Lucy 219

Lucy posing in a street called Zandstraat, at the foot of the Zuiderkerk, a 17th century protestant church in the vicinity of the old Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam. When I was a child, many streets of the former Jewish Quarter still existed and it was like a ghost town. Some 70.000 Amsterdam Jews were deported to the extermination camps in Auschwitz and Sobibor between 1942 and 1944. Less than a thousand of them survived the war. As a child I was bombarded with the stories about the Holocaust and it had a huge impact on me: "How could this happen in my own city, only a short while ago?". My mother grew up in a part of Amsterdam (Transvaalbuurt) to which many Jews moved after their houses in the slums of the Old Jewish Quarter were demolished in the 1920's. Being non-Jewish, she was one of three children of her school class who survived the war. After my mother's death I sent copies of most pages from her "Poëzie album" ("a girl's album of friends' verses) to an institution called "Jewish monument" and they were able to identify some of the girls in my mother's class, supplying us with information about the fate of those girls. The grim story of the Amsterdam Jews was a part of my life long interest in history, an interest shared with Lucy who is a bright student.