A Dutch company has withdrawn a coffee bowl emblazoned with a cartoon of Holocaust victim Anne Frank after the item sparked complaints.
The image shows Anne Frank, who died in Bergen Belsen concentration camp, as a rosy-cheeked and smiling cartoon figure holding her famous diary. Her figure is displayed alongside other items and people affiliated with The Netherlands, including tulips, clogs, windmills and Sinterklaas (Santa Claus). Famous Dutch desserts, vlaflip, a vanilla custard dish, and hagelslag, chocolate sprinkles on toast, were also depicted.
The kitchenware manufacturer Blond Amsterdam has since withdrawn the item - a small dish used for drinking coffee - labelled “Hollands Glorie” (Dutch Glory) from tourist shops and Albert Heijn supermarkets selling the item across the capital.
“We were dumbfounded,” explained Aron Vrieler, of Israel’s Information and Documentation Centre (CIDI), the country’s leading organisation dedicated to combating antisemitism, adding: “A cheerful picture of Anne Frank on a coffee bowl with the theme ‘Dutch glory’ is very inappropriate indeed.
“Not the context in which she should be remembered. And unfortunately, her fate was not exactly an example of ‘Dutch Glory’,” he went on.
Anne Frank op kitscherig servies van Blond Amsterdam, het is echt waar 😦
— Maartje Jansma 🎧 (@maartjejan) December 5, 2022
Fun fact: de familie Frank vroeg in 1939 het Nederlands staatsburgerschap aan maar kreeg het niet #MetJeHollandsGlorie pic.twitter.com/ZJjaoWtSTC
Anne Frank is one of the best-known Holocaust victims due to the posthumous publication of her diary which documented her life hiding from Nazi persecution in an Amsterdam annex.
The Frank family was arrested after Nazi collaborator police officers Gezinus Gringhuis and Willem Grootendorst raided their hidden living quarters in August 1944.
They were transported to the Westerbork transit camp in the eastern province of Drenthe.
Anne Frank died of typhus in March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen, aged just 16. Her 19-year-old sister Margot died several weeks prior in the same camp.
The sisters and their parents had moved from Frankfurt to Amsterdam in the 1930s in order to flee the Nazi regime.
Around 75 per cent of the country's Jewish population perished in the Holocaust pursued by the Nazi occupiers and aided by Dutch Nazi sympathisers.
In a statement, the Blond Amsterdam manufacturer said: "The series in which the bowl appeared should be a positive reminder of Dutch scenes and heroes of which we are proud. Unfortunately, this feeling does not come across to everyone in the way we envisioned.
"This was absolutely not our intention. We find this very annoying and are shocked by this. That is why we want to let you know that this item will not return to our collection. We also donate the proceeds resulting from this article in full."
They also offered people who had purchased the dish a free exchange or refund.
Blond Amsterdam also faced criticism in 2017 after it published a cartoon of blonde woman holding a ballot paper and a pencil captioned: "Of course I am going to vote, I like colouring in."
