OPINION: Defiling Anne’s memory does nothing for Gaza

Last weekend marked 80 years since Anne Frank and her family were arrested, the moment they had done everything they could to avoid. But the Nazis aimed to annihilate every single Jew everywhere, and the Jewish people hiding in the now-infamous annex could not escape their grasp.

Anne Frank’s name might be the best recognised of the Holocaust, an entry-point for generations to consider the horrors of the past. Confiding in Kitty, the nickname given to her personal diary, the teenager wrote about things to which we can all relate.

She wrote about the arguments she had with her parents, the struggle of being isolated and her dreams for the future. Her story lives on, even years after we have read her diary. Many of us see our own lives reflected in the words, seeing ourselves in Anne and seeing Anne in ourselves.

But the truth is what happened to Anne and her family and to six million other Jewish people is anything but relatable. The vast majority of the millions who have read the diary  could not have been Anne, would never have had to hide, to go without daylight, to have to stay silent every day, to be hunted by secret police, to be ripped from their childhoods, their friends and their schools.

They would not have been deported to a concentration camp like Anne. They would not have been murdered for who they were and dumped in a mass grave along with thousands of other victims.

Put simply, what happened to Anne and her family and six million Jewish men, women and children, happened for a very specific reason – because they were Jews.

So while we can all feel a connection to Anne, while we can all read her diary and reflect on our own lives, we also need to tell her story with integrity and truth. Because what happened to Anne and her family did not happen because they were human, but only because of who they were.

And now in 2024, 80 years after her arrest, a statue of Anne Frank was defaced, for the second time, with the words ‘Free Gaza’.

Anne’s hands on the statue were painted red – somehow suggesting Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the most appalling conditions almost eight decades ago, before the state of Israel existed, has blood on her hands. That somehow this child who was hunted down by the Nazis and killed simply because she was Jewish is responsible for the deaths of people in Gaza, in 2024.

One week earlier, a mural of Anne draped in a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh was painted on the streets of Oslo. Day in and day out, Anne Frank’s name and image can be seen in contexts that are not about her Holocaust experience.

Instead of remembering who Anne was, why she was unique and why she was murdered, her memory is being corrupted by those with a cause.

Anne Frank is not an accessory for anyone’s activism. She is not just a symbol. Her story cannot be taken out of the context of the life she lived, and the reason for her death. And what is more, defacing her likeness does not raise the profile of any issue or galvanise support for a cause. It is reckless, it is ignorant, it is hurtful. And it is antisemitism, pure and simple.

Victims of the Holocaust should be honoured and remembered, not appropriated for political causes.

When the images and names associated with the Holocaust are taken and twisted, when the truth of the Holocaust is distorted or diluted for affect, it does not help the people of Gaza.

But it does hurt the survivors of the Holocaust, who have endured the very worst of humanity. It does hurt the memory of the past. It does hurt Jewish people today.

Anne Frank once wrote: “I want to go on living after my death.” We have always said that through her diary, through her story, and through the connection so many feel to Anne that she does live on.

But it is a great shame and tragedy that today, 80 years after Anne was discovered and taken to her death, we have to work so hard to protect her memory.

• Karen Pollock, chief executive, Holocaust Educational Trust (HET)