Anne Frank’s diary was first published in Japan as early as 1952. Since its first Japanese-language edition, Anne has been portrayed in Japan as an enduring and recognizable symbol of the suffering of children, starting with those who had been killed or maimed by the atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. 200,000 people died as a result of the two deadly bombs, and many were children whose bodies were found incinerated and covered in black carbon, looking much like the images we recall from the obliteration of Pompeii.
The first Japanese edition of Anne’s diary sold a remarkable 116,000 copies in only five months, just seven years after the end of the war. What could be the reason for this remarkable interest in a Holocaust victim, by the people of a country that was allied with her persecutors?
Alain Lewkowicz is a French journalist who wrote an elaborate iPad application, ‘Anne Frank in the Land of Manga’, about his investigation of the Anne Frank phenomenon in Japan. ‘She symbolizes the ultimate World War II victim,’ said Lewkowicz. ‘And that’s how most Japanese consider their own country because of the atomic bombs – a victim, never a perpetrator.’ Japan has seen the publication of at least four popular manga comic books about Anne Frank and three animated films. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told the German broadcasting service Deutsche Welle why he believed Anne’s story had so resonated with the Japanese people. ‘The Japanese love children and this is a story of a child in a terrible situation, through no fault of her own. And she shows real honesty, opening up on so many different levels, including as a teenage girl. She talks about her first kiss, about her hopes for the future. Since she never expected anyone to read her diary, it has a particular sense of authenticity.’ Rabbi Cooper ventured another possible reason, ‘A lot of young Japanese people don’t have much space or privacy, so there is also a parallel in [Anne’s] struggle to find space for themselves.’
According to Anne Frank’s and Otto Frank’s biographer Carol Ann Lee, ‘The marketing strategy in Japan had been to sell the diary as a protest against the great misfortunes brought by war. [Anne was] a young victim but one who inspired hope for the future rather than a sense of guilt for the past. Her sex further emphasised the stress on innocence.’
For many decades after the end of the war, guilt about the past wasn’t on the Japanese agenda. The country’s leaders did not use the term ‘apologize’ about the country’s brutality in the Second World War until the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, when in a speech on 15 August 1995, Prime Minister Tomiichi Muramaya finally used the Japanese word ‘owabi’, which is translated into English as ‘heartfelt apology’.
Because Anne’s diary was one of the first books to mention menstruation openly and her name had become so well-known, the word ‘Anne’s Day’ became a euphemism in Japan for the female ‘time of the month’. In the late 1960s, a manufacturer of feminine sanitary wear saw a commercial opportunity in the association between Anne and menstruation, by creating a branded ‘Anne Frank’ range of tampons. Production of these was stopped when it came to the notice of the Anne Frank-Fonds in Switzerland, who were understandably outraged.
The exhibition ‘Anne Frank in the World’ first visited Japan in 1987, and during this and subsequent tours, the exhibition was often located on the top floor of department stores. This is not unusual for cultural projects in the consumer-driven society of Japan (and actually in Britain too we have had several successful and busy exhibitions shown in shopping malls). From 2009 onwards, the focus changed from staging Anne Frank exhibitions for the wider community to that of educational establishments or cultural centres. Since then there have been over 100 different Anne Frank exhibition venues involving 300,000 participants.
Stefan Vervaecke is a Schools Improvement Officer in Amsterdam. He had become involved with the anti-racism work of the Anne Frank House back in the early 1970s, when tensions had erupted in Amsterdam over discrimination against the Surinamese community. Stefan, a graduate of Theology and Education, started his career working with Catholic schools in Amsterdam and over the years had developed good connections with Catholic missionaries throughout the Far East. In 2009 he received a call from the Anne Frank House. It was Jan Erik Dubbelman asking for some help. This was the time leading up to the 400th anniversary of the first formal trade relations established between the Netherlands and Japan in 1609, when the Dutch had been granted extensive trading rights. The Dutch had set up an East India Company outpost at Hirado to trade in exotic Asian goods such as spices, textiles, porcelain and silk. To mark the anniversary, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, was due to attend a commemorative ceremony in Tokyo and the Anne Frank House had been invited to bring an exhibition on Anne Frank to mark the celebrations. A suitable venue quickly needed to be found.
