Eulogies given at the funeral of Annejet Campbell
Digna Hintzen (sister)
Annejet was number three in our family of seven. A central place, in more ways than one. Once, when she went to Switzerland because of her health - which often was not good when she grew up – my mother noted how empty the house suddenly was: Annejet would be busy sewing or making things and then hurrying off to something else, leaving her messes all over the place! But also she was always around, interested in what was going on, or just showing off her latest creation which she had improvised. Fashion was her passion!
Also performing. She could give a hilarious imitation of Betty Boop, and she started a theatre club with her friends in our home. I remember them rehearsing rather than performing! One summer – this was wartime – we stayed in a small hotel where there was a barn. There we put on a circus with a number of children. Annejet’s act was to hang upside down from a bar, with her pleated Hungarian skirt flowing down from her waist over her face and arms, while she played God save the Queen on her recorder!
She was a home maker from the beginning. Once my mother found the guestroom with the curtains drawn, the bedside lamp lit, a small vase of flowers beside it and in the bed one of Annejet’s dolls. She must have been five years old. And this gift of hospitality remained with her to the very end. So many here will remember being made welcome for meals or to stay. And she would use her home for conferences, feeding many, as well as for fundraising – which she was very good at: never for a big cause, always for individual people she cared about, so they would be able to go to Caux or whatever.
As a little girl she was already very generous: whoever had a birthday would get two or more presents, nicely wrapped. During the war one could not buy things, so they were always home made. So, often they were rather flimsy, but the joy of giving them was what mattered. Actually, with her, performance outweighed content. She had piano lessons with little result. But she would sit down and play the first bars of the Warsaw concerto with enormous vigour… and that was it!
As we grew up, my mother made notes which I have gratefully delved into. For one thing: Annejet did not like school. She had a keen mind, but it just did not interest her. She skipped reading children’s books altogether and at ten went straight into teenage literature, the kind of stories which ended with an engagement! Romance was one of her great interests - no wonder she ended up writing about marriage! But by then it was really her interest in people, although she often embarrassed me, when we were having dinner with a couple we had barely met, by asking them how they had come to fall in love!
Actually, we were so different. I would boast that I had better marks in school, but I was jealous because she had more boyfriends! Also when we were younger she would play with dolls with our younger sister while I climbed trees and built fires with my brother and cousin. So one of the few things we did together (besides giving ballet performances for the family) was to squabble or fight. My mother found Annejet’s quiet time note book in which she wrote (aged nine) “Grateful Digna does not hit me so much anymore” !!
It has taken us years to accept that we had different gifts, that we both were needed and that we complemented each other so well, especially in the care for our large family. We could share all that was on our hearts. So, especially after both our husbands had died, we shared many adventures, many summers sharing a room at our conference centre in Caux. At times our neighbours would knock on the wall because we laughed so much late at night!
Actually, it was at Caux, when she was twenty, that the great turn around happened in her life. For some years she had been my parents’ headache. After finishing secondary school (where her report generally read: ‘She could do better if she would only try!) she shared a flat in Amsterdam with a girl friend, where they worked in a fashionable store, where - I quote- ‘we learned to make hats as well as some of the facts of life which had escaped us before’.
And then she wanted to go to Paris (where she had spent a year before) to be a sales girl at Dior’s! My mother was very worried and suggested she accompany her first to Caux where she met people of all races and nations, as well as young people who seemed to have a purpose in life, and a Hollywood actress to whom she felt she could talk – which had not been the case with my mother.
I quote from her book Listen to the Children: ‘After a few days I began to realise that I must make a choice: either to go on as I was, totally centred on my own career and fulfilment, or to use my life for a bigger purpose. One night I saw a play there about a university. The first act shows life as it is today, free and easy. The second act shows the same place, but under a totalitarian regime, where people are controlled by fear and terror. As I watched it, it was as though my childhood in occupied Holland flashed in front of my eyes.’ (and here I must add that during the was she was very scared of air raids and everything else, with both our parents having been imprisoned at some point). So as she watched it, it was like a voice inside her said: ‘Do you want your children to go through that? If things go wrong in the world you won’t be able to blame anyone else – you are too selfish to do anything about it.’
‘The next morning’ she continues, ‘I felt utterly miserable. I knew that going back to Paris would no longer satisfy me, but to put my life into the hands of a higher authority, as my Hollywood friend suggested, was a very daunting prospect. I went to find her. We talked a long time and finally we knelt down together and I said to God, “OK God, I give you my life, whatever it may mean.” It was like signing a contract and I intend to honour it for the rest of my life.’
And that she has done. She never wavered or went back on this. Liberated from her selfishness all her qualities to care for people came to amazing fruition. But her first step was to put things right with my mother, to really open her heart and tell her the things she had been hiding from her. They became very good friends and more than that. During the later part of my mother’s life she became her greatest support. Whenever my mother was in a flap, because the whole family was going to descend for some big occasion, it was like a hurricane going through our house. (This someone told me recently). And then Annejet would arrive. She would take over and calm returned. My mother trusted her completely.
Yes, she was calm, competent and caring, as well as very independent. She did things either out of love, or she would not do them at all. No sense of duty for the sake of keeping something going. But always ready to serve and help in very practical ways. And it looked so effortless! She left people free, but could be straight when needed.
What a void she leaves behind, but how grateful we can be for all the years we have had this unique fun sister and friend, and for everything she gave us.
