Anger at school's snub of Anne Frank exhibit

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January 24, 2017 5:55 PM

The exhibition, prepared by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, was due to be displayed at a high school in the coastal town of Sibenik from Tuesday last week.

Anne Frank died in Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp early in 1945, aged 15, less than a year after the Nazis found her and her family members

A Croatian school came under fire Tuesday for refusing to display an exhibition on Jewish diarist

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre called for the school's head to be dismissed, saying otherwise it signalled that pro-Nazi nostalgia was "perfectly legitimate" in modern-day Croatia.

But the organisers withdrew the same day after the school's director Josip Belamaric refused to allow six panels explaining the role of Croatia's wartime Ustasha regime, saying the pro-Nazis were presented as "criminals" while their rival communists' crimes were ignored.

The Ustasha persecuted and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and anti-fascist Croatians.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, based in Los Angeles, has written to Croatia's charge d'affaires in Tel Aviv in protest at Belamaric's behaviour and seeking his immediate dismissal.

"A failure to do so will indicate that Ustasha nostalgia is perfectly legitimate in today's Croatian school system," wrote the head of the centre's Israeli office, Efraim Zuroff.

The exhibition, due to be displayed until mid-February, had previously been presented in 23 Croatian towns without any problem, the organisers said.

Frank wrote "The Diary of a Young Girl" while hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic from June 1942 to August 1944. More than 30 million copies have been sold in 67 languages.

Frank died in Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp early in 1945, aged 15, less than a year after the Nazis found her and her family members.

Croatia's conservative Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, who came to power after a snap election in October, has pledged to move away from extremism.

The previous centre-right government was accused by critics of turning a blind eye to a far-right surge in the country, including nostalgia for a pro-Nazi past.

Croatian Jews are planning to boycott an official ceremony on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, accusing authorities of downplaying the Ustasha crimes.

Plenkovic arrived Tuesday on an official visit to Israel to discuss boosting ties, as the two countries mark 20 years since establishing diplomatic relations.

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