Like many international Anne Frank projects, after Jan Erik had made the call to Stefan, a transcontinental thread of helpful connections quickly came into play. Stefan was doing some work in Hong Kong at that time, and through missionary friends in Taiwan, he was introduced to a Catholic school in the centre of Tokyo. This school was extremely happy to host an Anne Frank exhibition, and especially to mark such an auspicious occasion.
The exhibition opening took place at the Catholic school, garnering lots of positive publicity. Then the Anne Frank exhibition was invited, through Stefan’s growing Catholic schools network, to visit others. Within two years, there was a clear need to take it even wider. A local Japanese based co-ordinator of the tour was urgently needed. Again, international networks came into play.
In the 1990s, Stefan had been one of the first people to encourage widespread use of computers in Amsterdam’s schools. Some years later, in 2003, he had attended an educational conference and youth summit in Japan, where he was particularly impressed by a woman educator called Yoko Takagi. In the spring of 2011, the same Yoko received an email from Stefan Vervaecke asking for her help in co-ordinating an extended Japanese tour of the Anne Frank exhibition. Yoko had no hesitation in saying yes. She had read one of the first published editions of Anne’s diary at junior high school back in the 1950s and, perhaps surprisingly for a girl from the Far East in those days, had found Anne’s life to be ‘not exactly outside my own world’.
Yoko’s early childhood had been spent in the eastern Asian region of Manchuria, for a long time an area of dispute between China, Russia and Japan. Following an invasion of Manchuria by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1931, Japanese families had been encouraged to go and settle there. They did in large numbers, and swelled the local Chinese population more than threefold. Immediately after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War, the Soviet Union sent its army into Manchuria, ending the four years of peace between Japan and Russia during the Second World War (when the Soviet Union had been otherwise occupied defending its western borders against Nazi advances). During the nine months the Soviet army was in Manchuria, the Japanese community found themselves being regularly attacked and threatened by Soviet soldiers, often pointing guns directly at them. Yoko had a vivid memory of being five years old and threatened at gunpoint by a callous Soviet soldier. Even at such a young age, little Yoko had understood that Japanese children were being kidnapped and sold for a high price by the Soviet soldiers and that many Japanese adults were being killed. Yoko felt very fortunate that she and her family managed to survive until they were able to move back to Japan.
Yoko’s early adult life in Japan was pretty conventional. She worked in a bank, married, raised children and then at the age of 35, decided she should learn English, which she went on to teach. But then, nearing the age of 50, she did something very unconventional. She had long held a dream of going to university, and leaving her husband at home in Osaka, she flew off across the Pacific to Hawaii State University to further her English studies.
Since Yoko received the invitation from Stefan Vervaecke in 2009 to help the Anne Frank House by finding suitable venues, she has taken the exhibition to eighty places, averaging ten a year, mostly high schools. One-third of a million people have seen an Anne Frank exhibition in Japan. Yoko also feels that the Japanese interest in Anne Frank has long been due to a connection to Anne’s experience because of the suffering of children in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. But she also proposed a more sensitive and controversial reason. ‘Through looking at the genocide of the Holocaust, educators can see an important doorway into a very difficult time in Japanese history for young people to learn about – that of the cruelty of the Japanese occupying army. I hope that young people will make these connections. They know that the bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immensely cruel, but at the same time they need to learn that once wars start, human beings, and in our case the Japanese army, are capable of very cruel things,’ said Yoko.
Today, Anne Frank’s life story is taught in Japanese schools in tandem with that of Chiune Sugihara, the wartime diplomat who was the Japanese equivalent of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, in Sugihara’s case saving the lives of 6,000 Lithuanian Jews. Yoko works with the practical side of taking the exhibition around schools and once it has been set up, she equips each school with a set of resources and suggested activities. Yoko organizes the tour from her home as a volunteer, and a grant initiated by the former Vice Education Minister covers the costs of the transport of the exhibition from school to school. She has an almost spiritual description for the practicalities of finding venues: ‘When it’s hard for me to find the next site for the exhibition, something happens and suddenly there is a new site waiting. I believe Anne is working with me!’
