Remembering Through the Sidewalks of Amsterdam

Remembering Through the Sidewalks of Amsterdam

By Sydney Scarlata

Amsterdam is not a new city for my husband, Jacob, or me. We’ve been enough times to feel comfortable navigating the city’s bike lanes, tram lines, and canal systems. However, on our first night in town, Jacob’s cousin Ethan — who had recently moved to the Dutch capital — called our attention to a small detail in the sidewalk. Having spent the last year studying Judaism at Holy Blossom, I had a new perspective through which to view Amsterdam and these little sidewalk details.

While I learned about the country’s arguably most famous Holocaust victim, Anne Frank, as a kid, I was relatively unfamiliar with Amsterdam’s Jewish history. In 1941, nearly 79,000 Jews resided in the city’s iconic row houses. As a result of Nazi occupation and mass deportations throughout World War II, nearly three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered. Their names are now inscribed in the city’s Holocaust memorial in the Weesperstraat neighbourhood. But the city — and Europe writ large — went a step further in creating a collective memory about the Holocaust. In 1992, German artist Gunter Demnig installed small, 10×10 cm, brass plaques on the sidewalk outside the known residences of the War’s victims. Demnig’s inspiration for this project was to further an idea in the Talmud that “a person is only forgotten when their name is forgotten.”

The plaques are simple; each one lists the person’s name, year of birth, when they were deported, arrested, or went into hiding, and whether they were murdered, liberated, or survived. Upon further research, I discovered that the craftsman who makes each plaque engraves every letter with a hammer and a hand-held metal stamp. “To show respect for the victims, it must be done by hand,” he told the Guardian in 2019. These “stumbling stones” can be found throughout Europe, but this was our first conscious encounter with them.

Once we knew what they were, we saw them everywhere. I have toured Holocaust museums before and stood in front of the remembrance walls, allowing the names to wash over me like a wave. But there was something so profound and deeply humanizing about associating a plaque with a person, and a person with a place. It was as if the plaque was telling me, “This person was once here, and there’s a reason they are not here anymore.”

These tiny squares made me think deeply about property, remembrance, and justice. We know who lived in these homes. It is literally etched into the ground in front of their doors. Who lives in these houses now? Do they understand and appreciate the history of their home? Does it matter if they don’t? Should these homes be returned to the survivors? To Jews? As North Americans, we must contend with our own government’s decision to forcibly remove (and slaughter) Native peoples from their land. In reading Indigenous writers and activists, I am struck by how challenging it must be for tribal leaders to negotiate and reconcile with the governments of Canada and the United States when our concepts of land ownership and our relationship to the land couldn’t be more different. Merely recognizing that we live on stolen land hardly feels like enough, just as reading the stones in Amsterdam felt insufficient. Though perhaps no one gesture will ever be enough to make up for such a catastrophic loss of human life.