THE HAGUE, Netherlands (JTA) — A poster for a play on the life of Anne Frank was defaced with anti-Semitic symbols, prompting calls for a parliamentary inquiry.
Unidentified individuals on Saturday or Sunday wrote the words “Jews” and “Hitler” and painted a Star of David on the large poster, which was hanging at a bus stop near the city of Haarlem, 10 miles west of Amsterdam, the Volkskrant daily reported. They also drew a large Nazi swastika on the bus stop’s garbage bin. Police are investigating.
The 5 1/2-foot-high poster, which featured a picture of Anne Frank, was an advertisement for “Anne,” which premiered last week at the Theater Amsterdam in the presence of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.
The play is the first theatrical adaptation based on the full archives of the family of Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who documented her time in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam before she and her family were discovered and deported to concentration camps. She died in the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in 1945 at the age of 15.
Velsen Mayor Franc Weerwind, who runs the municipality where the bus stop is located, told the regional broadcaster RTV NH on Monday that the incident reflected “that we are living in a society that is suffering from a lack of historical consciousness.”
“The image of the bus stop was a horrible scene that I reject resolutely,” he said.
Joram van Klaveren, a lawmaker who splintered off from Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, told RTV NH that he intends to file a parliamentary query to Social Affairs Minister Lodewijk Asscher as to his ministry’s position regarding the incident.