The Anne Frank Rose of Japan
‘In the rose garden unless you retrace your steps, you’ll find no way out.’ Haiku by Tsuda Kiyoko (part of the text of ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’)
In 1960 a Belgian horticulturalist called Hippolyte Delforge created a fragrant orange blend floribunda rose he named ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’. Symbolically the new rose was grafted together from one rose that had been created in 1929, the year of Anne’s birth, and one created in the year of her death, 1945.
On reading Anne’s diary at her school in Japan in the early 1970’s, 15-year-old Michiko Otsuki became one of the thousands of young Japanese girls who were inspired to write to Otto Frank. The two corresponded for a while, during which time Otto sent Michiko a Christmas gift of a dozen of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose bushes. All but one of the bushes died, and Michiko gave the last surviving rose bush to her uncle Ryuichi Yamamuro, a former teacher who in retirement had become an expert Bonsai grafter. Mr Yamamuro grafted the European rose onto Japanese stock, and then an idea struck him. He planted ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose bushes in the Peace Gardens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then set about sending the roses, along with a copy of Anne’s diary, to schools in cities throughout the islands of Japan – from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south. Mr Yamamuro thought of the children he had taught long ago in the years before the Second World War and their sadness at being called up to fight an enemy.
Kenji Yamamuro, Ryuichi’s son, continues the sacred work of his father to this day. One of the rose bushes grows in the gardens of a church in Nishinomiya City. The church is called the Anne’s Rose Church, so named after consultation with Otto Frank. As far as it is known, it is the only church in the world named after Anne Frank.
In 2011, this remarkable story of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ roses became the basis of a musical interpretation by the British-based Ensemble Theatre Group. The group’s founder, the actress and singer Elizabeth Mansfield, had discovered an Anne Frank-inspired musical piece for piano, cello and violin entitled ‘Het Achterhuis’ (the Dutch name of Anne Frank’s diary when published) written by the composer Colin Decio. Having been introduced to Colin at one of her performances, Elizabeth was thinking about putting Anne’s own words to his music to create a new work for the Ensemble group. In the course of her research for this, she came upon the story of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose which excited her.
Elizabeth described to me her particular motivation, ‘I was interested in the correlation between Otto’s return to life after his time in Auschwitz, through his discovery and publishing of Anne’s diary, with Mr Yamamuro’s passionate commitment to grafting “Souvenir d’Anne Frank” roses, and sending them to children in Japanese schools. From opposite sides of the world, and with vastly different personal experiences, both men were committed to inspiring young people to work for peace and against injustice and racism.’ The Ensemble Theatre Group partnered with the Anne Frank Trust, who together applied for funding, and the production was launched alongside the Anne Frank exhibition at the Zion Arts Centre in Manchester. Elizabeth and her team also conducted educational workshops to further explore with students the themes of the story.
Nao Nagai was the lighting designer for Elizabeth’s production, and as her name suggests, happened to be Japanese. Using dogged determination, Nao managed to track down Michiko Otsuki, the very girl who had written to Otto Frank all those years ago. Michiko was by now in her seventies, living in Nara City, not far from Nao’s own home city of Kobe. Nao was then introduced to Kenji Yamamuro, Michiko’s cousin and son of Ryuichi Yamamuro, the original creator of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose. On a visit to Japan, Nao and Elizabeth were invited by Kenji to a special ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose-grafting event at his house, attended by about fifty people. Over tea after the rose had been grafted, Kenji spoke about his father and how much the rose had meant to him. Elizabeth and Nao also visited Michiko Otsuki who showed them all her correspondence from Otto Frank from forty years ago, which he had typed on light blue gossamer-thin ‘Par Avion’ paper, typically used in those days for expensive overseas mail.
