An antisemitic message was projected onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam last week, the museum revealed Friday.
The message “Ann Frank [sic], inventor of the ballpoint pen” appeared Monday on the outside face of the building where Anne Frank and her family hid during World War II, according to a statement from the Anne Frank House.
“Reprehensible. There is no place for anti-Semitism in our country; we can never and should never accept this,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte tweeted Friday.
The text was projected from a nearby vehicle before being noticed by security guards, according to The Associated Press.
A video of the incident was posted by a private American group on encrypted messaging app Telegram.
The remark refers to an antisemitic conspiracy that the Holocaust victim’s diary is fake because parts of Frank’s diary were written in ballpoint pen, which wasn’t introduced to the Netherlands until after World War II.
In the 1980s, multiple pages written in ballpoint pen were found among Frank’s papers by the country’s top official for fighting antisemitism, according to The Associated Press. Researchers later concluded that the pages were accidentally left in the diary in the 1960s.
“With the projection and the video the perpetrators are attacking the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and inciting hatred,” the museum said in a release. “It is an antisemitic and racist film. We are acutely aware of what this means for the Jewish community and for the city of Amsterdam as a whole.”
Frank’s diary documents the two-year period she and her family were hiding in Nazi-occupied Netherlands until their capture in 1944.
Frank died of typhus at a concentration camp in northern Germany in 1945. The diary was published by her father, the family’s only surviving member, when her manuscript was discovered after the war.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
