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(CNN) — A group of people carrying Nazi flags demonstrated outside a community theater performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Livingston County, Michigan, in a display of antisemitism.
Several masked men showed up waving Nazi flags and reportedly shouted antisemitic and racist slurs outside the American Legion Post 141 in Howell on Saturday during the play, according to CNN affiliate WXYZ.
“People were shocked. They were appalled,” Army veteran Bobby Brite told WXYZ. “Everything you would expect.”
Brite said many of the 75 people who watched the play were afraid to leave the building and had to be escorted to their cars.
“Nobody in America should feel like that,” he said.
Demonstrators were also seen in the nearby town of Fowlerville, according to eyewitnesses.
Alex Sutliff and his wife were driving home through downtown Fowlerville when they came across a group of masked men waving Nazi flags.
“They were saying awful antisemitic things that I don’t even feel comfortable repeating myself,” Sutliff told CNN on Tuesday.
Sutliff, who filmed the brief encounter, said the group “all stuck their hands up” and chanted “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.”
Sutliff’s interaction with the demonstrators took place at a stoplight, and when the light turned green, he drove away before things could escalate.
He and his wife called local police to report what they saw, and then circled back to let the demonstrators know that authorities were on their way.
“The second that they heard that they were on the way, they all packed up their stuff and ran away.”
CNN has reached out to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office for further details.
The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which put on the production, said in a statement the play “centers on real people who lost their lives in the Holocaust” and added the cast and crew “endeavored to tell their story with as much realism as possible.”
“On Saturday evening, things became more real than we expected,” the group said. “The presence of protesters outside gave us a small glimpse of the fear and uncertainty felt by those in hiding.”
“As a theatre, we want to make people feel and think. We hope by presenting Anne’s story, we can help prevent the atrocities of the past from happening again.”
Citing the sheriff’s office, The Detroit News reported the demonstrators left after being told to vacate the legion post’s parking lot, then ensued in a brief exchange of words with patrons while across the street.
The Anti-Defamation League’s regional office in Michigan said on social media it was “disgusted by the far-right extremists who praised Hitler and waved Nazi flags outside of an American Legion hosting the play.”
The county has faced similar displays of racism this year. In July, White supremacists marched through Howell, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Detroit.
Threats to Jews in the US tripled in the one-year period since the deadly October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, preliminary data provided to CNN by the ADL showed. In the weeks following October 7, reports of hate crimes and bias incidents targeting Jews, Muslims and Arabs all surged across the US.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” was published posthumously and has been translated into more than 70 languages in more than 60 nations, with several film and stage adaptations. Her diary is often a teen’s first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II.
She and seven others, all Jewish, hiding in a secret annex above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam for nearly two years were detained and deported in 1944. Anne later died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at age 15.
Growing fears of antisemitism remains a present issue – including in Amsterdam. In July, a statue of Anne in a local park was vandalized with the word “Gaza” scrawled in red paint. More recently, people were beaten and injured in violent clashes between fans of an Israeli soccer team and counter-protesters in the city over the weekend, which Dutch authorities condemned as antisemitic.
The-CNN-Wire
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