Speech to the Anne Frank Trust (Notes)
London
January 27th, 2012
• [Lords, Lord Mayor, Excellencies, fellow MPs of all parties, ladies and gentlemen]
• I am deeply honoured to be asked to speak today, humbled to join such a distinguished list of speakers over the 21 years of this special event, and delighted to be supporting the outstanding work of the Anne Frank Trust. This year we remember the 70th anniversary of the day when Anne received her diary for her 13th birthday. Yet despite the passage of time her short life seems all the more resonant and important for the challenges facing today’s global village.
• By a strange irony, the country of her birth, a country that has been seen for a long time as a centre of tolerance in Europe, a country that in the 1930s provided something of an idyll for Anne Frank, has been convulsed for ten years by a storm of concern, driven from the hard right, first by Pim Fortuyn and now Geert Wilders, about values, identity and Islamic immigration.
• So the mission of the Anne Frank Trust – to challenge prejudice in all its forms - is all the more complex but also powerfully necessary.
• Many reasons to be keen to take up the opportunity to speak today.
• Seen the extraordinary work that Anne Frank Trust has done in my own constituency. The educational mission in schools. The training of Anne Frank Ambassadors at South Tyneside College, including Callum McKean who you saw on the video and who is here with us today.
• But also more personal reason for honouring the memory of Anne Frank and supporting the work of the Trust.
• My mother and her sister, and my father’s sister, spent the War in hiding. Two in Poland, one in Belgium. Like Anne Frank, their lives should have been ordinary, but were made extraordinary, in the worst possible way.
• They saw and felt the terror of being wrenched from normal life to fight for survival, from childhood innocence to childhood fear. They lived secret lives, and thanks to the extraordinary bravery of adults beyond their immediate families, they were survivors.
• • My aunt on my father’s side, who spent nearly half the war in a Catholic farming family South of Brussels, had the remarkable good fortune to meet Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, in London in the 1950s, when he came to London in connection with the translation and publication in English of the diaries. I spoke to her last week, and she had a lovely lilt in her voice when she described her meeting with Otto Frank, his kindly demeanour, and his remarkable fortitude.
• My starting point today is that my generation is a transitional generation – from Holocaust as memory of our parents to history as learned by our children.
• I was born in 1965; the Holocaust was recent memory; Holocaust now closer to being 100 years ago than twenty; receding into history.
• So the evidence of Anne’s diary becomes even more precious. As the survivor generation dies out, and the chain of memory is protected by those who have met and heard the tales of Holocaust survivors, the work of organisations like the Anne Frank Trust becomes even more important.
• History and memory.The recently renovated Wiener Library houses the most remarkable, dreadful collection of Holocaust artefacts, from Nazi games to death plans, anywhere in the world. The children of the museum’s creator, Alfred Wiener, saw Anne Frank arrive in Belsen concentration camp in 1944, so there is a link to the Anne Frank story.
• The museum has the slogan: “If we don’t save our history it will perish”. It is powerful and iconic. But also ironic.
• I am not a Hebrew speaker, but I have learnt that there is no word in Hebrew for history. The closest word is the word Zachor, “memory.” This word in one form or another appears no less that 169 times in the Bible.
• What is the difference between history and memory? Consider the elegant words of Chief Rabbi, Professor Lord Sacks, in The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah: "History is his story - an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story - something that happened to me and is a part of who I am. History is information. Memory, by contrast is part of identity."
• The remarkable thing about the diary of Anne Frank, or one of the remarkable things about her diary, is that it crosses the line between history and memory. It is part of the history of a terrible period in European history. It is also the diary of a young girl. It is particular and it is universal. It speaks across generations. It is about her, but it is also about us. It speaks about the daily routines and imagination of a child. And then on 1 August 1944 the voice is stilled, never to be heard again.
• One of the things I like most about the Anne Frank Trust is that it is not only about Anne Frank. It uses her memory to try and bend the arc of history of tomorrow.
• So today I reflect on Anne Frank’s life, but also on the lives of the Anne Franks fighting for life against the odds around the world today - in Syria, in Somalia, in Afghanistan. I think about two things.
• First I think about how today memory and history can be fused in time - the diary on one side of the world that can be uploaded on a server on the other side of the world, the phone video that can be seen around the world, the pictures of a Tunisian fruit seller burning himself to death as the spark that has lit revolutions across the Middle East.
