Priory's Anne Frank Trust ambassador meets Holocaust survivor

Priory pupil Jessica listened to the moving story of Holocaust survivor Anne Super as part of her Anne Frank Trust Ambassador role. 

Year 10 Jessica went to Pleckgate High School in Blackburn, along with History teachers Mr Eccles and Miss Ackers, where Anne was giving a speech as part of The Anne Frank Trust’s partnership with the Fed. The Fed is a Jewish Social Care Charity which launched the My Voice Project, recording the lives of Holocaust survivors and refugees in their own voice. 

Anne, who lives in Manchester, has had a book produced through My Voice and spoke of her life. How her first memory is of being in a cot in around 1941 and seeing green, the colour of the German officer’s uniform. Then she remembers her mother crying and being rounded up with other Jews and taken outside. Her mother, knowing what was to come, pushed Anne through a hedge and told her to run and she was picked up by a local milkwoman. 

She never saw her parents again and knows they were taken to a concentration camp and were murdered. She lived with that family for several months and said she probably only survived because of her blue eyes and blonde hair but it was always a battle for food.

While the milkwoman saved her life, she didn't like Anne and Anne was soon put on a train to live with an aunt.  A railway worker risked his life to take her and she had to sit on the top of the train as inside was reserved for Germans only. 

Anne then went to Warsaw to be with her aunt, still hiding from the Germans, and she also almost died from tuberculosis.  Then an uncle went through the Red Cross looking for his family and found his niece was still alive. 

In 1948, Anne went to South Africa to live with him and, in her words, ‘then life began’. 

This life took her to Namibia, Edinburgh and eventually Manchester. Along the way she married and had three children and became an optician. She didn’t talk about her early life until recently when the Fed encouraged her to tell her story as part of the My Voice project. 

Jessica said: “It was a really interesting speech. It’s hard to listen to and it doesn’t feel real until you sit and hear it. 

“I enjoy being an Anne Frank Ambassador and hope to go to primary schools and talk about challenging prejudice through Anne Frank.”  

Lead teacher of History, Mr Eccles said: “Jessica has been on residentials with the Anne Frank Trust, she was specially selected to go on a course in Ambleside, learning about the Windermere children and going to the Holocaust Museum. 

“Jessica is being mentored by the Anne Frank Trust and we were invited to Pleckgate to listen to Anne’s story which was extremely moving.”