no idea about. We were going into territory that nobody had really visited. It was a very special time.’
Following the Anne Frank exhibition’s visit to the former Soviet Union in 1990, Ilya Altman and Elena Yacovitz were both invited to attend an international conference in the Netherlands. Coming from Communist Russia, they had spent their lives accustomed to waiting patiently in line for many hours to buy any item of food or household requisite, which I can verify from seeing these queues during my own visits to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. A long queue could form outside a shop simply if word spread of the arrival of a consignment of apples, potatoes, meat or even the scratchy regulation lavatory paper. Ilya described to me his first sight of the long line of people waiting outside the Anne Frank House in 1991 and how he had innocently asked Jan Erik, ‘Are we shopping for food now?’ That queue on the Prinsengracht is now an Amsterdam tourist attraction in its own right, just as the Soviet food queues were to bemused Western tourists three decades ago.
Seeing the huge interest from the public in visiting the Anne Frank House, a site of Holocaust significance, ignited Ilya’s idea to have some kind of similar centre in Moscow. And this eventually did come to pass. For the first five years of its existence, the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Centre was housed in Ilya’s own apartment with just himself and his archivist wife as the staff. They avidly researched, published documents and created exhibitions, building the reputation of the centre, until eventually the Russian government gave them a space in a building near the Kremlin. The authorities even offered to pay the rent, and their centre became one of only ten organizations in Russia so supported by the government.
During the conference Ilya and Elena attended in the Netherlands in 1991, he had listened with some cynicism to the focus on the general issue of tolerance. ‘This topic was far from my consciousness as a Russian historian and archivist. But step by step I started to understand the reality. This new understanding led directly to 2010, when I helped to stage a conference in Beslan on “Children as Victims”.’
In 2004, the town of Beslan, in the autonomous Russian province of North Ossetia, had suffered one of the worst ever massacres of children in recent history. A group of Islamist militants from the Chechnya and Ingushetia regions broke into a local school on the first day of the new academic year, when it was packed with pupils and their parents. The terrorists held more than 1,000 people hostage within the school for three terrible days. The hostages included 777 terrified children and parents, kept in inhumane conditions. As Russian security forces attempted to retake the building, the terrorists’ booby-traps began to explode. Seeing no way out, they opened fire on their hostages. In all, at least 385 people were killed, including 156 children, the youngest of whom was only two-years-old.
Ilya said:
In our ‘Children as Victims’ conference, we applied the lessons from the Holocaust to what had happened so recently at Beslan. The idea of the ‘culture of the memory’ is the same. In the hell and terror of that school, three days was like three years in a Holocaust era ghetto. We conducted two forums and prepared a handbook for students. I know now that we can use methods we have learnt of educating about the Holocaust for other chapters in history. I realized this from working with the Anne Frank project and the Anne Frank House.
In 1998, the Anne Frank exhibition paid its first visit to one of the Baltic States, when it went to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Ruta Puisyte had been working as a historian for the Jewish Museum in Vilnius when she received a surprise communication from the Anne Frank House. They were looking for help with bringing the exhibition to the city. The Lithuanian Jewish community is small (still numbering under 5,000) and its members tended to keep their heads down. The Jewish Museum were excited at the prospect of working with the prestigious Anne Frank House, but with a degree of ingrained fear at the same time, even though the dreaded KGB had by then been effectively dismantled.
Ruta’s work in Holocaust education had come through an unusual route. She had been brought up as a good Soviet citizen, but in a Catholic family that celebrated the festivals of Christmas and Easter. This was done quietly in their own home so as not to put them at risk in a regime that promoted state atheism. Although religion was never formally proscribed in the Soviet Union, the official structures imposed a strong sense of social stigma on practising a religion. It was also generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. The baby Ruta had been baptised in a church, but in a different village from their own, as having the ceremony in your local church could result in being reported by your neighbours to the Soviet authorities. Nowadays Ruta freely can attend her church every Sunday.
Growing up, Ruta had naively believed that everyone in Lithuania was an ethnic Lithuanian. She was aware that Jews had written the Bible and lived in Israel but had no idea that Jews also lived alongside her in Lithuania and of their importance to towns and villages. That is until she started her studies at Vilnius University. Her history professor just so happened to be a Holocaust survivor who described to her in gruesome detail something he referred to simply as ‘the catastrophe’ (the term Holocaust was hardly used at that time in Lithuania). Ruta wanted to investigate more about this crime and discovered that there were Holocaust survivors volunteering at the Vilnius Jewish Museum. As an inquisitive historian she wanted to talk to real people feeling that, ‘Paper will never argue with you. A human being, who lived through it, will.’