• Memory is verified instantly, and becomes history as well as news. This is democratisation of information unknown in human history. I call it the civilian surge, holding government and the private sector to account. And in that surge of empowered citizens, I see new resources to combat prejudice and cruelty.
• There has never been more democracy around the world and never more hunger for democracy – just think of the Middle East. Yet the paradox is that there has never more dissatisfaction with democracy – just think of the decline in trust here, in the US, in India. So we have work to do.
• Here is a small example. Over the last year I have created a leadership academy for community organising in Britain – Movement for Change. We are training 10 000 people to tackle crime, further social inclusion, promote voter registration. In Egypt, the Lifemakers programme is engaging 1000s of young people to tackle the scourges of illiteracy and drug abuse. Now we are going to help each other, with an exchange programme where young people will spend a week in the other country, learning about how you build civil society and secure the foundations for sustainable democracy. Building understanding and respect between cultures and peoples.
• But the second thing I think about is an old question that is not yet answered: whose responsibility is it to fight cruelty and responsibility?
• And here the questions that dogged the 1930s, about the responsibilities of states in the treatment of their own citizens, about the rights of other states to assert universal values and protect people from danger, are as fraught today as they were in the 1930s.
• It is true that out of the horrors of the Holocaust came a new international settlement, embodied in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But declaring rights is one thing; enforcing them is another. And that is where the international community is today still split.
• There is no agreed and shared doctrine for the governance of our interdependent world. For every assertion of universal rights, there is a counter-assertion of national sovereignty. For every condemnation of governments which abuse power, there is the loud cry: “none of your business”.
• So as we build on the cross party, cross class, cross regional unity that exists in this remarkable country about the values and aspirations of the Anne Frank Trust, let us also debate how in an interdependent world we can defend the rights of people whose names we do not know and stories we can only imagine, but who in time may become as famous as Anne Frank.
• This is the next frontier for international law and international relations. Respectful of the nation state as the foundation of political legitimacy, conscious of the dangers of meddling in affairs of which we know little, humble about our own history where wrongs have taken too long to be righted, but determined above all to defend the rights that make us human.
London
January 27th, 2012
• [Lords, Lord Mayor, Excellencies, fellow MPs of all parties, ladies and gentlemen]
• I am deeply honoured to be asked to speak today, humbled to join such a distinguished list of speakers over the 21 years of this special event, and delighted to be supporting the outstanding work of the Anne Frank Trust. This year we remember the 70th anniversary of the day when Anne received her diary for her 13th birthday. Yet despite the passage of time her short life seems all the more resonant and important for the challenges facing today’s global village.
• By a strange irony, the country of her birth, a country that has been seen for a long time as a centre of tolerance in Europe, a country that in the 1930s provided something of an idyll for Anne Frank, has been convulsed for ten years by a storm of concern, driven from the hard right, first by Pim Fortuyn and now Geert Wilders, about values, identity and Islamic immigration.
• So the mission of the Anne Frank Trust – to challenge prejudice in all its forms - is all the more complex but also powerfully necessary.
• Many reasons to be keen to take up the opportunity to speak today.
• Seen the extraordinary work that Anne Frank Trust has done in my own constituency. The educational mission in schools. The training of Anne Frank Ambassadors at South Tyneside College, including Callum McKean who you saw on the video and who is here with us today.
• But also more personal reason for honouring the memory of Anne Frank and supporting the work of the Trust.
• My mother and her sister, and my father’s sister, spent the War in hiding. Two in Poland, one in Belgium. Like Anne Frank, their lives should have been ordinary, but were made extraordinary, in the worst possible way.
• They saw and felt the terror of being wrenched from normal life to fight for survival, from childhood innocence to childhood fear. They lived secret lives, and thanks to the extraordinary bravery of adults beyond their immediate families, they were survivors.
• • My aunt on my father’s side, who spent nearly half the war in a Catholic farming family South of Brussels, had the remarkable good fortune to meet Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, in London in the 1950s, when he came to London in connection with the translation and publication in English of the diaries. I spoke to her last week, and she had a lovely lilt in her voice when she described her meeting with Otto Frank, his kindly demeanour, and his remarkable fortitude.
• My starting point today is that my generation is a transitional generation – from Holocaust as memory of our parents to history as learned by our children.
