A map hangs in the Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum, which is dedicated to the resistance against the German occupation during the Second World War. About a square meter with hundreds of dots. It shows how the Jewish population was distributed across Amsterdam in May 1941: One point stands for ten people. The Nazis had ordered the map from the hasty city administration in order to be able to get hold of the Jewish residents as easily as possible. The deportations began in July 1942. If the map had been drawn again at the end of 1944, only a few dots would have remained. The Germans were particularly thorough in the Netherlands.
Of the 80,000 people of Jewish descent in Amsterdam, a city with centuries-old Jewish tradition, only about 15,000 survived. In total, the Nazis murdered 102,000 of 140,000 Jews in the country as well as 220 Sinti and Roma. Hardly anything remains of them, they do not even have a grave, and a few stumbling blocks are reminiscent of them. It has been different since last week. Remembrance now has an appropriate form and a worthy place. After 15 years of preparatory work, two attempts and a lot of trouble, the “National Holocaust Name Monument” was opened on the lively Wesperstraat, in the middle of the city’s former Jewish quarter.
Children find their family name. And are moved when they read how young the people were
The work of the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, who himself lost 85 family members in extermination camps, is made of bricks, one for each murdered person. The name, date of birth and age at the time of death are engraved. Layered on top of each other to form a total of 380 meter long walls, when viewed from above, the stones result in the four Hebrew letters of the word “lezecher”: memory. Above, sharp-edged, typically Libeskind mirror surfaces reflect the sky, the trees – and the viewer.
The inauguration was attended by the king and prime minister, survivors and relatives of the victims. It was an occasion that brought the politically divided country to common reflection for a moment. Each victim now has its own memorial site, said the incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte. “This memorial says 102,163 times: No, we will not forget you. No, we will not allow your name to be erased. No, evil does not have the last word.” Mayor Femke Halsema spoke of a “fortress between us and oblivion”.
The architect Henk Schröder, 78, points to the name of Anne Frank, whose name, like that of the other 100,000 people who were murdered, is engraved on the bricks.
(Photo: Thomas Kirchner)
A few days later. A few dozen people roam the monument in the early afternoon, gray-haired women with daughters, entire families, study groups, even individuals. They search the walls, touch individual stones, some look in silence, others talk and gesticulate. This place works: because it appeals to people sensually, devoid of any didactic. And because it closes a gap. The local media are full of reports about visitors who are almost euphoric because they may be seeing a sign of their ancestors for the first time, and at the same time are overwhelmed by sadness. Just the sight of several rows of stones with the same family name makes one freeze: “Aandagt”, “Abraham”, “Agsteribbe”, extinguished in all branches and generations.
A first draft failed. The residents complained that it was getting too loud in the neighborhood
Schoolchildren find their family name. And they are moved when they read and understand how incredibly young people were when they had to die. “Evening after evening, the green or gray military vehicles drive past,” wrote Anne Frank in her diary at the end of 1942, “and the bell rings at every door and asks whether there are Jews living there. Nobody is spared. Old people, children, babies, pregnant women “Sick … everything, everything goes with the train to death.” The writer, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, bears her official name, “Annelies”, born on June 12, 1929, on her brick.
Henk Schröder just found this stone. The 78-year-old starts telling the story straight away. Sixteen years ago he restored the apartment at Merwedeplein 37, where the Franks lived from 1934 onwards, in the service of a non-profit housing association. She almost ended up in the real estate market. The famous photo of Anne sitting at her desk was taken there. “The reflections on the memorial will annoy many residents,” grumbles Schröder, who is himself an architect. To add immediately, “I’m very happy with it, it will be here for a long time.”
This place is the life’s work of a man, Jacques Grishaver, 79. He was born in the year after the occupation, went into hiding with his parents and was very lucky to survive. Two brothers and his parents remained of his family; his mother was severely traumatized. Only when he was 50 and after years of depression did he concentrate on his Jewish identity, became chairman of the National Auschwitz Committee and organized trips to the concentration camp. It was there that he had the idea for this memorial in 2005 when he saw people looking at and touching a wall with the names of the 60,000 Dutch people murdered in Birkenau. “If your name is no longer mentioned, then you’ve never lived,” he says.
Grishaver went to work, determined, tenacious, with Mayor Eberhard van der Laan, who died in 2017, behind him. There were doubters, as well as competitors, such as the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the former theater in which many Amsterdam residents were crammed together before the journey to the Westerbork interim camp. In today’s museum, which is currently being renovated, there is already a wall of names. A first draft by Grishavers, planned in the nearby Wertheimpark, failed in 2015 due to protests from local residents. They switched to the current location, and protests were made again that the neighborhood was getting too crowded and too loud; Artists and architects wrote a fire letter, others sued the highest court.
Grishaver won. With supposedly not only fair means, as can be read. He acted like a “street fighter”, swinging the anti-Semitism club all too quickly, things like that. In any case, he made no friends with his brutal approach, it is said from many sides. But also that without him it would probably not have come to this memorial at this point and at this point in time. That even compels one of his tougher opponents, the Schouwburg representative Joop Wertheim, to give a “compliment”.
And now it is there, and it is a good thing. Not least as a sign against the oblivion of history in the Netherlands. It has only been a few days since the right-wing extremist member of parliament Thierry Baudet put the “Holocaust” in quotation marks in a tweet and shouted to the “Jews” in a debate that the war is not theirs alone, that it is “our war too”. He was sharply criticized. But the excitement has long since subsided.