Supporters of Italian football team Lazio have littered stadiums with professionally-produced stickers depicting Anne Frank, in a shocking new low for the club.
The stickers were found by stadium staff discovered the stickers on Monday, after a Lazio fixture against against Serie A rivals Cagliari at the Stadio Olimpico.
The stickers show an edited image of the young woman, who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp towards the end of the Second World War after years of hiding in a house in the Netherlands where she wrote her Diary Of A Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis - The Secret Annex)
Entre adesivos colados pela torcida da Lazio, um exibia Anne Frank coma camisa da Roma. Absurda manifestação anti-semita no Stadio Olimpico. pic.twitter.com/OpLP06Zbgo
— Diogo Rimoli (@diogorimoli) October 23, 2017
An antisemitic group within the Italian Serie A team has existed for quite some time. In 1998 a large banner was unfurled in the Lazio stand during a match against AS Roma which read "Auschwitz is Your Homeland. The Ovens are Your Homes"
The Italian football Federation (FICG) has responded to this latest outrage by announcing that a passage from Anne Frank’s diary will be read before Serie A matches this week, and that a minute’s silence will be observed at all of this week’s Serie A, B and C matches as well as amateur and youth games over the weekend.
UPDATE:
Lazio’s chairman, Claudio Lotito, has announced that the club will be starting a project to take 200 young people to visit Auschwitz every year.
In an announcement made from outside from Rome’s Great Synagogue, where he laid flowers at a memorial for Holocaust victims, he said “Lazio will go to Auschwitz. What happened must not be forgotten.”
Lotito has also said that Lazio players will be wearing Anne Frank shirts during their warm-up for their match against Bologna on Wednesday night,
Robert Posner, Chief Executive of The Anne Frank Trust UK told us: "The prompt actions of the Italian President, Sports Minister and the Italian football Federation in condemning outright this perverse use of an image of Anne Frank are to be applauded.
This antisemitic act not only desecrates the memory of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust but is an insult to survivors and refugees of the Holocaust, as well as all Jews living today.
We are also proud that fighting football-related antisemitism is part of our partner The Anne Frank House's educational activities."
