In 2006, the Anne Frank Trust’s method of working with young people started to evolve into something rather different, which would have a profound effect on the way the educational charity carried out its mission. Instead of our primary focus on staging exhibitions in prominent city-centre locations for one month, smaller-sized versions of the Anne Frank exhibition would be taken directly into schools for two weeks at a time, accompanied by a range of educational workshops and activities. There would be no need to advertise for local volunteer exhibition guides, as we would train the school students themselves to be ‘peer-to-peer educators’.
The Anne Frank House educator Barry van Driel, who was a seasoned trainer and academic and had a profound understanding of how to educate young people, was the first to present the concept of ‘peer-to-peer educators’ to his Dutch colleagues after he himself had encountered the methodology in the early 1990s while he was living in in California. This educational method had been used in the San Francisco Bay area as a way of spreading an urgently-needed educational method about HIV/AIDS as rapidly and effectively as the deadly disease it was trying to counter. Barry had met a health education expert called Jennifer Reinks and she explained to him about this inclusive new approach to teaching and learning. Instead of just being expected to listen and absorb information, the peer-to-peer method would give students an important role. As well as for HIV/AIDS and sex education, it was also being used to educate about drugs and health.
Barry decided to implement this method in the Watsonville community south of Santa Cruz where he was soon going to be working. ‘This was then, and still is,’ Barry recalled, ‘a very Latino community with a high degree of poverty. There were many drive-by shootings there in the 1990s. The gang experts I brought in also mentioned peer education to reach the very troubled youth of Watsonville.’
After his time in California, Barry found himself deeply embedded in education programmes in areas of post-Communist Europe, as related in my chapter on the Balkan wars. In 1994, he was taking an Anne Frank education programme to Hungary. After Hungary emerged from Communism, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to invest funding to help the country in its transition to democracy. The process of coming to terms with Hungary’s past would involve facing its own role in the Holocaust, where exactly fifty years earlier, in the weeks between 15 May and 9 July 1944, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered by the Nazis or helped in their deportation by Hungarian gendarmerie.
More recently, Hungary’s own Roma community and its other minorities had been victims of persecution. The Anne Frank exhibition was invited to a 100 per cent Roma school in Pecs, a small town in southern Hungary. The Gandhi School was the only school in Europe preparing Roma children for university education, and was named after Mahatma Gandhi for two reasons. Firstly, it had a philosophy of non-violence, and secondly to recognize the Indian roots of the Roma people. It was a weekly boarding school as it was located in a particularly inaccessible mountainous region with notoriously dangerous roads, where the school’s president and deputy president had both been killed in separate road accidents.
A group of ten 13- and 14-year-old students were trained to be Anne Frank exhibition peer guides and in the process learnt more about their community’s own history, especially the destruction of the Roma community in the Holocaust, when 500,000 of their Roma people were murdered. Alongside the Anne Frank exhibition, the play Dreams of Anne Frank was presented with the students playing the roles.
The play went on to tour primary schools throughout Hungary, and the ten actors from the Gandhi School went with it. They became role models for Roma children who were minorities in other schools. It also broke down stereotypical attitudes among teachers towards the Roma community, one even being heard to mutter, ‘I didn’t believe Roma children could act.’ Barry van Driel had taken a Dutch Surinamese colleague with him to Pecs. He remembers with a wry smile: ‘The kids told my colleague, “We’re considered black, but actually you’re really black”.’
The group even came to London at the invitation of Anna Sher, who had set up a renowned theatre school where many of our best-known young British TV actors had learnt the craft of acting. One of the most multicultural cities in the world, London was a real eye-opener for the Roma children. For the first time they felt they were not being treated differently because of the colour of their skin, which had been the case in predominantly fair-skinned Hungary. After their return from the London trip, two of the group, Sabina and Laszlo, continued their roles as peer-to-peer educators by giving after school lessons on sex education, as HIV was starting to gain ground in the area around their town of Pecs. In the years following the project, Barry discovered that many of the group had delayed having children to concentrate on their careers, unusual in the Roma community. One girl, Anna Ignasz, now lives in Bristol in south-west England where she teaches in a school for children with special needs.
