Eighty years after her death, a teenage girl still strikes terror into the hearts of bigots, haters and the fools who follow them.
In July, in an incident called an “unbelievable disgrace” by the city’s mayor, a monument to Anne Frank in the Amsterdam neighborhood where she made her home was vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti.
City workers and police cleaned off the red paint.
Gert-Jan Jammink, who initiated the project to install the monument, which was unveiled in 2005, called the vandalism “scandalous.”
“It represents the 14,000 Jews from this district who were murdered. It is not about a current situation,” he said. “If you want to draw attention to something, you can go to another location. I have previously advocated for a camera and light source at this location. It makes us think again that we have to do something to protect this defenseless image.”
The World Jewish Congress posted that “vandalizing a statue commemorating Anne Frank, a teenage girl murdered in the Holocaust, will not help ‘free Palestine,’ or end the war. This is unacceptable. The only thing it will help is further normalize antisemitism and dehumanize victims of the Holocaust.”
Anne Frank, whose diary is the most widely read nonfiction book in the world (#2 if one counts the Bible as nonfiction), died in a concentration camp toward the end of a war that saw six million of her fellow Jews and uncounted millions more civilians perish.
This is not the first, nor unfortunately, the last time a statue of the most recognizable victim of the Holocaust has been or will be marred by hate.
In 2020, the only Anne Frank memorial in the U.S.—a bronze statue depicting her holding her diary and peering out the window of the secret annex where she and her family hid for over two years—was covered by swastika stickers, again, under cover of darkness, at the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights in Boise, Idaho.
At the time, Dan Prinzig, the center’s director, said, “Is this what we’re becoming?”
Image credits: Anne Frank Diary, St Nicholas Church, Kiel, Germany by Diego Delso, delso.photo. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
