On the very day that Anne Frank was arrested exactly 80 years ago, someone thought it necessary to desecrate her statue.

In Amsterdam, the inscription "Free Gaza" was painted with red paint on the pedestal of Anne Frank's statue. The statue in Merwedeplein, a neighborhood in the southern part of the Dutch city, was vandalized for the second time this month, the English-language Dutch news portal NL Times reported on Sunday.

According to the report, the hands of the Anne Frank statue created by sculptor Jet Schepp were also smeared with red paint.

The Amsterdam municipality announced that it will remove the sign as soon as possible. The police informed us that they had launched an investigation into the matter, especially regarding the repeated vandalism.

They also asked any witnesses to report to the police.

The director of the Anne Frank Foundation, Ronald Leopold, said: "The vandalism touches our hearts again and again. The statue reminds of a young girl who was full of ambitions and dreams. For a girl who was murdered because she was Jewish. The inscription is particularly painful today, on the very day Anne Frank was arrested, exactly 80 years ago".

According to the police, it is not clear whether the vandalism is related to the anniversary, but this possibility is also being investigated.

The news portal recalled that the statue was first vandalized on July 9. At the time, Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, strongly condemned the vandalism of the monument, saying:

not a single Palestinian was helped by the desecration of Anne Frank's statue. “Whoever it was, shame on you! There is no excuse for that," he declared.

Anne Frank's family fled Germany to the Netherlands after Adolf Hitler came to power. After the Germans invaded and occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, Anne and her family were forced into hiding until they were discovered on August 4, 1944. Anne and her sister were transported to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where they both died. Their mother was murdered in Auschwitz. Their father, Otto Frank, escaped, and upon returning home to Amsterdam he learned that his family had been killed in concentration camps.

He received Anne's diary from one of the hiders, added comments to it, and then published it in 1947. In 2009, UNESCO declared the diary a part of the world heritage, and it is among the ten most read books in the world.

MTI

Cover image: Anne Frank's statue was vandalized on the anniversary of her abduction
Source: X/Joop Soesan