A Vision in Lancashire for This and Every Age

Exactly sixty years ago a book appeared in Holland. Like many books, it did so after a very long struggle to find a publisher who would actually take it on. So nervous in fact was the publisher who eventually did so, that he was only prepared to print a first run of just 1500 copies. It has since gone on to sell 60 million!

Publishers sometimes get things wrong, occasionally, spectacularly so. The first of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, let's recall, appeared in a very limited hard-back print run before people recognised its obvious worth and the presses went into overdrive. Like Harry Potter, this sixty-year-old book from Holland narrates the story of worlds colliding: a dark, adult world of suffering and evil which presses ever closer on a teenage girl's world of wide-eyed hopefulness. And, like the Harry Potter stories again, these worlds collide in a conflict which is brought about by the kind of betrayal of trust from which Harry Potter so frequently suffers.But unlike young master Potter - who always seems to emerge victorious from whatever situations befall him - this sixty year old Dutch book is not fantasy-fiction. It's a real-life story, in which an awful betrayal leads directly to the death of its young female authoress whose words will be published and become so well known only after her demise.

Let's remind ourselves of some of those words, words which are still for many the only prism through which the collision of worlds and world-views in Europe sixty years ago can be understood.

Sensing that coming cataclysm, she writes: I see the world being slowly turned into wilderness.

I hear the approaching thunder, that one day will destroy us too.

And yet, when I look at the sky, I feel that everything will change for the better.

And extending this hopeful and remarkably visionary train of thought, she comments elsewhere so poignantly: Whenever you feel lonely or sad, try going to the loft on a beautiful day and looking at the sky.

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know you're pure within.

As if that teenage girl actually had a choice to be anywhere else but the loft, the attic in which her fearless words were found, after her betrayers came to cross the threshold between worlds - a bookcase on the stairs - and to take her and her family to their place of extermination.

I'll never forget the shock when I stood amidst a room of suitcases in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, and spotted the suitcase belonging to Margot, the little sister of the young woman, Ann Frank, whose words were published posthumously exactly sixty years ago. Or the tears that ran down the faces of the young people - as they ran down my own - when we were in the Anne Frank Haus in Amsterdam, looking at the pin-up pictures in her attic bedroom and suddenly spotted among them photographs of our own Queen - the Princess Elizabeth, as she then was - and her sister Princess Margaret: in age, Anne Frank's contemporaries.

That connection brought it all home and made it just so real and raw for us. But soon - every day in May 2008 in fact - everyone in the Diocese won't have to visit Amsterdam for that experience. Amsterdam will come to them since they will have the opportunity to engage with that room and the story written within it by the fearless young writer, Anne Frank.

How so? Because exChange, the community cohesion, education, outreach and interfaith development agency at Blackburn Cathedral, has worked with its closest partners - the Anne Frank Trust, the Diocese of Blackburn, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, Elevate East Lancashire, Blackburn College, Booths and the Co-operative Movement to bring the award-winning exhibition, Anne Frank + you, to Blackburn Cathedral.

In the sixty years since Ann Frank's father, Otto, made the courageous decision to publish his daughter's intimate diary, the Anne Frank exhibition - in any of its forms - has never been to Blackburn.

We are correcting this serious omission, not only because Anne Frank's will always be a story that deserves to be told, but also because a story about a girl from a persecuted minority, who suffers simply for who she is, is a story that will certainly resonate amidst the cultural, religious, economic and social complexities of post-industrial Lancashire.

As failed multi-culturalism - people simply living side by side, as if in adjoining hotel rooms, hopefully not bothering or interfering with one another because the point, of course, is that they are not bothering about each other at all - as all this gives way to a new truly cohesive notion of a society built by all for all, we need models to encourage us.

All who sit in Anne Frank's bedroom - recreated at the heart of this exhibition - cannot fail to be moved by the vision of hope and love which emerged from so tiny and cramped a space. Why? Because it's a vision for each and every age Anne Frank + you is in Blackburn Cathedral throughout May 2008. Schools and colleges, and community groups wishing to come may be able to receive financial support with transport. Please contact Anjum Anwar MBE on 07903731106 to discuss this further. Annalies, an oratorio based on Anne Frank's story by composer, James Whitbourn - the only composer ever to be allowed to set extracts from the diary - will be performed for only the second time on (date from cathedral concert diary). For further information about this please contact Canon Chris Chivers on 07706632508.