Annejet, so dearly loved, so sorely missed…. You lived to make others happy. May you be even more happy now yourself!
Hugh Nowell
It was just two weeks ago to-day that Annejet called Carolyn and me to ask if I would give the address at her service. I was absolutely dismayed but of course said yes, yet knowing full well that I would not be able to do her life justice. But that was like her, realistic and caring.
Annejet was modest. It’s hard to find out about her life even though she hs written two books on family matters. I’m reminded of an occasion was Frank Buchman was asked by a well-known writer if he could write a book about him. Yes, said Buchman, provided you do not mention my name.
But she does write of her family in her first book, Listen to the Children , ‘My husband Paul and I come from very different back grounds. He was born on the Canadian prairies, the product of a Yorkshire mother and a Highland father who was a Scottish Baptist minister. I, on the other hand, am an industrialist’s daughter from Holland, who grew up with my three brothers and three sisters in an occupied country, each of my parents being taken away to concentration camps at different times. What Paul’s and my parents had in common, was a strong faith in God, a faith which grew stronger through the hardships of the prairie and the dangers of war.
Paul and I, each in our own way, lost much of this inheritance, and each had to find faith for ourselves, by which time he was a successful young doctor at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and I was a rebellious twenty year-old, learning French and fashion in Paris. It was that determination to try and bring that faith into the affairs of individuals and nations which contrived our meeting and later in 1957, our marriage. We now have two daughters, Edith Anne and Digna.’
My friendship with Annejet goes back 50 years when a large group of us were working in Detroit mounting two theatrical productions, ‘The Vanishing Island’ and ‘Freedom’. Annejet was applying her skills in dress and clothing back stage. I used to collect her with her friend Joti every morning from their hosts in Dearborn, Peter and Jane Ponta, Engineer and Vice-president of Ford’s. One day I inadvertantly took a wroong turning and was way off course. Hey, said a voice from the back seat, ‘What are you thi9nking about?’ I was in fact thinking about proposing to my wife, Carolyn . I can’t remember what I said in reply.
Annejet worked with our production team for may years on her two books.
It was about Easter 1988 during a lunch with Annejet when she said, ‘Could we get ‘Listen to the Children’ into Russian?’ An innocent enough question you might suppose for an author to ask a publisher. In fact, it was the start of a big adventure for us and her. But this was characteristic of Annejet. It was an approach to life that she always had even into recent days. She was always ready to try something daring- difficult or not.
Annejet wanted families to find the way to live together. And in this, relations with the children were at the heart. She put together first person stories of many individuals whom she knew and had helped. The book, ‘Listen to the Children’ was born. It was launched at the Thomas Coram Foundation for orphaned children in London.
In 1988, the Soviet Union was intact but opening up. We thought that perhaps one way to achieve a Russian edition might be to attend the Moscow Book Fair the following year. It could present an ideal venue for selling the Russian rights. Up to that point, world communism had seen MRA as an enemy. Yet to attend the Fair officially we would need to go in a collective stand of UK publishers organised by Collett’s Bookshop a communist front organisation. David Locke and I negotiated with the UK director and went to Moscow under the Communist umbrella. On the first day we were met by the official translator who said she had looked into Annejet’s book overnight, liked it and would take us to the Lithuanian stand to a friendly editor whom she judged would like it too. She did and in a few months the first edition of an MRA title appeared in an Iron Curtain country.
In Lithuania the publishers produced Annejet's two books LTTC and LFAC together in one volume and were immensely pleased that this was the first book they had done from an author outside the Soviet Union. As State publisher at that time they were tremendously busy re-writing the history and text books to have a Lithuanian perspective. The Russians were still in the process of leaving the country and there was a ferment of enthusiasm because of Independence. So this was a very interesting moment to launch a book on family life which had been so affected by the past years of suffering. The launching of the book meant that Annejet was meeting many women who were and had been struggling to rebuild family life and as this was her motivation there was a meeting of hearts and minds in a wonderful way and enduring friendships resulted.
Annejet's stories of her own childhood when her parents were in concentration camp spoke to the suffering in others there. She had a tremendous ability to produce appropriate stories which related to the people she was talking to. All based on her longing that others find the close walk with God that she had.
We had been emboldened to go to Russia, by the promise that Paul and Annejet would take a tourist visa to Moscow via Finland and support us on the stand. But the tour was delayed for various reasons and they arrived only on the last morning of the Fair when all the stands were being dismantled. Oddly enough this had a fortuitous result. A Russian visitor to the Fair from Nizhni Novgorod had also been delayed and was only able to get to the Fair at the last moment. She came to our stand as we were one of the few that were not dismantled and met Annejet. This lady was Dr Bella Gribcova University lecturer from Nizhny Novgorod University. So started a life-long friendship with Annejet. In due course, ‘Listen to the Children’ was translated by Bella and published in Russia.
In succeeding years this life-giving book went into 12 languages. It was with great enthusiasm that she would report on the next language that she had succeeded in landing. It was followed by ‘Listen for a Change, making marriage work’. She reckoned that the title was inspired by life with her family.
In the last two years, we had a special link. I was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer about the same time her cancer re-appeared. We were both subjected to aa rigorous chemo-therapy treatment. We compared notes at intervals on how to cope with the the inevitable after effcts. Sadly she has had a tougher time than mine. It was nevertheless a comfort to to encourage each other.
English