And so in the late 1990s Ruta, now working at the museum as a historian, found herself being asked to organize the visit of the Anne Frank exhibition. The exhibition arrived in Lithuania at a time of huge transformation, and Ruta considers herself a ‘true child of that time’. As well as its informative Holocaust content, she wanted me to understand the broader context of the exhibition. Ruta’s account echoed what Ilya Altman had said about the Anne Frank exhibition in Russia eight years earlier. She explained, ‘For people in the newly independent Lithuania anything arriving from the West was like the “whole universe” was coming to us. We were a young nation, insecure and looking for an identity. We were so excited that foreigners were making the effort to come to us.’
After the capital city of Vilnius, the Anne Frank exhibition went on to tour nine more Lithuanian cities. Funding for the tour came mainly from the European Union’s Comenius programme, along with support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Comenius pan-European schools programme, named after the seventeenth-century Czech educator John Amos Comenius, aimed ‘to help young people and educational staff better understand the range of European cultures, languages and values’. The programme ceased in 2013, but had been a great source of financial support for the Anne Frank House’s work in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
Norbert Hinterleitner of the Anne Frank House, who spent a lot of time working in Lithuania, felt that the Anne Frank project was sorely needed there at the time. He recalled receiving a letter from the director of one of the museums who was to take the exhibition in 1998 which started: ‘Dear Anne Frank, We would very much like to show your exhibition . . .’, demonstrating a lack of knowledge that proved to be endemic in the country.
Twelve thousand people came to see the Anne Frank exhibition on its first tour of Lithuania, demonstrating that there was certainly interest in knowing more about the subject matter. The Lithuanian tour was complemented by a series of teacher training sessions and drama workshops involving Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers working together, often for the very first time.
The success of the drama-in-education workshops can best be described by the words of one of the teenage participants who told Norbert, ‘My parents always told me that Jews are a little . . . a little bad. Now I know that it’s not really the case.’ Another proof of the project’s success were sweet romantic flirtations between some of the Jewish and Lithuanian teenage participants. Something Anne Frank would have most definitely approved of.
When Norbert recalled those days of 1998 in Vilnius, my mind travelled back sixteen years earlier. In 1982, I had visited Vilnius during my days of campaigning on behalf of Soviet Jews. Our group would travel to the Soviet Union to bring vital supplies and moral support to those who had been dismissed from their jobs and deprived of income after making the brave step of applying to emigrate to the West. Once they had done so and been refused a visa, and became what we termed ‘Refuseniks’, they lived in precarious limbo without any form of state security. Many were victims of trumped-up charges of treason and found themselves spending many years in labour camps.
I found Vilnius to have a different atmosphere from that of Moscow, with its street upon street of drab concrete Soviet-style apartment blocks. Vilnius had a more European charm, still retaining its Lithuanian language, historic squares and narrow cobbled streets. The women’s clothes hinted at a more relaxed existence, the colourful and perky little berets worn by the young Lithuanian women noticeably different from the ubiquitous fur hats or matrioshka-like headscarves of Moscow women.
However, despite this facade of a more carefree society, Vilnius had another side. Our group of four travellers from Bournemouth visited the children of the few survivors among those Jewish families who had been marched to the suburb of Ponary between July 1941 and August 1944. There, close to the suburban railway station, 70,000 Jews, along with thousands of Poles and Russian POWS, were systematically shot by Einzatsgruppen commandos and their Lithuanian collaborators. In actual fact Lithuania and the other Baltic States became the first countries outside occupied Poland where the Nazis would mass execute Jews as part of the Final Solution. Ninety per cent of Vilnius’s Jewish population was slaughtered.
I will never forget spending an afternoon in the tiny apartment of Carmela and Vladimir Raiz, who told us about the fate of their families during those terrible years, but also described their current oppression as Jews who had committed the crime of wanting to leave the Soviet Union. Actually they didn’t tell us these stories in normal conversation. They wrote the key words of information on a child’s ‘write and swipe’ pad so that what they shared with us could be immediately obliterated. The reason for this being that one afternoon when Carmela and Vladimir were out, KGB operatives had come to the block and laid the wires to enable the authorities to tap into their every word spoken to each other in the kitchen, reception room and even their bedroom. They had found this out because, despite the fact that mostly your neighbours were possible KGB informants, one of the neighbours had warned the couple about what they had seen being done.