Looking back to 2011, Elizabeth Mansfield summed up what she saw as the legacy of the fascinating story of the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ rose and its musical interpretation. ‘Anne’s story is a complicated one. Within it lie important lessons for today and for all time. Man-made war is still with us, along with torture, genocide and persecution. People are still in flight from man-made horrors. And yet people also continue to do good for each other, and to fight against injustice and racism and for peace and understanding.’
Throughout Japan the ‘Souvenir d’Anne Frank’ roses continue to flourish. As does the Japanese people’s love of Anne Frank.
The Vietnamese Anne Frank
The Vietnam War, or what the Vietnamese refer to as ‘The American War’, left over 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead. It also left an indelible imprint on the national psyche of both countries.
One of those killed was a young, idealistically Communist North Vietnamese doctor, who became known after her death as the ‘Anne Frank of Vietnam’ – because of a diary that she had kept during the Vietnam War. The strange and circuitous route that enabled this young woman’s wartime diary to come to the eyes of the world is a story well worth relating.
Fresh out of medical school in the late 1960s, Dang Thuy Trâm had headed down to South Vietnam to tend wounded Viet Cong soldiers. On 22 June 1970, Thuy Trâm was walking along a jungle path dressed in her regulation Viet Cong black pyjamas, when she came upon a group of American soldiers engaged in a gun battle with their Vietcong enemy. Several of her own patients had already been killed in the offensive, and she was caught in crossfire. She took a bullet in the head and died immediately.
It so happened that the original translator of Anne Frank’s diary into Vietnamese was a woman called Dang Kim Trâm. In a twist of fate, Kim Trâm had no idea that her older sister Thuy Trâm, the very same young doctor who had been killed by the Americans, had also been keeping a wartime diary – one that would go on to sell more than 300,000 copies and would be translated into sixteen languages. When it was published, comparisons were drawn internationally between Thuy Trâm’s writings and those of Anne Frank.
In June 1970, days before her death, Thuy Trâm had written of the American president, ‘Nixon is foolish and crazy as he widens the war. How hateful it is! We are all humans, but some are so cruel as to want the blood of others to water their gold tree.’ In another entry, she almost foretold her destiny writing, ‘Death was so close as the bombing stripped the trees bare and tore houses to pieces’.
The country of Vietnam has had a complex history. It had managed to keep its independence from Chinese imperialism since AD 939. However, in 1859 the country’s independence was eroded by colonialist France in a series of military conquests, after which the southern third of the country became a new French colony. By 1884, the entire country had come under French rule. This situation continued until almost the middle of the twentieth century.
Ho Chi Minh was a Communist revolutionary who was the leader of the Việt Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, founded originally to fight the Japanese. In 1945 Ho Chi Minh announced the establishment of the Communist-ruled Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and eight years of fighting the French followed. After the ferocious battle of Điện Biên Phủ, 10,000 starving French troops surrendered to the Viet Minh. The 1954 Geneva Accords was eventually agreed between France and the Viet Minh, allowing the latter’s forces to regroup in the North whilst anti-communist groups settled in the South. Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated to Hanoi and became the government of North Vietnam, a Communist one-party state.
South Vietnam meanwhile was ruled by a government led by Ngo Dinh Diem, who was a fiercely anti-Communist Catholic. His power base was significantly strengthened by 900,000 refugees, many of them Catholics, who had fled the communist North. In the early 1960s, the South was rocked by unrest, led by university students and Buddhist monks, several of whom shocked the world by setting fire to themselves in highly-publicized protests. In November 1963, a group of young generals staged a coup backed by the United States. It was planned that the unpopular South Vietnamese leader Diem would go into exile, but the generals got over-excited and Diem and his brother were killed. A succession of military rulers followed Diem but they continued his erratic policies.
With an era of political instability following, Ho Chi Minh’s Communist National Liberation Front (NLF), which came to be known by the West as the Viet Cong, began to gain ground from the north. To support South Vietnam’s struggle against this communist insurgency, the American government began increasing its number of military advisers over there. US forces became involved in ground combat operations in 1965. At their peak their forces on the ground numbered more than 500,000, backed up by a sustained aerial bombing campaign. Meanwhile, China and the Soviet Union provided North Vietnam with significant material aid and 15,000 combat advisers.