After its success in the Latino community of Watsonville and its use to enhance the self-esteem of Roma children in Hungary, the new methodology for teaching the lessons from Anne Frank’s life was discussed by Jan Erik Dubbelman and his International Department team. This could be a dramatically new way of working with the Anne Frank exhibition programme in other countries. Jan Erik saw the value of taking Anne Frank exhibitions directly into schools and training students in each participating school to be peer educators.
Surprisingly, the area chosen to pilot the new peer-education project in 2002 was as demographically far away from the culturally-diverse environments of Watsonville and Amsterdam as it was possible to find – the rural valleys of the Austrian Tirol. This was an unusual but carefully-considered choice of location. Unlike teeming metropolitan cities with excellent transport links enabling people to go wherever they choose, those who live surrounded by steep mountains have limited ability to travel. This creates strong feelings of community within each valley, something I also encountered when working with the Anne Frank project in the former mining communities of the Welsh valleys.
Amidst the towering pine trees and crystal streams of the Austrian Tirol, the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ travelled from school to school along the winding valleys. Those children of the Tirolean valleys were not aware that they were the guinea pigs for an educational philosophy that would change lives and empower the next generation of teenagers around the world. Jan Erik’s rationale was to take the learning experience of young people a step further into the realms of both teaching and learning. He explained, ‘The biggest change-makers in our society are kids themselves. Young people can relate to complex issues of prejudice even better than adults.’
The Anne Frank House’s educators Barry van Driel and Norbert Hinterleitner (whose surname coincidentally translates into English as ‘those who lived on the back slope of a mountain’) had the task of convincing schools in the hidden villages of the mountain valleys to take an Anne Frank exhibition and educational programme. This was far away from the high-profile government, embassy or corporate-funded international Anne Frank exhibition tours that the Anne Frank House had been accustomed to running. In the Austrian Tirol the participating schools were each encouraged to plan satellite events, such as lectures, discussions and film shows, for their own village community to take part in, while doing their own publicity and fundraising.
It proved easier than expected to convince the schools to take part. Schools in this sparsely-populated and inaccessible region of tall mountains and deep valleys were competing to attract students. The school principals each started to realize the value of showing that their school was thinking in a radically different way and engaging with the local community. Jan Erik explained, ‘In these deep valleys you grow up looking out at mountains all around you. This creates a strong and cohesive community in each village. We wanted to pilot the peer-to-peer method where we knew there would be whole community involvement.’ At the end of the Anne Frank exhibition’s tour of the Tirolean villages, this new way of working was deemed to be fruitful and it was time to develop it further.
The Anne Frank Trust’s Head of Education Lucy Glennon heard about the new methodology at an international education seminar she attended at the Anne Frank House in 2006. She came back to London enthused and wanted to discuss with me if somehow we could implement it in Britain. Happily, an interesting opportunity soon arose. Our Head of Fundraising Paul Tyack had a contact on Hackney Council, an Anne Frank enthusiast called Nicola Baboneau who was working in the Community and Partnerships team. When Paul called Nicola, she liked the idea of bringing a small version of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ directly into secondary schools in the borough.
Hackney was an area of East London that had seen many waves of immigration. Its residents during the twentieth century had included my own Polish immigrant paternal grandparents. They had moved there just before the First World War from the grimy tenements of Whitechapel to an imposing new Edwardian house in what was then considered the leafy and quiet suburb of Hackney. I had spent much of my childhood visiting this Hackney house, but by then my cousins and I found ourselves playing in the street alongside other former grand houses that had been razed to the ground in the Blitz.
It was in Hackney in the mid-1950s that I vividly remember my first childhood experience of seeing a person whose skin wasn’t the same colour as mine. We were driving towards the famous Ridley Road food market and a football rolled into the road in front of our car. My dad stopped the car and waved to a boy to retrieve his ball. The boy, roughly 8-years-old, ran and got his ball and gave my Dad a bright smile of thanks. Dad explained to my confused brother and me why the boy looked so different – that he and his Mum and Dad had come from a hot sunny place, and that’s why his skin was dark to protect him from the hot sun. The first post-war wave of 492 immigrants from the West Indies had arrived in Britain on the ship the MV Empire Windrush only a few years earlier (ironically this vessel had originally been a German cruise ship during the 1930s) and maybe this boy’s parents were among them.