• I was born in 1965; the Holocaust was recent memory; Holocaust now closer to being 100 years ago than twenty; receding into history.
• So the evidence of Anne’s diary becomes even more precious. As the survivor generation dies out, and the chain of memory is protected by those who have met and heard the tales of Holocaust survivors, the work of organisations like the Anne Frank Trust becomes even more important.
• History and memory.The recently renovated Wiener Library houses the most remarkable, dreadful collection of Holocaust artefacts, from Nazi games to death plans, anywhere in the world. The children of the museum’s creator, Alfred Wiener, saw Anne Frank arrive in Belsen concentration camp in 1944, so there is a link to the Anne Frank story.
• The museum has the slogan: “If we don’t save our history it will perish”. It is powerful and iconic. But also ironic.
• I am not a Hebrew speaker, but I have learnt that there is no word in Hebrew for history. The closest word is the word Zachor, “memory.” This word in one form or another appears no less that 169 times in the Bible.
• What is the difference between history and memory? Consider the elegant words of Chief Rabbi, Professor Lord Sacks, in The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah: "History is his story - an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story - something that happened to me and is a part of who I am. History is information. Memory, by contrast is part of identity."
• The remarkable thing about the diary of Anne Frank, or one of the remarkable things about her diary, is that it crosses the line between history and memory. It is part of the history of a terrible period in European history. It is also the diary of a young girl. It is particular and it is universal. It speaks across generations. It is about her, but it is also about us. It speaks about the daily routines and imagination of a child. And then on 1 August 1944 the voice is stilled, never to be heard again.
• One of the things I like most about the Anne Frank Trust is that it is not only about Anne Frank. It uses her memory to try and bend the arc of history of tomorrow.
• So today I reflect on Anne Frank’s life, but also on the lives of the Anne Franks fighting for life against the odds around the world today - in Syria, in Somalia, in Afghanistan. I think about two things.
• First I think about how today memory and history can be fused in time - the diary on one side of the world that can be uploaded on a server on the other side of the world, the phone video that can be seen around the world, the pictures of a Tunisian fruit seller burning himself to death as the spark that has lit revolutions across the Middle East.
• Memory is verified instantly, and becomes history as well as news. This is democratisation of information unknown in human history. I call it the civilian surge, holding government and the private sector to account. And in that surge of empowered citizens, I see new resources to combat prejudice and cruelty.
• There has never been more democracy around the world and never more hunger for democracy – just think of the Middle East. Yet the paradox is that there has never more dissatisfaction with democracy – just think of the decline in trust here, in the US, in India. So we have work to do.
• Here is a small example. Over the last year I have created a leadership academy for community organising in Britain – Movement for Change. We are training 10 000 people to tackle crime, further social inclusion, promote voter registration. In Egypt, the Lifemakers programme is engaging 1000s of young people to tackle the scourges of illiteracy and drug abuse. Now we are going to help each other, with an exchange programme where young people will spend a week in the other country, learning about how you build civil society and secure the foundations for sustainable democracy. Building understanding and respect between cultures and peoples.
• But the second thing I think about is an old question that is not yet answered: whose responsibility is it to fight cruelty and responsibility?
• And here the questions that dogged the 1930s, about the responsibilities of states in the treatment of their own citizens, about the rights of other states to assert universal values and protect people from danger, are as fraught today as they were in the 1930s.
• It is true that out of the horrors of the Holocaust came a new international settlement, embodied in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But declaring rights is one thing; enforcing them is another. And that is where the international community is today still split.
• There is no agreed and shared doctrine for the governance of our interdependent world. For every assertion of universal rights, there is a counter-assertion of national sovereignty. For every condemnation of governments which abuse power, there is the loud cry: “none of your business”.
• So as we build on the cross party, cross class, cross regional unity that exists in this remarkable country about the values and aspirations of the Anne Frank Trust, let us also debate how in an interdependent world we can defend the rights of people whose names we do not know and stories we can only imagine, but who in time may become as famous as Anne Frank.
• This is the next frontier for international law and international relations. Respectful of the nation state as the foundation of political legitimacy, conscious of the dangers of meddling in affairs of which we know little, humble about our own history where wrongs have taken too long to be righted, but determined above all to defend the rights that make us human.
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