I could just be that light in the darkness’ The AJR and the Anne Frank Trust

This year, with huge thanks for the support from the AJR, we have been able to refresh and renew the ‘Anne Frank and You’ travelling exhibition. The panels in the exhibition section that focus on our contemporary world were created in 2005, so some of the information has been looking seriously out of date for some time. We launched the new exhibition panels at Z-Arts in Manchester in March and then it visited Bradford College and Newham Town Hall in east London. In June it was on show in Southport, Lancashire, a completely new venue for the exhibition. Although we have added some shocking new stories, like that of the murder of young Jimmy Mizen in south London in 2009 and continued acts of racism by football fans, there were some more positive additions too. We were able to update the story of Stephen Lawrence with the news of the convictions in January 2012 of two of the gang who killed him. Doreen Lawrence OBE attended the launch of the exhibition in Newham in May and met up with old friends and AJR members Herbert and Lilian Levy. Herbert and Lilian first met Doreen in 1997 when we launched an Anne Frank exhibition at Southwark Cathedral. Herbert’s photo as a blond child in pre-war Berlin is still featured in the exhibition and he is still called on by the Trust to speak in schools. Another attendee at the Newham exhibition was David Gold, the Chairman of West Ham United Football Club and a well-known entrepreneur, who related to the very multicultural audience how his own Polish-Jewish immigrant greatgrandfather had been so impoverished and persecuted by anti-Semitism that he had hanged himself in his local synagogue. Our public exhibition ‘Anne Frank and You’ is now organised in a rather different way from previous years, when many AJR members were our highly valued exhibition guides. The exhibition is now an integral part of the programme we offer schools in specific regions around the country, where we take a smaller exhibition on Anne Frank’s life into secondary schools and train teenagers to be peer educators. Many of these young people go on to become ‘Anne Frank Ambassadors’, given additional training by the Anne Frank Trust and with part of their role being to guide the public around ‘Anne Frank and You’. These young people engage very closely with the Anne Frank story and the programme we offer gives them important developmental life skills, including the self-confidence to communicate with others and impart their knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. In Bradford, as in many of the areas in which we work, there is a high proportion of young Muslim students and it is heartening to see them explaining to the public Kristallnacht and earlier and subsequent events. As reported in the Leeds Jewish Telegraph, community barriers were being broken down by the Anne Frank exhibition. Esther Olusaniya, a 15-year-old ‘Anne Frank Ambassador’ who spoke at Newham, said: ‘Being a part of the Anne Frank Ambassadors’ scheme has meant me gaining a sense of responsibility. I now work towards embodying Anne Frank – her values, her message. Dare I say, I could just be that light in the darkness. That’s how the Trust makes me feel. As if I could go out there and make a difference.’ The Anne Frank Trust wishes to thank the AJR for its continued and valued support of our work. For further information about the Anne Frank Trust, visit www.annefrank.org.uk or telephone Gillian Walnes on 020 7284 5858. Gillian Walnes MBE Co-founder and Executive Director Anne Frank Trust UK