The Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial located in Boise, Idaho, was vandalized with swastikas, promoting hate is being investigated by police.
Fox News reported that the swastikas had the words "we are everywhere" written on them. A visitor discovered the Natzi symbols on Tuesday morning, December 9th.
The swastikas were found stuck on Anne Frank's diary and the statue "Spiral of Injustice." The statue "Spiral of Injustice" was sculpted by Ken McCall. The statue reminds people that "hateful language can lead to discrimination" and promote "respect for human dignity and diversity." Swastikas were also discovered on the photo of former Idaho Catholic priest Bill Wassmuth.
Wassmuth, who had left the church to battle white supremacist hate groups in northern Idaho. Wassmuth spoke out against racism and anti-Semitism and became a leader in the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations until his death.
Boise Police Chief Ryan Lee said that the vandalism was "absolutely reprehensible" and that they are looking for the suspects behind the act of hate.
Dan Prinzig, director of the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, stated, "it's sad that this is becoming a statement of who and what our community is."
Memorial Park
The Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was opened in 2002 and is the first of its kind in the United States. Idaho architect Kurt Karst designed the park. Karst created an educational theme park using nature throughout the memorial.
Karst's inspiration was to encourage peace, hope and to educate individuals about human rights issues. The park is recognized by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.
Throughout the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, over sixty quotations were written by Holocaust survivors, politicians, and artists encouraging peace and understanding.
The park has a life-size Anne Frank statue looking through a window as she did many times while in hiding. The Anne Frank Chestnut Sapling tree is from the original Chestnut tree that Anne looked at from the window. There is also a plaque featuring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Since the memorial was opened in Idaho in 2002, there has been only one other time that the memorial was vandalized.
In May 2017, the memorial was vandalized with profanities. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports that in 2017, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights anti-Semitic graffiti was written all over it and across the plague of donor's names.
Who was Anne Frank
Anne Frank is one of the best-known child Jewish victims of the Holocaust. During World War II between 1942 to 1944, at just 13 years old, Anne went into hiding with her family during the Netherlands' German occupation. Anne Frank and her family hid upstairs in concealed rooms behind a bookcase at an office where her father Otto had worked. When Anne Frank was in hiding, she kept a diary and detailed her experiences and feelings on what was happening.
Then in August 1944, the building that Anne Frank and her family were hiding in was found. The apartment raided, and the Gestapo arrested the family. After the family was an arrest, they were transported to Auschwitz. Then around November 1944, Anne was only 15 years old, and her sister were both transferred and transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. By March 1945, only a few months after arriving at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, both Anne and her sister were dead.
Anne's father, Otto, was the only person in the family to survive. After Otto was freed from the concentration camp and found out his family died, he returned to Amsterdam. Miep Gies, who had been Otto's secretary, kept the Franks's belonging while they were imprisoned and gave them back to Otto.
In the families belonging, Otto found Anne's diary and had it published in 1947. Since Anne Franks's diary was published, her book has been translated into 70 languages, and numerous movies have been made about life during World War II.
