Netherlands: Anne Frank Statue Vandalized

The darkest and wildest wave of anti-Semitism has swept Europe. On August 4, 2024, exactly 80 years after Gestapo agents found the safe house where the Frank family was hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, pro-Palestinian vandals desecrated the statue of Anne Frank in the southern part of the Dutch capital. The pedestal of the monument to the Jewish girl murdered by Hitler’s executioners along with her sister in the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, weeks before liberation carried out by the British army on April 15, 1945, was smeared with red paint with the inscription: “Free Gaza.” The vandals also stained the statue’s hands and shoes with blood-red paint.

Dutch police have launched an investigation, and a spokeswoman for the municipality said the statue will be cleaned “once again”: it has only now emerged that the monument had already been defaced on July 9, but since then police have done little or nothing to find the vandals.

As The Times Of Israel newspaper recalled, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, Anne Frank, a German Jewish girl, moved with her family to Amsterdam in 1934. During the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, the Frank family took refuge in a building where the head of the family, Otto, worked. The asylum was discovered by the Gestapo on August 4, 1944. Frank’s family was subsequently deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Anna and her sister Margot were then transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they died in early 1945. Their mother, meanwhile, died in Auschwitz. The only family member to survive the Holocaust, Otto Frank, returned to Amsterdam after the war and found the diary his daughter Anne had kept while in hiding. The diary was translated into many languages and posthumously published worldwide in 1947. The book’s circulation has exceeded 30 million copies.