The sad story of Amsterdam's Jews
I went on a guided walking tour of the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. There are many monuments to the Jewish Holocaust here but the first one we were taken to was to this street, where in one street 200 of the residents were taken away and murdered.
The names on the plaques are those of the people who used to live in the houses opposite. Children as young as 2, up to old people in their 80s.
Just around the corner is the National Holcaust Memorial, to those who were taken away and murdered by the Nazis. 102,000 bricks in the walls, each with a name on. Some babies only days old, some in their 90s. Horrifying.
What is it about regimes like Hitler's Nazis and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge that have so little respect for human life? They must be able to switch their emotions off - if they have any.
We were taken to the zoo, where 200 Jews survived the war by hiding in the animal pens for years.
A memorial to deaf Jews...
And a memorial to the non Jews(this is a dock worker) of Amsterdam who went on a 2 day strike against the Nazis in support of the Jews.
This 2 hour tour gave me lots of food for thought for my forthcoming visits to Berlin and Auschwitz. Despite it all happening 80 years ago, it's still important to remind the world of the horrors of WW2. My tour included several young people; there were many groups of schoolchildren being shown round.
Good for thought indeed, and persecution continues in many parts of the world still. Sachsenhousen concentration camp, north of Berlin, albeit grim, illustrates the start of the Third Reichs program of ethnic cleansing and the (flawed) Arian precept.
ReplyDeleteIt’s shocking isn’t it. On our way to the Colosseum this morning we’re going to be looking for “stumbling stones” as the memorials embedded in the cobbles here in Rome are called. I hope humanity will win and prevent this sort of thing happening in the future but with people like Putin around it does make me worry.
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