One afternoon during our visit to Vilnius our group were told by our concerned Soviet tour guide that we had to present ourselves to an office on the fifth floor of our hotel. Unbeknown to most tourists, each large hotel used by the (only) Soviet tour company Intourist allocated a suite of rooms to the KGB, the Soviet secret police. These rooms were used for the surveillance operation the KGB routinely carried out on Western tourists to ensure they were not making contact with the local people during their stay. So concerned were the Soviet authorities about subversive influence that even at airports Western tourists were kept in separate screened-off waiting areas from those of the local travellers.
It was an unnerving experience on that afternoon waiting to be called in to the KGB office, but it was as nothing compared to the constant harassment of the ‘Refuseniks’, who at any time could be arrested. We knew that we could leave the country, but these courageous people that we had come to lend our support to, definitely could not. Once inside the cramped office, we, the two women and two men who found themselves a world away from our comfortable lives in Bournemouth, were directed by two burly KGB men to cease our activity of visiting Soviet Jews or we would be ‘on the next plane out’ of Lithuania. We happened to know that the next plane from Vilnius to Moscow was in two days’ time, the day we were due to leave, so having ensured that Carmela and Vladimir and the others were comfortable with it, we continued to do what we had come to Vilnius to do. Perhaps this was the day that my name had been added to the Soviet computer system as a ‘serious troublemaker’, resulting in the cancellation of my visit to Moscow for the Anne Frank exhibition opening eight years later.
After its tour of Lithuania in 1998, the Anne Frank exhibition then proceeded north to the neighbouring Baltic state of Latvia, a country which was moving out of Communism but into a new and harsh form of nationalism. During the late 1980s, Latvian nationalism had worked well as a liberating force for the people and mobilized the disillusioned Soviet-ruled masses. However, once the country had become independent from Moscow, Latvian nationalism spawned the introduction of notorious post-Communist policies, such as its Citizenship Law. This measure disenfranchised about a third of Latvia’s people on the grounds that they were considered ‘Russian remnants’ of the Soviet occupation. Because of this, as well as other restrictive policies, Latvian nationalism became thought of as a classic example of ‘ethnic nationalism’, where efforts to protect what the government liked to call ‘cultural uniqueness’ in fact generated anti-democratic policies.
As well as the travelling exhibition, Norbert Hinterleitner and his colleagues from Amsterdam brought to Latvia the popular play about Eva Schloss’s life, And Then They Came for Me. Building on the success of the previous initiative in Lithuania to bring Lithuanian and Jewish teenagers together, this time Latvian and Russian teenagers were invited to participate together in the production of the play, both as the actors and the audience. For Eva Schloss, this production in the country where her own husband’s grandmother had been murdered by the Nazis was in her view ‘perhaps the most extraordinary’.
In Latvia, not only was there even more mutual understanding between the teenage actors from the different ethnic groups, but there were again a few romantic flirtations, this time between Russian and Latvian teens. Norbert never found out if their parents knew about these and, if they did, how they would have reacted. For him it was proof that ‘Ethnic division is an artificial human construction. It is weaker than the human desire for love and peace.’
After its first visit to Ukraine in 1990, the Anne Frank exhibition returned in 2003. Ukraine had meanwhile become an independent state in 1991, formalized by a referendum at the end of that year. Like much of eastern and central Europe, Ukraine had a varied history in terms of its nationhood and identity. Western Ukraine had belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of the eighteenth century, although for a short time in the seventeenth century parts of the region had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire.
Eastern Ukraine had a different history, having been incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1667. During the eighteenth century the Russian empress Catherine the Great had invited European settlers to come and cultivate the lands of Eastern Ukraine, and Poles, Germans, Swiss and other nationalities took up her invitation.
Fearing the rise of separatism, during the nineteenth century Russia started imposing limits on the Ukrainian language and culture, even banning its use and study. Some Ukrainian intellectuals left the Eastern Ukraine for the Western side, while others embraced a Pan-Slavic or Russian identity. Many well-known authors or composers of the nineteenth century that we consider as Russian were actually of Ukrainian origin, notably Nikolai Gogol and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. These deep-rooted issues of national identity affect Ukraine even today, resulting in the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, pro-Russian unrest in southern and Eastern Ukraine, and the continuous deadly fighting between Russian-aligning and Western-aligning Ukrainians.