By the early 1970s, facing an increasing casualty count, rising domestic opposition to the war and growing international condemnation, the Americans began withdrawing. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the Communists on 30 April 1975 and the following year North and South Vietnam were merged, becoming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
During the preparations for the withdrawal from Vietnam, a young American military intelligence specialist called Fred Whitehurst had been passed the war diaries written by the young woman doctor Dang Thuy Trâm. Part of Whitehurst’s brief was to destroy unwanted documents and, just about to burn one of the notebooks, was persuaded by his Vietnamese interpreter to save it. Whitehurst recalled that his interpreter had implored him, ‘Fred, don’t burn it, it already has fire in it.’ Acting against orders, Whitehurst secretly posted the notebooks back to his home in North Carolina. For years afterwards Fred didn’t know what to do with them, it was after all the personal diary of a dead young woman, and remarkably similar to Anne Frank’s diary in the matters it discussed – ideals and convictions, love and life, as well as anger addressed at her persecutors, in this case the Americans and their president, Richard Nixon. So Whitehurst kept the tiny notebooks at his home for thirty-five years, holding on to the idea of one day perhaps returning them to Thuy Trâm’s family.
Whitehurst’s search for Thuy Trâm’s family initially proved unsuccessful. After earning a Ph.D. in chemistry he joined the FBI, but was unable to get anyone from the Vietnamese embassy who could help. In March 2005, he met the photographer Ted Engelmann, another Vietnam veteran, who offered to look for the family during his next assignment to Vietnam. With the assistance of a staff member in the Hanoi office of the Quakers, Engelmann was finally able to locate Thuy Trâm’s mother, Doan Ngoc Trâm, and through her, he also reached the rest of the family.
In July of that year, Thuy Trâm’s diaries were published in Vietnam under the title Nhật ký Đặng Thùy Trâm (Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace), which quickly became a bestseller. In less than a year, the book sold more than 300,000 copies and was then translated into sixteen languages. ‘She was my enemy but her words would break your heart,’ Fred Whitehurst told the British Independent newspaper just after the book’s publication. ‘She is a Vietnamese Anne Frank. I know this diary will go everywhere on Planet Earth.’
Just as in Anne’s diary there was a terrible poignancy in Trâm’s final entries. She had written on 20 July 1970, ‘No, I am not a child: I am grown up and already strong in the face of hardships, but at this minute why do I want so much a mother’s hand to care for me, or really the hand of a close friend, or just that of a person I know who is all right? Please come to me and hold my hand when I am so lonely. Love me and give me strength to travel all the hard sections of the road ahead . . .’ Two days later she was shot dead.
In December 2014, the Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, led a business delegation to Hanoi. As well as discussions about deeper co-operation on issues such as urban planning, water management, energy and waste treatment, a French-English language version of the Anne Frank exhibition was staged as a specially-linked cultural event. It opened at the Hanoi-Amsterdam High School and went on to tour international schools in Hanoi. At the opening Mayor Van der Laan talked with young students there on the heritage of Anne Frank’s war diary and related Anne’s message of peace to the story of Dr Dang Thuy Trâm.
In the autumn of the following year, the Anne Frank House received three very special visitors. Doan Ngoc Trâm, the 92-year-old mother of Thuy Trâm, had come to see the Anne Frank House along with her two surviving daughters Kim Trâm and Phuong Trâm. Kim Trâm was the woman who, years before her sister’s diary had become known to the world, had translated Anne Frank’s diary into Vietnamese.
Hong Kong Island, off the south coast of China, had become a British colony under the Treaty of Nanjing, signed after the First Opium War in 1842. At that time, opium was a legal substance in Britain, used for pain relief before the discovery of aspirin, and so a key import alongside large quantities of Chinese tea.
