By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News reporting from the Netherlands
AMSTERDAM (Worthy News) – There is outrage in the Netherlands after a statue of Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, or Shoah, was vandalized again in Amsterdam with pro-Palestinian graffiti.
Police say the memorial was defaced over the weekend, exactly 80 years after Anne Frank was deported to a Nazi death camp. She died of starvation and disease at age 16 in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in 1945.
Her diary has become one of the most influential accounts of the Holocaust, which wiped out around three-quarters of the country’s 140,000 Jews during the Nazi German occupation.
The Amsterdam house where the Frank family took refuge for two years before being captured by the Nazis in 1944 — after which they were sent to Bergen-Belsen — has become a museum dedicated to her story.
August 4 marked exactly eight decades to the day that the Franks were arrested and deported after their hiding spot was discovered. The question of who turned the Frank family in to the Nazis has never been definitively settled.
The statue, located near the Anne Frank House on Merwedeplein (Merwede Square) in southern Amsterdam, was spray-painted red with the words “Free Gaza,” and its hands were also painted red.
SECOND INCIDENT
Officials said this weekend’s incident was the second time the statue had been targeted in less than a month. “Keep your paws off the statue of Anne Frank, you Jew haters,” wrote Dutch commentator Joop Soesan on social media in a reaction.
The nearby Resistance Monument, remembering resistance fighters, and the statue of India’s icon Mahatma Gandhi were also defaced.
It comes amid concerns about mounting hatred towards Jewish people in the Netherlands. “I am shocked,” said Phia Baruch, a royally awarded journalist who survived the Holocaust.
She and a Worthy News reporter had just witnessed a cyclist wearing a pro-Palestine scarf around her head despite summer temperatures.
There have been violent protests in the Netherlands against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which began after the October 7 massacres in Israel.
The Hamas-run health ministry claims Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.
Israel says nearly half of those who died were terrorists linked to Hamas, the group that killed some 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 others in Israel on October 7.
Copyright 1999-2024 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
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