In 2000, Ukraine had been rocked by a scandal which became known as the ‘Cassette Scandal’, or ‘Tapegate’, thus named after the discovery of tape recordings of the then President Leonid Kuchma apparently ordering the kidnap and murder of Georgiy Gongadze, a popular journalist. A criminal investigation into the President’s involvement in the murder was inconclusive, but the event dramatically affected the country’s domestic and foreign policy. It eventually led to the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’, which was actually an election process rather than a revolution, which installed Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko as the new President. The ‘Revolution’ was co-led by Yulia Tymochenko, who became the country’s first woman Prime Minister, instantly recognizable for the thick blonde plait always wound tightly round her head. Mrs Tymochenko was at that time named in Forbes magazine as the third most powerful woman in the world, but this did not save her from being convicted in 2011 for an allegedly corrupt gas deal between Ukraine and Russia, for which she served three years in prison.
Against this volatile historic and recent backdrop, in 2003 the exhibition that had superseded ‘Anne Frank in the World’, the appropriately-named ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’, was taken to Ukraine. The Anne Frank House team didn’t shirk from addressing specific Ukrainian issues. The exhibition was accompanied by two smaller localized displays, one about the Holocaust on Ukrainian territory, curated by the Ukrainian Centre of Holocaust Studies. The other, called ‘Sources of Tolerance’, showed the stories of ten post-war Ukrainian heroes who had risked their lives for citizens’ rights, and teacher and guide training sessions for this exhibition focused on the issues of co-existence with minorities in the present day. These Ukrainian-focused ancillary exhibitions helped to bring in even larger numbers of visitors than expected. Norbert Hinterleitner proudly told me that it was the first international project to do this in Ukraine. ‘The Ukrainian organizers, and the visitors too, valued the fact that here was a prestigious international partnership really caring about their history by giving a public showcase to Ukrainian experiences and their national heroes. They couldn’t thank us enough for this.’ The project also left a legacy of helping some of the smaller, more fragile Ukrainian NGOs to acquire funding to develop themselves.
Young Ukrainians related the Frank family’s experience in hiding to their own growing up in Soviet times. ‘There were eight people hiding on two floors in Anne Frank’s secret annexe in Amsterdam. But this is how we grew up here.’ Young people also took part in a weekend-long training seminar about prejudice and discrimination, called ‘Who are your neighbours?’. After the seminar they were asked to look for cases of intolerance in their own locality. Their findings formed the basis of self-created micro-exhibitions about the situation of minorities and discriminated groups in their hometowns, which were displayed in the schools.
The Anne Frank exhibition continued touring Ukraine for the next seven years and in that time, it visited all twenty-five provinces of the country.
Norbert’s Story
Norbert Hinterleitner, who has spent many years running Anne Frank programmes in post-Communist Eastern Europe, explained to me what has driven his enduring commitment to the Anne Frank programmes. He traces the first steps towards his journey as a moral educator to 1986, when he was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Austria.
Kurt Waldheim had just been elected the country’s President. During the Second World War, Waldheim had been attached to the Wehrmacht, the combined armed forces of Nazi Germany, and served on the Eastern Front, in Yugoslavia and in Greece. Even if they took no active part, Waldheim’s units were close enough to civilian massacres and the deportations of the Greek Jews from Salonika to have been aware of them. However, in Waldheim’s memoir entitled In the Eye of the Storm, published the year before he became President, there were omissions and discrepancies about his wartime service fighting for the Nazis. The controversy surrounding this became known as the ‘Waldheim Affair’, both in Austria and around the world. It was never proved that Waldheim actually took part in any atrocities – only that he had lied about his wartime activities.
During this period in Austria, politics became the topic to talk about. Norbert describes himself as belonging to the ‘Waldheim Generation’. ‘We were a teenage generation confronted with questions and we asked those questions. At this age we learned to be critical thinkers.’ In his early twenties in 1996, Norbert joined the ‘Gedenkdienst’, the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service (an alternative to Austria’s compulsory national military service), as he wished to contribute to a movement with a clear and positive mission, that of the acceptance of responsibility.
