Holocaust survivor’s message to Johnson projected onto White Cliffs of Dover
In emotional plea, Steven Frank asks the prime minister to allow Ukrainians seeking shelter to take refuge in the UK
Holocaust survivor Steven Frank has made a heartfelt and direct plea to prime minister Boris Johnson to “show some humanity” by allowing Ukrainian refugees into Britain.
And in a powerful symbol, the 86-year-old made his plea from the White Cliffs of Dover, one of the traditional entry points into the UK.
From the White Cliffs of Dover, just 21 miles from where Ukrainian refugees have been turned away trying to get to their families in the UK, Holocaust survivor Steven Frank has this message for Boris Johnson.
— Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) March 11, 2022
To deliver his emotional seven-minute message, Frank teamed up with the British political campaigners Led By Donkeys, who transmitted his speech onto the clifftops in a gigantic image.
Frank spoke of his own Holocaust experience. He was five years old when the Nazis first occupied the Netherlands, and still only seven when he first went into the camps.
Leonard Frank, his father, was an eminent Amsterdam lawyer who spent the early years of the war providing fake papers for other Jews and also hiding Jews in his own home. All that ended in 1942 when he was betrayed “and I never saw him again”.
Recounting how his mother, a native English speaker, had written down from the radio the speech by Winston Churchill announcing the end of the war, Frank went on to recall how he, his mother and two brothers, finally managed to make their way to France and then the UK where they ended up at an RAF reception centre in Stanmore.
A policeman at the centre taught the boys their first English words, the days of the week and then gave each of them sixpence. He recalled that it was: “the first kind action to us by a policeman in uniform for five years”.
Frank, who regularly speaks about his Holocaust experience and holds the British Empire Medal for his work, told the prime minister that those Ukrainians whom he could allow into Britain would make an enormous contribution to the country and would be “eternally grateful for the hospitality and the safety” that Britain would offer.
He highlighted actions by people in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany in helping the Ukrainian refugees. And he said: “Don’t turn them away — that’s not humanity at all”.
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