At almost 89 years old, Anita Magnus Frank still remembers “the war years.”
When she was 6, she was separated from her parents and for two years lived as a “hidden child” with a Dutch Quaker family. She said she was in constant fear that her Jewish identity would be revealed.
“I have even the visual memories of where I stood and what I felt, and how remarkable that is,” Frank told J. “Every day was a day in which I knew I had to pretend to be another person in order for me to live. That was completely part of my everyday life.”
Frank came to the JCC of San Francisco on Wednesday to attend an extended remembrance of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah. The JCC hosted a full day of programming with the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center.
The annual program, which included an evening commemoration attended by 400 people and the recognition of several Holocaust survivors, offered a solemn look into the future, as firsthand witnesses of Nazi atrocities become more rare.
The median age of all remaining Holocaust survivors around the world is 87, according to a new report from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Nearly half are projected to die within the next six years, and 90% will be gone within the next 15 years.
A small group of people who belong to the JFCS William J. Lowenberg Holocaust Survivors Speakers Bureau attended the evening service, lighting candles in memory of family members who did not survive. Others in attendance included a dozen Russian-speaking survivors who are part of the JFCS L’Chaim Adult Day Health Center.
Frank herself is a member of the speakers bureau, and through her role estimates that she has spoken to thousands of students about the traumas she endured during her childhood.
Frank is also the subject of a new documentary short titled “A Great Big Secret,” directed by Berkeley-based filmmaker Yoav Potash, that was screened in the afternoon.
In a Q&A session following the screening, she noted that just last week, she spoke to over 300 students at middle schools throughout Orinda. The students’ responses, she said, were “phenomenal.”
“I really focused with them on just being young people who are learning to respect and enjoy the fact that they are with many different children from many different backgrounds,” Frank said. “The most important thing that I see is that we need to learn tolerance. We need to learn respect for others… and to recognize that others are sources of potential wisdom from us.”
In an interview with J., Frank expressed concern for young Jews today who conceal their Jewish identity for fear of being targeted. Forced to live with a false identity for so long herself, she is upset by the trend that has emerged since Oct. 7, 2023.
“It just makes me so sad, because we should not be afraid. The worst thing we can do is not wear our stars and feel confident,” Frank told J.
At the commemoration ceremony, JFCS board member Garry Rayant presented the Morris Weiss Award, which recognizes educators who have done innovative teaching around the Holocaust and other genocides. The honor went to Donna Fernandez, a math teacher at Piner High School in Santa Rosa.
Over the past two years, through her participation in the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education, Fernandez has developed a curriculum using statistics to examine the progression of genocides throughout history.
Originally from the Elem Indian Colony, the oldest cultural site of the Pomo Nations, Fernandez has been able to draw lines between the eradication of the Native American population and that of European Jews in the Holocaust.
At Piner, where 80% of students are Hispanic, Fernandez was struck by the gap in their knowledge of the Holocaust.
“They understood it as, ‘It was in Germany, during World War II.’ But other than that, they had no personal accounts of it, or understanding of why it happened,” she told J.
The Piner students’ own cultural identities — mostly second- and third-generation immigrants — gave them “some idea of what it means to move and not be connected to your home anymore,” Fernandez added. “So I think that that’s a good connection between us.”
Although California has mandated Holocaust and genocide education at all public schools since 1985, the state still has a long way to go to achieve that goal. Only 26% of school districts that participated in a survey commissioned by the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education reported that they had a formal curriculum on the subject.
“I will not rest until that number rises,” Morgan Blum Schneider, JFCS Holocaust Center director, told J.
California Lt.-Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who spoke at the event, echoed the same urgency to expand access to Holocaust education in underserved schools.
“Twenty-seven percent of us in California are immigrants. So if your parents came from a part of the world that didn’t have Holocaust education… and teachers aren’t teaching it, then it’s going to fall out of the common knowledge,” Kounalakis told J. “What we know now is that has been a mistake, and that it is always going to be relevant to know the history of the Holocaust.”