posted 3rd August 2024
Blind racism is a silly curse. A throw back to the human races base instincts that leaves little to thought or imagination. Little to reason and fact. The act of vandalism of Anne Frank's statue in Amsterdam by person or persons unknown fits the very definition of blind rage. Naked ethnic hatred without any productive results for the people the vandals claim to be helping.
When the Frank family arrived in Amsterdam in 1933 they had fled the menace of Hitler and were refugees trying to build a new life in the Netherlands. Trying to reestablish their fundamental rights after the Nazi regime had crushed them. Anne was just a young girl when the ancient, cobbled streets of Amsterdam became her home. A young girl with all the normal aspirations that most young girls have. A life that wanted to be led. A life full of enthusiasm for the adventures to come.
When WW2 broke out in Europe in 1939 the Franks must've had feelings of foreboding. That Hitler's army would march across the border, and they'd again be the victims of persecution at the hands of the Bohemian Corporal. Those forebodings became prophetic truths when Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands in 1940. After hiding out from the Nazi's for two years between 1942 and 1944, the Franks were discovered and deported to Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot survived the horrors of Hitler's most notorious concentration camp but died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen situated on German soil. Anne and Margot's lives had come full circle. Born in Germany, shaped in the Netherlands, and finally perishing in the land of their birth.
Anne Frank has become a symbol of a life cruelly cut short by prejudice. In her diary we hear her voice. We can imagine the sound of her as she reads from the pages. This is my story. This is where our worst impulses as an animal can lead if they're unrestrained. How the fanaticism of the Third Reich ended the life of a gifted writer. Ended the lives of many gifted writers. Of so many gifted musicians and artists.
Anne Frank's house and the monuments to her throughout the city, hold a special place in the fabric that makes up modern Amsterdam. Along with Rembrandt's house and the Van Gough Museum, Anne Frank is a part of this unique city's history and its present. The act of vandalism perpetrated on Anne's statue dismissed the warnings her life offers to us. A blind act of hatred against a young Jewish girl whose life ended in a concentration camp years before Israel came into existence. But is the very act of hatred telling us an undeniable truth. That collective thinking led to the perpetrator holding all Jews responsible for the controversial acts since the Hamas attacks in October. That an inspirational and iconic figure like Anne Frank was no such thing because of a vague religious affiliation with Israel. Reading Anne's eternal legacy to the world, her diary, you hear the words of an intelligent cultured young women wanting to set out on the long road to adulthood and beyond. A mindless act of vandalism won't change her inspirational story, it won't alter the course of events and it won't win the vandals any friends at all.