As you can guess, with my childhood memories I didn’t need much convincing that Hackney would be a great place to start our exciting new Anne Frank programme in 2006. This was an area of East London that still had a diverse population and many social problems, but parts of the borough were also becoming newly gentrified and affordable areas for young professionals. Nicola Baboneau was keen that as many secondary schools as possible in the borough should benefit from the Anne Frank programme, and so Lucy and Paul set about writing bids for funding for an anticipated year-long event. The Labour Government were supporting initiatives aimed at the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities and we received funding from the Department for Education for half the salary of a project worker to deliver our work in the Hackney schools, plus a further two years in other London boroughs. The other 50 per cent for the first year came from the Prince’s Trust, the foundation set up by the Prince of Wales in 1976 to help disadvantaged young people. Not only did the Prince’s Trust agree to half fund the position of a Project Officer but our new project worker came through their ranks too.
In July 2006 we recruited a young man called Mukith Khalisadar who was on a Prince’s Trust training programme. Mukith was 20-years-old, from the Bengali community in the inner city area of Tower Hamlets and this would be his first job. Such was his inexperience in the working world that in his first week he popped his head around my office door and said to his Executive Director (i.e. me), ‘Darlin’ we are going for lunch now, are you comin’?’ (we still laugh about this together). Little did we know that more than ten years later Mukith would, as a married father of a young son, still be leading our London Schools Project and considered by the Prince’s Trust (and by the Anne Frank Trust too) as one of their greatest success stories. Mukith was so impressive and dedicated that for two full years his salary was funded by the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
As a Muslim man, the reasons for his dedicated work in educating about the Holocaust have sometimes been cynically questioned by teenage Muslim pupils and he has even been called a ‘Jew Lover’. But he has always patiently and sensitively deflected these attacks, by explaining the importance and relevance of everyone knowing about what happened to Anne Frank and why. It has been difficult for him, as well as other members of our education team, working in schools during heightened conflicts between Israel and Palestine, and within our organization there are deep emotional ties towards both sides of the conflict. Our strategy is to explain that the history of the Middle East is complex, with grievances on both sides, whereas the history of Nazism and the Holocaust is black and white.
As well as Mukith, Jamie Arden was appointed in 2006 as London Schools Project Manager, to oversee the year-long Hackney project and the next two years. Jamie had come through the drama in education route and was a hugely engaging and charismatic educator for teenagers. The following year the tentacles of the UK’s Anne Frank peer education project started to spread outward from London. Fiona Ranson, who worked in the Ethnic Minority and Travellers’ Advisory Service at County Durham Council in the north-east of England, had heard about the project and called Lucy Glennon. She was enthusiastic about how it could be used in the former mining communities of County Durham and soon raised funding from an alliance of local trade unions and the local police. And so we took the new project northwards.
The Barcapel Foundation in Glasgow also heard about it via Jed Wilson who happened to be a Trustee of both our charities. The Barcapel Foundation had been set up by Jed’s family from the sale of their successful pet food business, which had at one time captured 20 per cent of the UK market. Our work in challenging prejudice particularly chimed with one of their Trustees, a lawyer called Niall Scott, whose 16-year-old son Mark had been the innocent victim of the Protestant/ Catholic sectarian hatred that still blights parts of the United Kingdom. Walking with friends past a Protestant pub in his Celtic football scarf, Mark was attacked and stabbed in the neck by Jason Campbell, the son of a convicted Loyalist terrorist. Campbell served fifteen years for Mark’s unprovoked murder.
Heather Boyce was employed in 2008 as our new Scotland Project Manager. Now based in York and married to our Fundraiser Paul Tyack (Anne Frank would love it that romance blossomed at her eponymous Trust), Heather is now responsible for the Trust’s educational development.
In 2009 we were invited to conduct a year-long education project in Addenbrooke’s NHS Trust hospital in Cambridge to teach their 7,000-strong staff, from the venerated surgeons all the way through the staff chain to hospital porters, the value of treating their patients and staff colleagues with equality and dignity. Val Ross came on board to manage the project, and since its completion in 2010 remained as the Trust’s East of England Project Manager. She has travelled extensively throughout this region (as a non-driver relying on often challenging public transport connections) bringing the peer education programme to schools in the predominantly rural eastern counties, from the county of Essex, immediately north-east of London, right up to the northern tip of East Anglia. Much of Val’s work has been funded by local trade unions, including the NASUWT teaching union.
