Mystery in Tokyo as hundreds of Anne Frank books are defaced

Similar passages torn out of Holocaust memoir at dozens of libraries across Japan

Police are baffled at the systematic besmirching of copies of Anne Frank's diary Photo: GETTY

By Julian Ryall, Tokyo

The Telegraph - 21 Feb 2014

More than 250 copies of "The Diary of a Young Girl," by Anne Frank, have been damaged or defaced at dozens of public libraries across Tokyo.

"We first noticed damage to the book at the end of January last year and it has been going on since then," Saeko Nishimura, a spokeswoman for the Japan Library Association, told The Telegraph.

"We do not know who is doing it or why they are doing it," she added, "But the police are now carrying out an investigation."

Pages have been torn out of the books, according to police, who are examining closed-circuit footage from libraries that were targeted. In many cases, the pages contained the same passages of text, leading police to suspect that the same person is causing the damage.

Undamaged copies of the book - which is part of the syllabus in many Japanese schools - have been removed from the shelves of many libraries in Tokyo, Mrs Nishimura said.

Other libraries have placed their copies on the counter where books are signed out so staff can monitor the people who read them.

Arguably the most famous memoir of the Second World War, Anne Frank detailed her years in hiding in Amsterdam from her birthday in June 1942 until the family was betrayed as Jews and arrested in August 1944.
Transported to concentration camps, Frank was 15 years old when she and her sister, Margot, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945. After the end of the war, their father, Otto Frank, discovered the diary had been saved and set about publishing it as a book.
The book was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2009.