The Dutch police announced yesterday (Friday) that they are opening an investigation following the projection of a laser address on the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam – located in the building that was used as the hiding place for the Frank family. The sentence projected using a laser projector said: “Anne Frank invents the ballpoint pen.”
The source of the address is a conspiracy theory held by holocaust deniers in the Netherlands, according to which Anne Frank did not write her famous diary at all, because of pages written with a ballpoint pen and found inside the diary. Although the ballpoint pen was invented in Hungary in the 1930s, it was not common in the Netherlands before the end of World War II.
For years, extreme right-wingers saw this as proof that the diary is fake, despite the researchers’ repeated explanations that there is no connection between the diary, which was written with a fountain pen by Anna herself, and a number of pages left by a researcher in the 1960s inside the diary – with his notes on it in ballpoint pen.
Ronald Leopold, director of the Anne Frank House, responded: “We are shocked. We rarely if ever have to deal with anti-Semitic incidents at the Anne Frank House. This is a new low in the series of anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands. We know that there are circles that adhere to this theory, yet are shocked by it. We also understand what this does to the Jewish community.”
The complaint to the police was submitted on Thursday at noon without informing the media: “The intention of these people is to seek publicity and we do not intend to help them with that,” said the director of the museum.
Amsterdam Mayor Pemka Halsma said that she is, “shocked by this cowardly and despicable act. This is pure anti-Semitism and it is an attack on the legacy of Anne Frank, our international symbol of the fight against anti-Semitism. This is a cowardly and painful act, for the survivors, for the entire Jewish community and for everyone who knows where hatred leads, Racism and intolerance”.