Justin Bieber has visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and the museum says the Canadian pop star wrote in the guestbook that he hoped Frank “would have been a Belieber” if she had lived.
A post on Saturday on the Facebook page of the museum said Bieber had visited the previous night and stayed over an hour, along with a group of friends and guards, as fans waited outside to “see a glimpse of him”.
Frank was a Jewish teenager who hid with her family in a small apartment above a warehouse during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Her family was caught and deported, and she died, aged 15, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
The diary she kept in hiding was recovered and published after the war, and has become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust.
“In our guestbook he wrote: ‘Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber’,” the museum said in the Facebook post.
“Belieber” is what Bieber fans call themselves.
Museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostart said Bieber phoned on Friday afternoon to ask if he could visit and that the museum was happy to have received him.
Regarding that last sentence in the guest book, a large share of the hundreds of commentators on the museum’s Facebook post reacted negatively to Bieber’s choice of words.
“Anne Frank a belieber That is by far one of the most self-serving things I’ve ever read, like ever,” Facebook user Tania Saez Pinto wrote.
“I think she would be smart enough not to buy his records,” Facebook user Menachem Rephun wrote on the page.
Media commentators also joined in the fray.
Scott Simon, host of US-based National Public Radio programme Weekend Edition Saturday, said on Twitter, “Anne would be wise enough to just laugh”.
Frank was 13 years old when she began keeping her diary in 1942. Like many teenage girls, she made a collage of the celebrities of her day – movie stars, dancers, and royalty – and kept it on her bedroom wall.
“Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls; but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film-star collection and picture postcards … with the aid of a paste pot and brush, I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture,” she wrote on July 11, 1942, just days after going into hiding. “This makes it look much more cheerful.”
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Readers around the world have read her diary, which was first published in 1947 and details the deprivations and personal triumphs she and her family experienced in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
A representative for Bieber declined to comment.
Some commentators on social media sites commended Bieber for caring enough about Anne Frank’s story to visit the Amsterdam museum, which is built into the house where she and her family hid before their arrest.
And the museum itself in its post about the visit from Bieber, a Canadian-born sensation whose hit songs include Baby and U Smile, did not criticise him.
Annemarie Bekker, a spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House, said museum officials were “a bit overwhelmed” by the negative reaction to Bieber’s statement.
“He’s a 19-year-old boy taking the effort to come and see the museum, and we’d like to point that out, and I think it’s quite innocent what he put down,” Bekker said.
Bieber is on a European tour. He performed in Arnhem, Netherlands, on Saturday night, and will next perform three nights in Oslo, Norway.
– AP, Reuters
