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Anne Frank. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Unknown photographer/Collectie Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam.

The Museum of Victory in the Croatian coastal town of Sibenik is marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday with a reading of part of the diary written by Anne Frank in protest after a local high school took down an exhibition about the teenage Holocaust victim.

Zoran Restovic, the president of the Community of Associations of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of Sibenik-Knin, ZUABA, told BIRN that it decided to organise the event after the director of the high school removed the travelling exhibition about Anne Frank, complaining that it portrayed the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement negatively.

School director Josip Belamaric complained about six display panels showing the effects of the World War II and the Holocaust on Croatia and the region and highlighting crimes committed against Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascists by the Ustasa.

Restovic said that as well as the reading of the diary, the six panels will be displayed in the museum, along with a book containing the names of the 83,145 victims of the Ustasa-ran WWII concentration camp Jasenovac who have been identified so far – 47,627 Serbs, 16,173 Roma, 13,116 Jews and the others anti-fascists.

He described it as “an attempt to show that victims aren’t only numbers, but have names”.

“As a citizen of Sibenik, I can only say that I am ashamed that in the 21st century we have some that still doubt about the victims of criminal regimes throughout Europe and in Croatia and the region,” he added.

Anne Frank: A Brief Biography The teenage Anne Frank, a German Jew, wrote a journal while hiding with her family in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Dutch city. She was caught by Gestapo in August 1944, along with her family, and transported to Auschwitz. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945at the age of 15. Her father discovered her diary after the war and after it was first published as a book in 1950, it became a global bestseller.

The museum – which is dedicated to the anti-fascist liberation of the coastal region of Dalmatia in World War II – will also show documentaries about Anne Frank’s life and the Jasenovac camp.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day has proved controversial for a second year running in Croatia after the Croatian Jewish community again decided to boycott all state-run commemorations.

It is protesting about what it says the government’s lack of action to deal with right-wingers putting up plaques that display WWII fascist slogans, as well as the cancelled Anne Frank exhibition.

Croatian media reported in December that former members of the 1990s-era Croatian Defence Forces and right-wing politicians installed a memorial plaque with the Ustasa slogan ‘Za dom spremni’ (‘Ready for the Home(land)’) near the site of the Jasenovac camp.

Last year, both the Jewish and Serbian communities boycott the official commemoration of the victims of Jasenovac, claiming that there was a revival of wartime fascist values in Croatian politics.

In this year’s official commemorations on Friday, the chairman of the Croatian parliament Bozo Petrov will lay flowers in front of the monument dedicated to Holocaust victims at Zagreb’s Mirogoj central cemetery, while special programs will be organised in parliament and in the Croatian Education and Teacher Training Agency.

Meanwhile the Jewish community’s Shoah Academy organised a seminar on Thursday dedicated to the issue of Jasenovac and how it should be left to historians, amid continuing attempts to downplay the crimes committed at the WWII camp.

During the Ustasa-led Independent State of Croatia – which included the majority of present-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Serbia – between 1941 and 1945, some 31,000 out of approximately 40,000 Jews were killed or sent to German death camps.