And so our peer education project continued to expand across Britain. The Department for Communities and Local Government have been supporting the project since 2007, and the consistently high externally conducted evaluations our work has received resulted in many other sources of funds, including a five-year major grant from the Big Lottery to expand the Anne Frank Ambassadors programme. To date we work intensively in seven regions of England and Scotland where our Anne Frank Trust teams are active week in and week out in schools, whilst building their own local relationships and networks of support. Sadly, I can’t acknowledge every one of our expanding education team but I hereby put on record my immense pride in their work and huge appreciation of their dedication.
Even though it may appear that the peer-to-peer education programme is a very open style of presenting the Anne Frank story, there is a firm structure and ongoing evaluation lying beneath. The Trust implements the peer education programme in a school in the following way. Having visited the participating school several times, the Trust’s Regional Manager or a member of his/her team installs the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ in a designated area of the school. The installation usually takes place on a Monday morning and, as the exhibition stands and panels are flexible, durable and lightweight, two or three pairs of hands can get them set up in a couple of hours. The flexible structure means that they can be erected along a wall, or in different configurations around a central core, helpful when you are visiting a different busy and crowded school environment each couple of weeks.
Later that morning the team of young peer guides chosen for the task, anywhere between six and twenty in number, receive their training from the Trust’s team member. Usually each peer educator has a responsibility for guiding visitors through a set of panels, learning a couple of different sets of panels in case they are called upon to substitute for an absent guide. The peer educators vary in age, but usually they are between the ages of 12 to 15. It isn’t always the most obvious students – the quick learners, high achievers or good communicators – who are chosen by their teachers for the peer educator role. An astute teacher will often deliberately select a pupil who has had difficult issues to overcome – shyness, attention deficit or hyperactivity, a tough family background or has been the victim of bullying. Many of our peer educators have been from immigrant families, who have experienced difficulties of assimilation into their new school community, and some of our best educators have been refugees themselves from the wars in Kosovo, the Middle East and Africa. They have felt a particular affinity with Anne’s story. In turn, their audience has come to a deeper understanding of their peer educator’s own traumatic background.
During the week or two that the Anne Frank exhibition is in each school, the teachers have selected an enhancement programme from a range of accompanying workshops created and presented by the Trust’s education team. These are on topics such as ‘Rights and Responsibilities’; encouraging creative writing projects such as for our own year-long ‘Generation Diary’ online campaign; and addressing more current prejudices such as Islamophobia. In 2015, the Trust received a grant from the Department for Education to create a workshop and materials to help tackle homophobic, transphobic and biphobic bullying in schools, and was able to expand what it could offer to teachers even further. Where possible a Holocaust survivor, or survivor from a more recent genocide, will come to the school to tell their story.
But our programme does not end when the Anne Frank exhibition is taken down and moves on. Schools are then invited to sign up their peer educators for the ‘Anne Frank Ambassadors’ programme and twice a year the Trust conducts two-day training courses for new Ambassadors in each region. On this course the student will learn how to create social responsibility initiatives in their own community; or give a presentation on Anne Frank in their local primary schools; or create and run a campaign to tackle a local or national human rights issue. In many cases Anne Frank Ambassadors have used their skills to act as guides for the public at the large community exhibition held in their town, which since 2005 has been ‘Anne Frank + You’. The Anne Frank Ambassadors are expected to carry their ambassadorial title with pride and this is certainly the case.
Since 2001 and the inception of the peer-to-peer methodology by the Anne Frank House there have been thousands of feedback responses from teachers and from the students themselves, gathered from all over the world. Both the Anne Frank House and the Anne Frank Trust UK regard all this feedback as accumulated learning, constantly helping to improve the training procedures and relevance to changing school systems. The Trust’s attention to monitoring short-term responses and longer-term outcomes has resulted in the consistent renewal of Government grants supporting the programme and even expanding it to more regions of the UK.
Lucy Glennon echoed Jan Erik’s views about tasking teenagers in this role, ‘Whereas we as adults find ourselves talking in a rather self-conscious politically correct way about subjects like racial abuse, the children get straight to the point.’ Mukith Khalidasar agrees.
