National Holocaust Names Memorial
Why is it significant?
Step off the noise of the Weesperstraat into the narrow passages between walls of brick, and slow down. Every brick carries a name. Every name was a person. Read a few: a date of birth, an age. Some of the ages are two, or four, or nine.
Key Facts
| Place | National Holocaust Names Memorial |
|---|---|
| Address | Weesperstraat 4, 1018 DN Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36570, 4.90500 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
Step off the noise of the Weesperstraat into the narrow passages between walls of brick, and slow down. Every brick carries a name. Every name was a person. Read a few: a date of birth, an age. Some of the ages are two, or four, or nine. Some were babies only weeks old, others were in their nineties.
This is the National Holocaust Names Memorial, opened in September 2021. It holds the names of more than 102,000 Jews from the Netherlands who were murdered in the Holocaust, and of some two hundred Sinti and Roma. There is no grave for almost any of them. Most were deported through the transit camp of Westerbork to Auschwitz and Sobibor, and of the Jews of the Netherlands, roughly three out of four did not survive the war, one of the highest proportions in Western Europe.
The memorial was designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, whose own parents were Polish Jewish survivors. From above, the walls form four Hebrew letters that together spell a word meaning in memory of. Above the bricks rise mirrored steel shapes, so that when you look up you see the sky, the trees, and yourself, among the names.
The idea grew from survivors who wanted a place where every name could be touched. It took years of discussion, and even neighbours objecting to the design, before the first bricks were laid. Many families have adopted a brick, and people come here to search for grandparents, great aunts, classmates of their parents, and to leave small stones in the Jewish tradition.
Take a moment here. There is no need to read all of them, nobody can. But try to remember one name when you leave. Then walk on along the Plantage Middenlaan, into the green district called the Plantage, where the next stop is, surprisingly, a garden.