CNN
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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 show of anti-Semitism.

According to CNN affiliate WXYZ, several masked men appeared Saturday waving Nazi flags and allegedly shouting anti-Semitic and racist slurs outside the American Legion Post 141 in Howell.

“People were shocked. They were shocked,” Army veteran Bobby Brite told WXYZ. “Everything you would expect.”

Brite said many of the 75 people watching the play were afraid to leave the building and had to be escorted to their cars.

“No one in America should feel this way,” he said.

The Fowlerville Community Theater, which put on the production, said in a statement that the play “focuses on real people who lost their lives in the Holocaust” and added that the cast and crew “sought 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 demonstrators outside gave us a small glimpse of the fear and uncertainty felt by those in hiding.”

“As a theater we want to make people feel and think. We hope that by presenting Anne’s story we can help prevent the atrocities of the past from happening again.”

CNN has reached out to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office for more information.

Citing the sheriff’s office, The Detroit News reported that the protesters left after being told to leave the Legion Post parking lot, followed by a brief altercation with customers across the street.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Michigan regional office said on social media that it was “disgusted by the far-right extremists who praised Hitler and waved Nazi flags outside an American Legion hosting the play.”

The province has faced similar manifestations of racism this year. In July, white supremacists marched through Howell, about 40 miles northwest of Detroit.

Threats to Jews in the US have tripled in the one-year period since Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, according to preliminary data provided to CNN by the ADL. In the weeks after October 7, reports of hate crimes and incidents of bias against Jews, Muslims and Arabs poured in across the US.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” was published posthumously and has been translated into more than 70 languages ​​in more than 60 countries, with various film and stage adaptations. Her diary is often a teenager’s first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II.

She and seven others, all Jewish, who hid for almost two years in a secret secret annex above a canalside warehouse in Amsterdam, were arrested and deported in 1944. Anne later died at the age of 15 in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

The growing fear of anti-Semitism remains a current problem – also 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 last weekend in violent clashes between fans of an Israeli football team and counter-protesters in the city, which Dutch authorities condemned as anti-Semitic.