In July 2024 the word Gaza was painted in red over the plinth bearing the statue of Anne Frank in the Netherlands. Frank was the innocent Jewish girl murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, who left her diaries as testament to the world. The Western colonial media clamored to denounce this as an act of vandalism, defacement and desecration.
But if Anne could speak to us, what might she say of Gaza?
I was only a child when they came for me. I had done nothing to anyone. I wrote in a diary, I dreamed of peace, and still, I died in terror. So how can anyone, especially Jews, who know what it is to be hunted,drop bombs on children? How can they say they are defending themselves while killing babies in their beds and sniping children in the street?
Eighteen thousand children. That number is beyond horror. It is a silence louder than all my pages. If my memory is used to justify this, then it has been stolen. If my name is spoken to excuse this slaughter, then it has been defiled.
I never wanted vengeance. I only wanted to live. And now, these children, these Palestinian children, wanted the same. What kind of people kill what they once were? And what kind of world lets them do it?
This is an imagined statement, not a historical one. Anne Frank did not speak these words. But the question what might she say is not posed lightly. It is asked in anguish, in conscience, and in solidarity with all innocent children whose lives have been cut short by violence, wherever and by whomever it is inflicted.
Anne Frank has come to symbolise the devastating cost of hatred, persecution, and the world’s failure to protect the vulnerable. Her name is invoked across cultures as a moral touchstone. That moral clarity is precisely why we ask what her memory demands of us now.
The purpose of this piece is not to equate histories, but to resist their misuse. The memory of Anne Frank is too often claimed to justify acts that she, as a child and as a human being, could never have condoned. If her image is used to uphold power, it can also be summoned to speak for the powerless.
This is not a desecration of her memory. It is a refusal to let it be desecrated by silence in the face of 18,000 murdered children.