Auschwitz memorial
Wertheimplantsoen
In 1993 a memorial was placed in Amsterdam's Wertheim Park, a stark reminder of Auschwitz concentration camp. Made by Dutch artist and writer Jan Wolkers, it consists of broken mirrors, in which the skies are reflected, day and night.
In Wolkers' words, after the horror of Auschwitz 'The sky is wounded forever. Auschwitz was an unspeakably appalling attack upon everything that humanity stands for.'
The bitter facts can be read on a panel beside the memorial. Before the German invasion of 1940 there were 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands. Between 15 July 1942 and September 1944 around 107,000 Jews were deported. Of them only 5,200 survived the concentration camps, to return to the Netherlands after the war. 95,000 Jews from the Netherlands were deported to the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Only 500 of them survived.
The Dutch Auschwitz Comité commissioned Wolkers to make the Mirror Memorial. Initially it was placed, in a more sober version, in one of Amsterdam's municipal cemeteries. Each year on 27 January - the date on which the Russian army liberated the camp, an Auschwitz remembrance is held
