A memorial dedicated to Anne Frank, the only one in the United States, was defaced with swastika stickers. The memorial in Boise, Idaho, was vandalised on Tuesday, the Wassmuth Center, which manages the memorial, confirmed in a Facebook post. 

“These stickers were plastered throughout the Memorial yesterday. I fear for what is happening to our community,” the centre said in the post. 

The memorial depicts Frank holding her diary and peering out of a window of the small annex in which she, along with her family, hid from the Nazis for 761 days. 

The stickers pasted on the memorial had swastikas along with the words “we are everywhere”. 

“Frankly, it’s a sad day,” Wassmuth Center Executive Director Dan Prinzing told CNN. “The Memorial is located in the heart of the capital city, we are the heart of the city. Such a blatant act of hate, directed in such a fashion, emboldened to occur, is just sad. We also recognise that now we must fundraise to add a security system in the Memorial.”

Prinzing said that there was no extra damage done to the memorial, with only some cleaning required to remove the sticky residue.

“The Memorial was funded by individuals, businesses and foundation to be a physical statement of our shared values, we recognise today that one of those values is that we must stand up to confront hate,” he added. 

Founded in 1996, the Wassmuth Center’s goal was to construct a memorial dedicated to human rights, which was realised in 2002 when the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial opened to public.