On 8 December 1941, Hong Kong was invaded by the Imperial Japanese Army, just eight hours after their attack on American warships stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The British colonial officials were forced to surrender to the invaders and three-and-a-half years of brutal occupation followed. Food was severely rationed and 10,000 civilians were killed.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the economy started to boom, partly due to skilled immigrants from mainland China who had fled Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong became a major industrial and manufacturing centre, and by the 1980s had become an international financial centre too as well as one of the world’s top ten economies. In July 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China and the Union Jack was lowered for the last time, rolled up and handed to the British Governor of Hong Kong, former Conservative Minister Chris Patten. Now to be known as a ‘A Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China’, the new mother country promised that the former British colony would be run under the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’.
In the summer of 2007, Jan Erik Dubbelman asked me to open the first Anne Frank exhibition in Hong Kong. It was only a year since I had lost my husband Tony, so this exciting project was a helpful distraction from my grief. An added bonus was that Jan Erik also invited our Head of Education Lucy Glennon to come with me to help train the volunteer guides.
China, already emerging from its Communist economy, seemed to be keeping its promise to treat the citizens of the dynamic business based community of Hong Kong with a degree of difference from the rest of its one billion people. Thus when Lucy and I arrived in November 2007, Hong Kong was certainly still a retail paradise. The first thing that struck me was a strange conundrum. The high-rise buildings soared into the clouds, each containing hundreds of tiny apartments, with what we were told were very compact living spaces. But everywhere, in malls or markets, Hong Kong’s residents were seen to be buying new consumer products, always carrying smart apparel carrier bags or boxes containing the latest electronics.
Shani Brownstein was a Canadian expat who had lived and worked in Hong Kong since 1992. On a visit to Chicago in 2006 she encountered the Anne Frank travelling exhibition. The following train of events, which started as a whimsical idea, she describes as the ‘highlight of my life’. It occurred to Shani when she was walking around the exhibition that here was something that could and should come to Hong Kong. She contacted the Anne Frank House and spoke with Barry van Driel and Jan Erik Dubbelman. When she realized that her first task was to find a venue she came close to aborting the project. Knowing that Hong Kong had a massive space problem (hence it is built upwards and not outwards), she also asked herself if there would indeed be an interest in anything so obviously not Chinese.
Shani saw the challenges she would encounter, explaining,
There was a huge awareness in Hong Kong about the atrocities committed by the occupying Japanese, but an ignorance about the extent of Hitler’s crimes in Europe. Hitler was perceived as a strong leader to be admired. A famous clothing chain had used images of Hitler in its marketing campaigns, with no real understanding of how offensive this was. When our expat European and American community objected, explaining that we would not revere a Japanese oppressor, they then understood and said they didn’t realize that was the way the Nazis had behaved. There was clearly work to be done.
Shani worked on her plan to educate the children of Hong Kong about the Second World War in Europe. The board of trustees of Hong Kong’s 100-year-old synagogue agreed to underwrite the costs of the exhibition. The organizing team were made up of members of the small Hong Kong Jewish community plus ex-pat British and Americans.
Shani, as the instigator, became ‘team leader’ and allocated tasks to the twelve equally enthusiastic committee members. Eventually a space for the exhibition was offered by the Government, a civic centre building in the bustling downtown area of Sheung Wan. The civic centre lobby was accessed through a ground-floor food market and after walking through surrounding stalls of pungent dried fish, one ascended in the lift to the fifth-floor exhibition space.
In November 2007, an English and Cantonese version of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ duly arrived in Hong Kong. Lucy and I spent our first evening in the city meeting the team over a memorable Cantonese dinner overlooking the harbour and the city’s dazzling skyscrapers. Excitement reigned palpably over the city, but it was more to do with the filming that week of the Hollywood blockbuster Batman, The Dark Knight, as Anne Frank was yet to make her mark.
