The war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas Movement has been going on in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. Amidst tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians, some unknown miscreants defaced a statue of Annelies Marie ‘Anne’ Frank in Amsterdam on August 4, 2024! Someone wrote Free Gaza with red paint on the historic statue of the young diarist at Merwedeplein Square in southern Amsterdam. This is the second time the statue of the most famous face of the Holocaust has been defaced.

The Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported that the statue was not only spray-painted with the words Free Gaza, but also painted red entirely! Photos show the word “Gaza” scrawled in red paint across the podium of the statue, which was erected in a park close to where Frank and her family had lived before being forced into hiding. The Police claimed that miscreants defaced the statue during the night. So far, no one has been detained by the Police. The Nazis had arrested Anne and her family members on August 4, 1944. Incidentally, the statue was defaced on the 80th anniversary of her arrest!

According to sources close to the Amsterdam Police, the statue of Anne has been vandalised for the second time in less than a month. The local Municipal Authorities installed surveillance cameras at the park after it was first vandalised on July 9, 2024. The authorities also made better lighting arrangements at the park. Despite all these, miscreants targeted the statue yet again.

Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, took to social media to appeal for anyone with information about miscreants. She wrote: “How can you get it in your head to make her memory so violent? Whoever it was, shame on you! There is no excuse for this. No Palestinian has been helped by smearing her precious statue.”

Anne Frank (June 12, 1929 - February/March 1945), a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary documenting her life in hiding amid Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands, died in a Nazi concentration camp at the age of 16. The Diary of a Young Girl, penned by Frank, was published in 1947 in German. The book has also been translated in several other languages over the years.

Anne, along with other members of her family, hid in a secret chamber of a house in the German-occupied Netherlands for two years to escape the Nazis! The 13-year-old girl began to write a diary at that time. The Nazis captured the entire family on the morning of August 4, 1944. Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February-March 1945. Although the specific cause of her death is unknown, evidence suggests that she died from a typhus epidemic!

Indeed, defacing of the statue of Anne Frank is a heinous crime and an act of antisemitism. However, the time has come for the global community to protect the Anne Franks in Gaza from the Zionist Regime. Such incidents will happen in different parts of the globe, if the international community allows Israel to continue committing genocide in Palestinian territories. Perhaps, History will neither forget, nor forgive the ancestors or successors of the Holocaust victims for murdering the innocent Palestinians!

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das