Back in the days of not-so-long ago, American history teachers used to assign The Diary of a Young Girl, the writings of Anne Frank as her Jewish family and she hid from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam, after the Germans occupied it.
Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, under the Weimar Republic, her family emigrated to the Netherlands in 1934, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power. Germany invaded Holland and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, and the Dutch government fled in just a few days. The Netherlands surrendered on May 15th. As the Reichskommissariat Niederlande, the Nazis civilian occupation government, began increasing oppression of the Jews in 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed room of a larger house, where they remained until August of 1944, when they were arrested by the Gestapo. They were sent to the concentration camps, and Anne died somewhere between February and March of 1945.
The recovery of her diary writings were published in 1947, and quickly became famous. And so we come to this:
Statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti
Story by CBSNews | Sunday, August 4, 2024
The statue commemorating Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti for the second time on Sunday.
The statue is located in Merwedeplein, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
According to images published on X, the base of the statue was spray-painted with the slogan “Free Gaza” while the girl’s hands were painted with the same red color, AFP reported.
Sunday was the 80th anniversary of the August 4, 1944 capture of the Frank family by the Gestapo.
Miss Frank had nothing to do with the war in Gaza, or the extermination of Ismail Haniyeh, or anything else. The restoration of the nation of Israel had not occurred when she was captured, and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen camp. So I really don’t want to hear that defacing her statue was some sort of anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli protest without being anti-Semitic as well.
Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896, in response to the anti-Semitism in Europe, in Christian Europe, where Jews had been pushed into ghettos, faced serious restrictions in society, and were occasionally the victims of pogroms. Mr Herzl claimed that the only solution to anti-Semitism in Christian Europe was for Jews to get out of Europe, and set up an independent state just where Israel is now. But it wound up taking the Nazis and the Shoah to make Israel a reality.
At the end of the war, half of the Jews in Europe were dead, and almost all of them had been completely dispossessed of their homes, their professions, their property. They quite literally had no place to go, no homes to which to return.
Think of what had happened. Though Germany had been completely under the Nazis’ control, most Germans weren’t Nazis. Yes, every German had been under twelve years of Josef Goebbels’ propaganda, something which told the German people that the Jews were their mortal enemies, that they were a tremendous danger, but if the non-Nazi Germans nevertheless cooperated with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews, so did the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Poles, the vast majority of whom were (supposedly) Christian, and who did not spend a dozen years being indoctrinated by the Nazis.
Even if the Jews could have returned to their pre-war homes, that would have left them living side-by-side with the very people who turned them over to the Nazis!
Anne Frank? She had nothing to do with any of that. Her statue is a symbol of the plight of the Jews wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators in the lands they occupied. Yet now some anti-Semitic thug or thugs have chosen to vandalize her statue.
Let’s not kid ourselves: while the war in Gaza might have made it more newsworthy, anti-Semitism is the bottom cause, not some distinction between hating Jews and opposing Zionism. The Germans exposed the fact that the Christian Europeans really didn’t want the Jews living among them, and now it seems that they don’t want the Jews living anywhere else.