The following morning, when Lucy and I emerged from the lift at the community centre and inspected the exhibition space, we were a little disappointed. The room was small and stark with bare grey walls and linoleum flooring and none of the atmosphere we had come to expect when the exhibition is housed in a cathedral, museum or a busy educational establishment. Shani and her team had not let this deter them. One team member, Debbie Amias, had come up with the idea of creating a full-scale replica of Anne’s bedroom. This was being completed by a local stage designer who was enjoying the task entrusted to him. Visitors would not be able to walk inside this space but instead would tantalisingly look through a window into Anne’s recreated world. With a final flourish a richly-patterned rug was laid in the centre of ‘Anne’s bedroom’, which turned out to be on temporary loan from Shani’s own living room.
Shani also happened to have a friend who was a book publisher and thanks to the can-do attitude, availability and speed of Hong Kong manufacturers, facsimiles of Anne Frank’s beloved red-checked lockable notebook were displayed in the bookshop ready for children to buy as a memento. In fact, at the close of the exhibition, the remainder of the stock was shipped over to London for the Anne Frank Trust and were hugely popular with British children too.
Eighteen months after Shani had first encountered ‘Anne Frank, A History for Today’ in Chicago, the Hong Kong launch day had finally arrived. That afternoon a local lighting engineer appeared and through his flair suddenly the entire room and the exhibition panels took on a sense of intense drama. The stage designer, who had built ‘Anne’s bedroom’, also produced a symbolic wooden tree-shaped installation, the ‘Leaves of Hope Tree’ for children and adults to write down and attach their thoughts onto the leaves. The reflection of the oval-shaped leaves, bathed in a slowly-rotating bright green light, covered the bare linoleum floor. A visit to the Hong Kong Anne Frank exhibition was going to be a visceral and emotive experience.
Delighted with how the exhibition space was now looking, Lucy and I returned to our hotel to await the arrival from London of her fiancé Dan and my daughter Tilly. We took our newly-arrived family out to show them the streets of Hong Kong and tried to impress them with our knowledge of downtown Hong Kong. We started to walk our visitors across the busy rainy city to the venue in Sheung Wan, trying to convince them it would be a good way of refreshing themselves after their long flight and that it was only a fifteen-minute walk. Needless to say we lost ourselves in the maze of streets and umbrellas but eventually arrived twenty minutes into the reception, to the great relief of the worried organizers.
Prior to the pre-event volunteer training sessions, Lucy and I had discussed with the team how to make the content of the exhibition relevant to the local visitors. We knew that Hong Kong teenagers, especially girls, would relate to Anne Frank on a teenage level, but as the colony was now part of China, human rights and freedom of expression were an issue where one had to tread carefully. Shani explained that the grandparents of the schoolchildren would have lived cheek-by-jowl with Mao Zedong’s aggressive Cultural Revolution.
We also spoke about relating the experience of Holocaust victims to those of the notorious ‘Rape of Nanjing’. In December 1937, and for six following weeks, the occupying Imperial Japanese Army unleashed a wave of violence and cruelty on the people of Nanjing (then known as Nanking). It was thought to be in retaliation for the unexpectedly long campaign they had fought in the previous months against the Chinese in Shanghai. It has been estimated that up to 200,000 citizens of the Nanjing area may have been murdered.
As it happened, we didn’t need to worry about the need for making explicit Chinese relevances. The people of Hong Kong supported the exhibition and 6,000 visitors, of which 4,500 were local and international students, made the journey up to the fifth floor of the Sheung Wan community centre. For many it was the first time that they had heard of Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
Midway through the event, watching Chinese children engage with the story, Shani came to a deep understanding of what Anne Frank represented to people. Having come to the Anne Frank story through her own personal connection to the Holocaust, Shani recalls that she suddenly experienced Anne Frank ‘in a different way. In her diary Anne Frank talked about all people – and she herself speaks to all people.’ According to a report in the Jewish Times of Asia, young people ‘walked away forever changed from the experience.’ Messages written on the ‘Leaves of Hope Tree’ included, ‘Anne Frank is my hero’, ‘There should be no more hate’, ‘I wish I could have known her’, ‘We cannot kill people anymore just because they are different’.
