A monument listing 102,163 Dutch victims of the Holocaust was unveiled by King Willem-Alexander in Amsterdam on Sunday, the first national memorial to be built in the Netherlands. The monument, designed by Daniel Libeskind, 75, who lost relatives in the Holocaust, lies in the center of the Dutch capital and is a labyrinth of brick walls that, when seen from above, form Hebrew letters reading "in remembrance."
Each stone carries the name of a Jew, Roma or Sinti who was deported from the Netherlands and who died in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. It is the first memorial to commemorate all the victims from across the Netherlands in one place.
"It gives the feeling that they really existed," said Hetty de Roode, a Jew whose parents, brother, and sister all died in the camps. De Roode, who attended the unveiling, survived by hiding with a family in the north of the Netherlands. Most of the Jewish population in the Netherlands was deported during the German occupation.
A hate-filled attack made a grandson of Holocaust survivors understand their experience a little more. But he decided to buck their advice."It's a black page in the history of our country," Prime Minister Mark Rutte said. "It forces us to question whether more should have been done to prevent it and to realize that even these days anti-Semitism is never far away."
Libeskind, who also oversaw the master plan for the Ground Zero memorial in New York, said it was overwhelming to see his design unveiled in the Dutch capital and added: "It's a warning to us all what can happen in so-called civilized societies." Construction of the memorial faced years of delays, amid disputes about where it should be built, the cost, and the design. The €15 million ($17.6 million) monument was funded by private donations and Amsterdam and other municipalities.
Analyst View
It has been over 75 years when the Holocaust took place but yet the memory of the murder and destruction of European Jews remains with us. Over 6million Jews were killed in the state-sponsored genocide by the German Nazis during the second world war (1941-45). The survivors and stakeholders in the Jewish state continue to remember the devastation.