Vienna was the city where the Anne Frank House had chosen to launch their new flagship travelling exhibition, ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’, which had been created to replace the eleven-year-old and rather outdated-looking ‘Anne Frank in the World’. Through the Gedenkdienst’s involvement with the Anne Frank exhibition in Vienna, Norbert became a volunteer exhibition guide, one of the very first to show people around the Anne Frank House’s brand-new flagship exhibition.
‘A History for Today’ had its international launch in September 1996 at Vienna’s Town Hall, overlooking Heroes Square and opposite the Hapsburg Imperial Palace. It was on the balcony of this palace that in 1938 Adolf Hitler stood and proudly announced to the ecstatic crowds in the square below the German annexation of Austria, the country of his birth. After the defeat of Nazism in 1945 this imposing palace balcony was not used again for a public speech, even for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Vienna. The first person to be invited to make an address from that balcony was the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel, but not until over half a century after Hitler had made his notorious ‘Anschluss’ (annexation of Austria) announcement. In February 1993, the 20-year-old politically-charged Norbert Hinterleitner was standing in Heroes Square below that same balcony for a mass protest against Jörg Haider, the leader of the xenophobic right-wing Freedom Party. Norbert smiled when he told me that the numbers in the square on that night, estimated to be 250,000, far exceeded the number of Hitler’s followers who were there for the Fuhrer’s ‘Anschluss’ speech in 1938.
After volunteering as an Anne Frank exhibition guide in 1996, he carried out the remainder of his Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service term in the International Department of the Anne Frank House. Pretty soon he found himself working with the Anne Frank programmes in post-war Bosnia, helping to make a difference to the lives of war-traumatized young people. He remembers thinking, ‘Wow, these people at the Anne Frank House really know how to involve young people and give them meaningful activities to put their heart and soul into. That was the starting point of a journey that I hope will never end.’
When I first met Norbert in London in 1997, he was an idealistic young man with long dark hair flowing down almost to his waist. Twenty years on, his hair by now somewhat shorter, and with his head containing an encyclopaedia of educational experiences from across the continent of Europe, Norbert Hinterleitner’s journey has not ended. The young schoolboy who was stirred into action by being one of ‘Waldheim’s Generation’ is now the Head of Education at the Anne Frank House, running a team of sixteen educators and project managers.
One of the most recent and surprising countries the Anne Frank exhibition has visited is the Republic of Kazakhstan, the mysterious land of Genghis Khan. Straddling northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe, Kazakhstan is huge, covering an area of nearly three million square kilometres, and is actually the world’s largest landlocked country. Although Kazakhstan is best known in the West for the inept unsophistication of its mythical ‘famous son’ Borat, the country’s gas and oil and vast mineral resources have made it the economically-dominant nation of Central Asia, generating more than half of the entire region’s GDP.
Kazakhstan has long borders shared with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and although officially a landlocked country, actually even has a ‘shoreline’ around some of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. Such a vast country has a very varied terrain, which takes in flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Given its enormous area, its population density is low, at less than six people per square kilometre.
The lands of Kazakhstan have historically been inhabited by nomadic tribes. Genghis Khan made the country part of his Mongolian Empire, but following internal struggles among the conquerors, power eventually reverted back to the nomads. The Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppes in the eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan, treating it as part of the Russian Empire. In 1936, it was named the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although Kazakh is the state language, Russian remains the official language for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes.
Yelena Shvetsova was an idealistic young woman who had come from Kazakhstan to work as an intern with the International Youth Human Rights Movement in the city of Voronezh in south-west Russia. This is a network of young adults from more than thirty countries, all sharing the idea that human rights and individual dignity are crucial values to be nurtured and supported. Participants must be young, either in their actual age or in their heart, and agree that different people, attitudes and methods should be appreciated; only violence, aggression and discrimination are deemed unacceptable.
In 2012, Yelena encountered the ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ exhibition at a school in Voronezh. As she stood in front of its powerful imagery, she made a vow to herself, ‘I am going to make this happen in my home country of Kazakhstan.’ It just so happened that Yelena’s determination coincided with plans that were being laid by the Dutch Embassy in Kazakhstan. They had been organizing an annual Human Rights Day event in the Kazakh capital city of Astana each year, and were looking for a new way of presenting Human Rights issues. Grant proposals were duly submitted to the Embassy and in due course a Russian/Kazakh language version of ‘A History for Today’ was created.