After the end of the month-long exhibition, it was packed up and transported across the border, and thence 2,000km northward to the Chinese capital of Beijing. But as in so many countries of the globe, it had left something behind. There is now a Holocaust and Tolerance Centre in Hong Kong offering training for teachers within their own schools. It marks Holocaust Memorial Day each January by inviting survivors and other speakers, including the son of the heroic Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara.
Shani summed up: ‘With the Anne Frank exhibition in 2007, we had created something. It’s easy to talk about an idea, harder to make it happen. But we did make it happen.’
Like many visits of the Anne Frank exhibition to countries around the world, China came about through one person happening to mention it to another. In this case it was suggested by a local Chinese woman staff member at the Netherlands Embassy in Beijing who happened to have a friend who worked at the National Library of China. This chain resulted in the Anne Frank exhibition paying its first visit to China in December 2007. Opening first at the prestigious National Library, it was then shown in the Children’s Library of Beijing. And now as I write plans are underway to take it back again to China with a different emphasis for a changing world.
Michael Liu is a Chinese academic whose field of interest is human rights related to criminal justice matters. In 2015 he founded the Chinese Initiative on International Law to engage and support communities in the Greater China Region to understand, critique, engage with, and eventually promote international law and justice. The organization has offices in both Beijing and The Hague as Michael believes that ‘Any international justice without Chinese participation will not be a true global effort’.
In August of the same year Michael took a group of ten International Law students to the Anne Frank House where they met with Jan Erik and Stefan Vervaecke to learn more about the Anne Frank programmes in the Far East. Michael could immediately see a huge potential for the Anne Frank project in China, where a surprisingly large number of young people know Anne Frank’s diary. For one of his own friends it was the first foreign language book she had read.
He described why he felt Anne Frank would have a future in China, ‘It’s not easy to sell international stories as there is usually politics in the background. Even talking about the recent experience of the teenage Malala Yousafzai, people would be asking about what would cause the Taliban to behave as they did. But because of the distance in both time and location, Anne Frank is seen to be non-threatening. Her story is primarily one of humanity.’ Unlike in Hong Kong, there would be no connections made between individuals who suffered in the Holocaust and China’s own history, such as the Cultural Revolution or the Nanjing Massacre, as these too were considered political stories.
In 2017, there was a new pilot Anne Frank project in China, starting at the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum. The city of Shanghai has its own Holocaust-related story. There is evidence that Jews have lived in China since the seventh century AD, often mistaken for Muslims by other Chinese. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo described the prominence of Jewish merchants in Beijing in the late thirteenth century, who had arrived in China through trade along the Silk Road. Over the centuries these Jews became very assimilated. Many Jewish White Russians also arrived in China following the Russian Revolution in 1917.
In the late 1930s, 18,000 German, Austrian and Polish Jewish refugees from the Nazis sought sanctuary in Shanghai, having been issued visas by Chinese diplomats. The Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara also helped them by issuing transit visas through Japan. By 1941, there were 20,000 Jewish refugees packed into a one-mile square area of Shanghai. Later in the war, the Nazis tried to pressure their Japanese allies who were controlling Shanghai to exterminate the city’s Jewish refugees. Fortunately by this time the Japanese were becoming fearful of further provoking the anger of the Allies. After the war, and as Chinese Communism was taking hold, most Jews left Shanghai to make new lives in other countries. The Jewish Refugee Museum of Shanghai continues to tell their story.
Michael Liu felt that linking Anne’s story to the refugee experience is a helpful entry point. ‘She was a refugee’, he said, ‘schools are talking about the global refugee crisis caused by the war in Syria, and China has its own internal migration issues to look at. With Anne Frank we speak of human values, such as love, tolerance and humanity.’
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Like the great explorers who journeyed along the Silk Road and the spice routes of the Far East, like the traders of the Dutch East India Company, Anne Frank has woven her silken thread from the north of Japan, westwards to South Korea, southwards through China and Hong Kong, through Vietnam, across the sea to the Philippines and all the way southwards to the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. With each community’s diverse history and experience, Anne Frank has a unique relevance – but the work in her name continues to leave behind changed people.