National Holocaust Names Memorial

There are more than 102,000 engraved bricks in these walls, and each one carries a name. They are the names of people who were taken from the Netherlands and murdered, and who have no grave.

Before the war this street was the middle of Jewish Amsterdam. The Weesperstraat was a crowded street of homes and shops, and almost everyone who lived on it was Jewish. After 1945 it stood deserted and neglected. The houses were pulled down and a wide traffic road was built. A strip of green was left open beside it, and that strip is where the memorial stands.

About 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands in 1940. About 102,000 of them did not survive the war. They were deported and murdered in camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor, or died of hunger, exhaustion and forced labour. The memorial is for those who have no grave. It also names 220 Sinti and Roma who were persecuted and killed in the same years.

The idea came from the Dutch Auschwitz Committee and its chairman, Jacques Grishaver. There was no place in the country where every victim was named, and families had no grave to visit. The architect Daniel Libeskind, himself the son of Holocaust survivors, presented this design in December 2016. Building began in 2019. On 19 September 2021 the king unveiled the memorial together with Grishaver.

The walls are laid out as four Hebrew letters, which together mean “in memory of”. On top of them, following the same letters, lie four shapes of mirrored steel. Libeskind left a narrow gap between the brick and the steel, so that the letters seem to float. The gap stands for the break in the history of the country.

The names run in alphabetical order. Each brick gives a name, a date of birth and the age at which that person died. Some of the ages are those of small children. People come here to find one brick among them all, and to touch it.