Peer education speaks the language of the audience. In my experience of working with young people when being taught about moral issues young people need to relate to the person talking to them. Teachers or adults, no matter how in tune they are with the youth of today, will still be seen as an adult rather than one of them. This is why when you put a young person in front of their peers it cuts out the mentality of ‘Oh it’s just another adult telling us what to do’.
Over 1,000 Anne Frank peer educators are trained each year in England and Scotland and of those approximately half go on to the Anne Frank Ambassador training. However, in the same way that learning about Anne Frank creates an emotive connection with the destruction of millions of lives, relaying individual uplifting stories from some of the young people who have benefitted from being Anne Frank peer guides demonstrates the method’s impact even better than statistics. I have heard many of these directly from the beneficiaries as well as their teachers.
The programme has been particularly successful in the former industrial towns and mining villages in the north-east of England. Despite it being a predominantly white monocultural region, high unemployment means many pockets are recruiting grounds for extremist organizations. When I visited the former mining town of Ferryhill, the Principal of the Business and Enterprise College explained to me the huge value he placed on having the Anne Frank programme. He told me that this was a community where there could be up to three generations of unemployed men in one family as the last coal mine had closed in 1968. He saw the Anne Frank programme as an insurance policy to help keep the next generation of adults away from extremist politics and had brought the programme into the school for four consecutive years. Faye, one of the peer guides who had become an Anne Frank Ambassador and was now about to leave school, told me she was a carer for her mother and that this was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
A consistent relationship with a school such as Ferryhill Business and Enterprise College gives us the luxury of a longer-term assessment of our theory of change. When we first interviewed Jordan Wilson as a newly-turned teenager and Anne Frank peer educator he told us in a pre-pubescent voice that there was racism in his area. He shrugged his shoulders; he didn’t know how he could do anything about it. Interviewed again four years later, looking more a muscular adult, he said he felt much more confident to challenge racist remarks if he heard them. Jordan felt a strong responsibility to educate people about what he has learnt from working with Anne Frank and that this attitude affects everything he does. He even said ‘I think Anne Frank would be happy as there are so many people preventing what she went through from happening again.’
Ferryhill’s town councillors gave me one of my proudest moments at the Trust when, having rather furtively asked Jamie Arden for a copy of our charity’s bright green and black logo, it suddenly appeared for a week prior to local elections in the form of a flag flying prominently above the town hall. The councillors saw the Anne Frank Trust flag as a symbol of defiance against extremist politics.
For one Anne Frank Ambassador training day, I visited the north-east city of Gateshead, where I met 14-year-old Joe. During the course of our chat he shared with me that his Mum had seen a transformation in his behaviour at home. Joe admitted that before he had become an Anne Frank educator he preferred his own company and to him family mealtimes were a social ordeal. But now he knew he was more communicative at home and actually enjoyed mealtime chat with his family. I thought that was a bold revelation from a 14-year-old boy.
Nathan was also a great exemplar from this region. He was a bullied autistic boy attending a special needs school, who had retired into his shell until he had become an Anne Frank Ambassador. His social transformation had been so great that it had allowed this young teenager to come on his first-ever visit to London (accompanied by his grandfather, who had also never before been to London), roll up at one of the city’s most exclusive five-star hotels and stride confidently on to the ballroom stage, where he addressed 600 business people at our Anne Frank Trust lunch in 2016.
Looking around the packed room, he spoke without hesitation to tell them,
I’ve faced prejudice because of my autism, and I have seen how people think differently of me because of it. There are people in my own community in County Durham who support racist groups, and if they knew the facts, rather than just the propaganda, they would change their minds. Doing the Anne Frank project has given me a completely different view than these kinds of groups. I’m now able to challenge prejudice when I’m confronted with it. I always try to help others who don’t understand, and I challenge those who do understand, but spread hatred.
What Nathan stated so articulately echoes what we hear from young Anne Frank peer educators up and down our country, and if I tried to capture even a selection of the best responses this book would run to 5,000 pages.
