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For more than 23 years Steven Frank, a Holocaust survivor, has been talking with thousands of students across the world about his personal experiences during the Holocaust and why the victims should never be forgotten.
George Santayana, a renowned novelist and philosopher, once wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
With this in mind, the Department of Defense Education Activity Europe held a Holocaust remembrance event at Ramstein Air Base, April 30, to educate its students and honor the lives of the victims.
Frank sat down with DODEA Europe students via Zoom to speak about his life and answer any questions the students had.
Steven was born in 1935 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to a secular Jewish family. His father was a well-known Dutch lawyer and his mother came from a family of professional musicians. He was the middle child of three boys.
Frank first spoke to the students about his happy childhood, a few years before the 1940 Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.
“I remember we had a happy family, full of love,” Frank said. “My mother and father were wonderful people.”
Jewish families in the Netherlands weren’t immediately subjugated, but by 1942 they started to be deported to concentration camps, were given special identification cards, and were made to wear yellow stars of David to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Dutch population, banning them from normal daily activities, such as attending the movies or swimming pools.
“I gradually began to not be able to play with my non-Jewish friends publicly at pools or parks,” Frank said. “I was removed from my school and was systemically exiled from all public life in Amsterdam. As a child, I didn’t understand what I had done to deserve this.”
Frank’s family did have the means to escape Amsterdam, but they remained because his father played an integral role in helping Jewish families escape persecution.
Frank’s father, Leonard, ended up secretly joining the Dutch resistance soon after the Nazi invasion, while publicly working for the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, which was forced to carry out Nazi orders. Leonard frequently participated in the issuing of false papers to enable people to escape across the border. He also helped Jews find hiding places in the countryside and even hid Jews in his own home.
“I had a loving father,” Frank said. “Those early memories are something I would never forget.”
Frank’s father was ultimately betrayed by someone close to him and in 1942 he was arrested in his office in Amsterdam and imprisoned, tortured, and sent to Camp Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp, where he was killed in a gas chamber in January 1943.
“My father left home one morning and I never saw him again,” Frank said.
Shortly after Frank’s father was taken, his family was removed from their home, but not before three of his father’s friends petitioned the German authorities for clemency for Leonard.
The petition was unsuccessful, but it did allow Frank’s family to be placed on an exclusive list reserved for prominent Dutch families, which allowed them to initially avoid being deported, but they ultimately were placed in several concentration camps throughout Europe.
“I remember being at the concentration camps,” Frank said. “We slept on top of each other in overcrowded bunks and had very little to eat. I had an encounter with the guards once where they ordered their dog to attack me, as they watched and laughed. I couldn’t have been more than nine years old.”
The concentration camps were breeding grounds for life-threatening diseases, with millions of Jews succumbing to their illnesses.
Frank credits his and his brother’s survival in the camps to the actions of his mother, Beatrix.
“My mother realized that our only chance of surviving the camps was to keep ourselves clean as possible,” Frank said.
Beatrix volunteered to work in the concentration camp’s hospital laundry, where she washed patient bandages and medical linens. Risking her life, she secretly would wash her family’s clothes and would wash other Jewish families’ clothes in exchange for food for her children.
On May 9, 1945, Frank, his family, and other surviving Jews were liberated by the Red Army.
After a long journey and some persuasion by Frank’s mother, England’s Royal Air Force flew his family to London, where they were reunited with his grandfather and slowly began to rebuild their lives.
Frank currently lives in the United Kingdom and continues to speak to students around the world about his experiences during the Holocaust.
“I’ve spoken to students in over 900 schools and will continue to remind the world about the atrocities of the Holocaust,” Frank said. “I’m humbled and honored to continue speaking for the Jewish families that no longer have a voice to do so. I am lucky to be here, and I want this generation and future generations to remember what happened in the past because if we let people forget, it will surely happen again.
Information for this feature article was taken from the Holocaust Educational Trust’s article on the life of Steven Frank.
