An official with a Swedish political party was suspended Saturday after reportedly making offensive comments about Holocaust victim and diarist Anne Frank on social media, The Associated Press reported.
Rebecka Fallenkvist, a 26-year-old programming head with the far-right group Sweden Democrats, called Frank "immoral" and derogatory names in a post on Instagram, AP reports, citing Swedish media. The post has since been deleted, but can be seen in a tweet from the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Ziv Nevo Kulman, who condemned the remarks.
Frank was forced into hiding with her family in an Amsterdam attic when the Nazis rose to power. She and her family were eventually discovered and sent to concentration camps, where Frank and her older sister, Margot, died in 1945, just weeks before the camps were liberated. She documented her experiences living in the attic in a journal that was retrieved from the hiding space and published in 1947 as The Diary of Anne Frank.
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The director of the Sweden Democrats, Oskar Cavalli-Björkman, told media the party had suspended Fallenkvist. He further called her comments "insensitive and inappropriate" and said an internal investigation would be launched.
However, despite the outcry, Fallenkvist defended her actions in a message to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, per AP, claiming her words were misinterpreted.
"The book is a moving depiction of human good and evil," she said. "My story was aimed at the good and human in Anne while not playing down the evil to which she was subjected."
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