Bradford in West Yorkshire is, conversely to the villages of County Durham, a very multicultural city with an Asian population making up nearly one quarter of the population. During the Industrial Revolution the woollen mills, fed by the soft waters of the nearby Yorkshire dales, had attracted first an Irish immigration and then German-Jewish merchants, who opened export businesses in a network of streets that became known as Little Germany. After the Second World War came Poles and Ukrainians, and then from the 1950s immigrants from India and Pakistan started arriving in the city to work in the woollen mills, which were in those days still flourishing.
The Metropolitan Council of Bradford have been hosting and funding an Anne Frank project over seven consecutive years. Jani Rashid, the former Head of Diversity & Cohesion for Bradford council’s Education Department, crystallized why, by describing a change he had seen in one student. ‘The project has been a real success for our students in terms of raising their self-esteem, aspiration and confidence. I could never have imagined that the pupil I saw three years ago, giggling through a Holocaust Memorial Day service, was going to be as committed as she is now to human rights issues and to making a difference.’
Jani Rashid has since retired and returned to his former home in Indonesia, but not before leaving his own rather unusual mark on his adopted city. Bradford’s Victorian synagogue, one of the oldest in Britain, was falling into disrepair and its tiny remaining congregation were struggling to raise the funds for repair works. Jani mounted a fundraising campaign in his own local Muslim community, and as a gesture of appreciation from the synagogue he was invited to become one of their Board members. The first Muslim appointed to the Board of a British synagogue made national news headlines.
Bradford pupils themselves have come forward to openly share what the Anne Frank programme has meant to them. One boy, who was seemingly full of external confidence, found the courage to admit he was the victim of bullying so his teaching support officers could help him do something about it. He has since been a much happier person. One Asian teenage boy told us that he had come across boys in his community who were tempted to go to Syria to fight for Islamic State and this was an insurance policy against growth of those ideas. Uzma Zahid was a pupil at Laisterdyke Business and Enterprise College in 2009 when she first became an Anne Frank peer educator and then an Ambassador. Her grandfather had come to Bradford as a teenager from Pakistan to work in a woollen mill. Their family followed varying degrees of Muslim practice, some being more secular than others, but even those who were more secular still lived in a segregated community.
Uzma had never heard of Anne Frank when she was asked to be a peer guide. Once she had read the diary, she felt she shared some of Anne’s sentiments but felt it hard to relate her own relatively easy life to a young girl who went through something so horrific and cruel. Uzma’s initial nervousness about becoming a guide was helped by being one of a large group who were being trained together. She had attended an entirely Asian primary school, although her interaction with children from different backgrounds increased when she went to a different high school. Being an Anne Frank peer educator sparked a desire to go to university and she chose Royal Holloway College in Surrey, over 200 miles away from Bradford. It was only when she went to university that she realized what real diversity was. Although she had lived in such a multicultural city, Uzma had not realized how segregated her life had been.
When she had first become an Anne Frank guide for the Trust she had not fully discussed her role with her family, not realizing she was starting a relationship that she would describe as a ‘lifelong one’.
I now feel this is a huge part of who I am so I have become more accustomed to telling people about this aspect of me. I have just been so lucky to be given so many opportunities: I have met Zlata Filipović, I have had the chance to be a witness to Holocaust testimonies, I have visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, I have mentored younger ambassadors, and many more things. All of these encounters have helped me become someone who I hope my family, my friends, and members of the Anne Frank Trust, can be proud of.
Uzma went on to take a Master’s Degree and her thesis explored the association of chemical imbalances in the brain with schizophrenia and memory impairment. Like so many of our Anne Frank Ambassadors, we are indeed proud of her.
Following the Anne Frank programme in a school, teachers have reported an increase in the number of students choosing to study History beyond 16 and as an A-level subject, as students’ eyes have been opened to the impact history has upon our own lives. Another unforeseen by product of creating peer educators is that students themselves have told us they feel a greater respect and empathy towards their teachers, as being educators themselves has given them an understanding of the challenges teachers face in communicating knowledge.
