Mary Reid

Anne Marie Alufuwa (in black) and some of the MeWe members with Eva Schloss (in blue), Shami Chakrabati (in green), MPs and others

MeWe is a Kingston youth theatre group, and yesterday I watched their powerful performance of 'And then they came for me - remembering the world of Anne Frank'.

The location could not have been more prestigious - Portcullis House, where most MPs have their offices and hang out. The occasion was an event organised by the Blue Sky Club, which is a human rights network of influential people from politics, the law, entertainment and other fields.

The production is a play, produced and sposored by Nic Careem, built around the videoed memories of two of Anne Frank's friends, both of whom survived the Holocaust. We watched Eva Schloss on the screen remembering the two years she spent in hiding, and then the horrors of Auschwitz. In front of her image, the actors worked through her story in emotionally painful detail.

Then came the revelation that the woman herself was sitting in front of me.  After the play ended she explained, in an interview with June Sarpong, that it took about twenty years for her to purge the bitterness, but that she knew it was essential to do so for her own emotional sanity.

She has accompanied several performances of the play but this was the first time that it had been performed by a racially mixed cast. This added extra layers to the theme of the dynamics of hatred and its consequences.

MeWe are to be congratulated on handling such explosive material with great sensitivity and truthfulness. I met up with Anne Marie Alufuwa, their director, and Joy Iruo of Kingston Connexions who sponsor MeWe. (Thanks to Joy for the photo)

In the discussion that followed, Shami Chakrabati, the Director of Liberty, commented on the danger posed by the British National Party and also by the way the term 'refugee' has become a slur rather than a mark of honour. She reminded us that the demonisation of groups of people is served as much by those who do nothing to oppose it as by those who actively encourage it.