The South African epilogue to Anne Frank’s diary

Anne Frank’s diary was a source of strength and inspiration for Robben Island prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, who would copy out its passages by candlelight in their cells at night.

“Mr Mandela astonished the audience at the Johannesburg opening of the Anne Frank exhibition in August 1994 when he spoke about how he had read Anne’s diary as a young man before he went into prison and the effect it had on him,” recounted Gillian Walnes Perry, the founder of the Anne Frank Trust in the United Kingdom, during a webinar this week.

“Mandela then said that it had been smuggled into the library on Robben Island for the university that had been started to educate the young political prisoners. Eventually the little paperback copy was handed around and read so much that it literally fell to pieces. Mandela related how prisoners took turns to copy it out at night on pieces of paper by candlelight in their prison cells so that it could continue being read by the young prisoners as a testament to the human spirit. I think it’s one of the most remarkable stories of Anne Frank’s diary’s place in history,” said Perry at the webinar hosted by the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation in commemoration of Anne Frank’s 92nd birthday on 12 June.

At the time, in his speech at the opening of the Anne Frank in the World exhibition, Mandela remarked that “the victory of the democratic forces in South Africa is a contribution to this worldwide effort to rid humanity of the evil of racism. It’s Anne Frank’s victory. It’s an achievement of humanity as a whole.”

During this week’s webinar, Perry and Myra Osrin, the original chairperson of the Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council, spoke about the potent impact of this original exhibition in South Africa, and how it served as a catalyst for later founding the permanent holocaust and genocide centres in the country.

The travelling Anne Frank exhibition, first created by Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in 1985, was launched in Cape Town in April 1994 on the eve of democratic elections. With “huge success”, it toured across eight cities for the next 18 months. By 1995, “the exhibition left our shores, but the seeds had been sown”, said Osrin.

“The huge impact on the general public and, more particularly, educators, by the story of Anne Frank and the important human-rights lessons of the Holocaust was to lead, within a very few short years, to the establishment of a permanent centre in 1999, first in Cape Town and then later in Johannesburg and Durban,” she said.

Moreover, with more than 30 million copies sold and translations into more than 70 languages, Anne Frank’s legacy is still universal and relevant. Perry, the author of The Legacy of Anne Frank, who has been awarded an MBE (Order of the British Empire) in recognition of her work in education, detailed the many extraordinary effects it has had across the globe, particular for the youth.

“More recently, it’s actually the teenagers who have been doing the educating. They are being trained by Anne Frank House to be peer guides,” she said. “Teenagers talking to teenagers about a teenager – it really works. By telling Anne’s story, you don’t have to preach about being nice to others and being equitable to others. The kids get it. They suggest it themselves.”

For example, she said in Kolkata, India, the students themselves made the connection between discrimination in the caste system and Anne Frank’s story. From Moscow to Kazakhstan, Sao Paulo to Sri Lanka, “Anne Frank has a message and a relevance to teenagers wherever they are”. Perry recalls a moving example when she worked in Northern Ireland with “very divided” Protestant and Catholic communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In facilitation with Protestant and Catholic school children, “they came together to produce a cross-community newspaper called Anne’s Legacy”.

Perry said the impactful educational legacy of the diary tied in deeply with the wishes of Otto Frank, Anne’s father. In his private capacity, he came to play a remarkable role for teenagers reading Anne’s diary.

“In the 1950s, a strange phenomenon started happening. Otto started receiving letters from teenagers all over the world. During this era, teenagers weren’t considered young adults like they are now, they were still considered children and they felt that they couldn’t really open up and talk candidly about their concerns and problems to their parents or their teachers

“However,” continued Perry, “because Anne had given such a wonderful description of her father in her diary as a liberal-minded man that she could talk to openly, they started writing letters to him. Mr Frank answered every single letter individually on an old typewriter. That’s quite a feat.”

In the 1960s, Otto, with a group of friends, went to the mayor of Amsterdam to propose that the building in which his family had hidden be turned not into a memorial site, but an education centre, “a centre of learning where young people would come together from different backgrounds, from different countries, and would break down those barriers of misunderstanding, suspicion, and mistrust”.

Once it was established, Otto started holding student conferences and bringing young people together from all over Europe. Some of the first students invited to these conferences, just 15 years after the war, were from Germany.

“He so believed in the power of education. He built hope so that young people wouldn’t have to suffer like his own two beautiful daughters had.”