Mukith cites the incident of a boy he was training in a West London school. During the guide training session, the boy was very engaged and answered all Mukith’s questions, but Mukith felt it had been in a rather loud and overconfident way. At the end of the session, Mukith called him over and told him his knowledge was impressive but that he perhaps needed to curb his overenthusiasm. Mukith continued:
I asked him how he knew so much about the subject, to which he answered that he was very interested in it and had learnt a lot outside of school. After the boy had left the room his teacher came over to me and asked me how I thought the training had gone. I mentioned that this particular young boy was a little disruptive but I was certainly impressed with his knowledge, even though it mainly revolved around the Nazis and Hitler. The teacher explained to me that there were reports that the community group this young boy belonged to were glorifying Nazism. The school did not have firm evidence and were scared of losing the boy to these extremist ideologies, so chose not to do anything radical, instead selecting him to be an Anne Frank peer educator.
Mukith continued:
Keeping my conversation with the teacher to myself, the next day I tracked down the student before his first guiding session and told him that I wanted to go over the slides with him before his session. After a brief conversation, I asked him how he knew so much about the Nazis and Hitler in particular. He was vague but mentioned that in his culture there was a belief in a caste system which mirrored the Nazis’ belief in a superior race. He explained that his community group did not have a violent approach but the similarities between the hierarchy of the Nazis’ race system and their own caste system made some in his community openly praise Hitler.
I sat with the boy and talked through some of the personal testimonies that I have been privileged to hear first-hand from Holocaust survivors and spoke extensively about the Nazi race laws and the meaning of racism. He slowly softened his stance and I asked him to research more about the Holocaust from reliable sources, giving him links to appropriate websites. The boy didn’t show up for two out of the three guiding sessions he was supposed to give but I did see him on the last day, when he agreed to guide a class.
Afterwards he explained to me that he hadn’t felt it was appropriate to guide classes around the exhibition while he held these beliefs but after researching more about the Holocaust, as I had suggested, he realized that what he had been taught in his community was not right – although he still believed a strong leader could be important. He admitted that pride in being part of a group should not mean treating others differently. I told him I was proud of him and really impressed by his bravery, not just for coming to guide the class around the exhibition but also for admitting something so personal, then challenging it and realizing it was wrong. I told him that if he could hold on to this bravery and continue being humble he would achieve some amazing things.
Uzma Zahid sums up why she feels the Anne Frank educational programme is so critical:
I think it’s very apparent why we should learn about historical events, especially atrocities. It’s also important to learn from personal accounts, to understand what an individual went through, to see events through the eyes of someone who lived through it really puts things into perspective. It is also necessary to draw comparisons between current and past atrocities, which can help put the events of today into perspective.
The Anne Frank Schools’ Peer Guiding and Ambassadors programme received a huge boost in 2012, when its expansion was supported by the Trust’s largest ever single grant, £836,000 from the UK’s ‘Big Lottery’ released over five years. The programme was called ‘Realizing Ambition’ and was carried out in particular areas of deprivation, helping to divert young people from pathways into crime so that they can fulfil their true potential. A new Programme Delivery Manager, Shona Gibbs, joined the Trust and managed the Education team in its delivery. The Trust’s work was scrupulously monitored and its impact assessed by independent agencies throughout the five years, and by the third year the Anne Frank Trust succeeded in receiving ‘Gold Quality’ standard. This led to further successful funding bids to other agencies. Shaun Whelan, a programme manager for ‘Realizing Ambition’, described why, ‘Your [Anne Frank Trust’s] commitment to the young people you work with has been amazing and your commitment to being challenged, to testing and improving the work you deliver, has been amazing too.’
The young people whose circumstances I have related reflect the impact on individuals of the peer education methodology. As well as the ‘Realizing Ambition’ continuous monitoring over five years, the Trust’s work in schools has been academically evaluated by the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Kent. 80 per cent of teachers interviewed said that Anne Frank peer guides were more likely to challenge discriminatory behaviour and 90 per cent of teachers reported that peer guides are more confident after having taken part in the programme. We know that our work has a long term impact on the lives of young people, leaving them with a greater empathy and respect for others and a reduced negativity towards different groups.
The numbers are hugely encouraging but even more so are these beautiful words from an Anne Frank Ambassador at Lawnswood School in Leeds:
Did you know that when the world was invented, racism came afterwards? Racism was invented by people, and today, we as people have the power to eliminate racism. The colour of your skin does not define you in any way possible. Your appearance is only a cover, a cover which starts the most magical story ever, which is your life. Don’t judge a book by its cover, because you don’t know what the story holds.