I visited the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names in Amsterdam soon after it opened.
The monument was designed by Daniel Libeskind, a Jewish Polish-American architect born in Łódź who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and also designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The monument consists of 72 concrete walls that, when viewed from above, form four Hebrew letters spelling zecher, meaning “in memory of.” The walls are covered with golden-yellow bricks, each inscribed with the name, birth date, and age at death of a Jewish, Roma, or Sinti individual from the Netherlands who was a victim of the Nazis. There are 102,000 bricks bearing the names of Jewish victims and 220 bricks bearing those of Roma and Sinti victims.
Decades before this visit, I had wept as I stood at the grave of my father, Simche, in the former Ebensee concentration camp, just before my mother and I immigrated to the United States. But on a later visit to Auschwitz—where my sister Eva was killed at age seven, and my sister Liane (Leah) was killed at age five—I could not fathom the presence of the two smiling girls in the colorized portraits on my mother’s living-room wall, and I did not shed any tears.
However, as my partner Joel and I walked along the wall of the new monument, following the alphabetical array of the bricks, tears welled up in my eyes as we came to the three names, one beneath the other—Eva, Liane, and Simche. I touched the three bricks, one finger over each brick, and closed my eyes. I surprisingly felt at peace, as if for one brief moment our family had been reunited.
My Uncle Elische (Emiel) was my father’s youngest brother and had followed him from their home town of Kańczuga to the Netherlands. He doted on my sisters, his nieces. He was deported on the same transport that took them to Auschwitz and was killed along with them. His last name did not include the same bureaucratic error as my father’s and sister’s, the misspelling of Mūnzer to Minzer, and his name therefore appeared on the next panel of the monument: Elische Münzer, born February 2, 1910, age 34. There are many other Münzers next to him. Are they too my relatives? Regardless of relation, perhaps I can be a voice for all 102,220 victims on this monument, as they call out for an end to the kind of hate that fueled the Holocaust.
Photos: Al Mūnzer, Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer, reflects on the engraved names of his sisters, father, and uncle at the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names. They were all killed during the Holocaust. Courtesy of Al Mūnzer
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