The representative of the Anne Frank House for the Kazakhstan project was Sergiy Kulchevych, a young man who had first helped the Anne Frank House with the exhibition in Kiev while he was working at the Jewish Foundation of Ukraine. When he had first been told about the exhibition, he was sceptical about presenting another Holocaust story to the Ukrainian public, and having studied the rich Ukrainian Jewish history, felt irritated by this continued focus on the death and destruction of its community.
However, when he was invited to Amsterdam in 2008 to visit the Anne Frank House his views radically changed. Just like the Moscow historian Ilya Altman had found a decade earlier, Sergiy found the Anne Frank House philosophy of making the message of the Holocaust relevant to today an exciting ideology to apply to his own academic area, that of Jewish History with a focus on Philosophy. Sergiy returned to Ukraine and lost no time in applying to be an intern for the International Department of the Anne Frank House. In 2010 he became a paid member of Jan Erik’s team, working on the Russian tour of six cities. This included the port of Murmansk far up in the icy polar region bordering northern Norway, which in the Second World War had welcomed British and American ships bringing weapons for the Soviets to fight the Germans.
And so with this experience, in 2016 Sergiy found himself being asked to take the Anne Frank exhibition to Kazakhstan, a country that, despite its economic muscle, has a reputation for human rights abuses and suppression of political opposition. The Kazakh President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has been leader of the country since 1991 and controls society in what is deemed the ‘Russian way’. The NGO Human Rights Watch reports that ‘Kazakhstan heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion’. Officially there is freedom of religion, but religious leaders who oppose the government are suppressed.
Sergiy describes Kazakhstan as ‘Certainly a central Asian country but somehow it has a different feel from its neighbours Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. It’s more multicultural than Poland and the Baltic states such as Lithuania.’ Multicultural it certainly is. Kazakhs make up half the population, with the other half made up of Russians, Poles, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, Uyghurs and over 100 other nationalities and ethnicities. In the south of the country there is a huge Korean community. Islam is the predominant religion, with Christianity practised by a quarter of the population. Many of these people are descendants of those who were exiled there by the USSR and those who had come during the industrialization campaign.
Any intolerance in such a diverse society is carefully hidden from public eye. There are no football hooligans or neo-Nazi groups in evidence and President Nazarbayev glorifies his country as a nation that is tolerant of differences. He is wary of not letting Kazakh pride in its history, and its towering statues of ancient kings that are found across the country, be seen as nationalism, the kind that brought civil wars to the Balkans after the fall of Communism.
NGOs who are funded by international money are regarded with suspicion both at national and local level. ‘There is a kind of paranoia that foreign money may bring about a revolution,’ explains Sergiy. His local Anne Frank project partner Yelena Shvetsova, the young woman who was doggedly determined to bring the Anne Frank exhibition to Kazakhstan, has adopted a straight-talking attitude to dealing with officials and has succeeded in creating her own Human Rights NGO called ‘Wings of Liberty’ but this, and a plan to bring TEDx Talks, have received a negative response from officialdom.
One of the Anne Frank exhibitions was staged at a Nazarbayev School, one of a network of elite schools named after the Kazakh president but open to all ethnic groups. The aim of the school is to create a new generation of Kazakhs who will be active thinkers, but although these schools are open to international projects such as the Anne Frank exhibition, it is not possible for foreign NGOs like the Anne Frank House to come and undertake the project in their usual way of encouraging open discussion about the political situation.
The exhibition was located in the Nazarbayev School’s concert hall where alongside it stood a traditional Mongolian yurt-style tent containing carpets, pottery and artefacts that were all redolent of the days of Genghis Khan. Having been worried that students so far away from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam both in time, in distance and in culture would not make any connections to her life and theirs, Sergiy was delighted to see a huge enthusiasm for Anne Frank by the young people in the school. He conducted an exercise about the incremental implementation of the Nazis Anti-Jewish Laws and the students themselves connected these to current threats to democratic values.
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In trying to capture twenty-seven years of the Anne Frank House’s work across the vast expanse and diverse nations of post-Communist Europe, there is so much of equal importance that has gone unsaid. But the selection of stories I have related of those astonishing times and of the work these remarkable educators, activists and students have undertaken, reflect the imprint that Anne Frank’s message has left on thousands of people with hugely different histories, views and hopes for the future.