Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
Blog Home > amsterdam
-
Reinkensstraat 67
November 16, 2022
Reinkenstraat 67 is the address in Den Haag of an ordinary two-story home next to a fish market. It is an ordinary house on an ordinary street lined with ordinary small businesses and cafés. The address is less than a mile from the house where I was born and that my family called home until October 1942 when our family was torn apart, and we were forced to go into hiding. Reinkenstraat 67 is an address that Hannah Arendt might have called “banal,” an ordinary address where evil and mass murder assumed a personal dimension. A house I needed to see with my own two eyes, not to achieve closure, but to feel and bear witness to the depths to which the human soul can descend.
-
The Uilenburgersjoel
November 16, 2022
The Uilenburgersjoel (Uilenburger Synagogue) was built in Amsterdam in 1735, in the center of the Jewish quarter. Regular services were held there from 1735 until 1942. The Jewish quarter was a lively area in the center of Amsterdam where people spoke Dutch with some Yiddish and Hebrew woven into the language. Next to the sjoel was a large square, het Waterlooplein. A market was held at the square every day but Saturday. The women got together to share their family news; they gossiped and bought their food for the day. The sjoel was in the center of it all.
