Tonight at 8 PM we celebrate Remembrance Day in honor of all our citizens who died in WW-2 and in any armed conflict since then. In Amsterdam, one of the sub-themes of Remembrance Day this year is generating awareness of just how Jewish the city was until almost all her Jewish residents were shipped off to the concentration camps where very few came back from.
A database has been created of all the 21,662 houses in the city where Amsterdam's 62,000 Jews lived who died at the hands of the Nazis. The neighborhood where we live was apparently one of the most Jewish neighborhoods of the city. Three of the four apartments in our building, Rijnstraat 40, were occupied then by Jewish residents, all of whom died in various camps. One of the newspapers published a special segment with all of the city's "Jewish addresses" and a poster to put in the window on Remembrance Day if your apartment was listed. The hope was that from the street it would be visibly clear just what how much the city lost in human terms when it lost her Jews.
Pre-war Amsterdam was heavily influenced
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