National Holocaust Names Memorial

Landmark · Weesperstraat (Plantage / Jodenbuurt edge)Amsterdam,Netherlands

Walls of 102,000 bricks in Amsterdam, each carrying one name, birth date and age at death, the only place all the Dutch victims are named.

The National Holocaust Names Memorial is built from 102,000 bricks, and each brick carries the name, birth date and age at death of one person. They are the Jewish, Roma and Sinti victims from the Netherlands who were murdered and left without a grave, and this is the only place where all of them are named. You walk between walls a little over two metres high, down passages barely wider than your shoulders, and the bricks are within reach. Names run roughly in alphabetical order, though a wall often starts on an unexpected letter. Daniel Libeskind laid the walls out as four shapes that read as Hebrew letters from above. The Dutch Auschwitz Committee pushed for the memorial from 2006, neighbours fought it in court, and the walls were only finished in 2021. This street was almost entirely Jewish before the war, and after the deportations the empty houses were stripped for firewood in the last winter of the occupation. The city then demolished what was left to widen Weesperstraat into a traffic route, and that road runs beside the memorial.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come at first light or late at night — Weesperstraat carries six lanes of traffic and the noise is constant, but the road empties in those two windows and the passages are lit from inside after dark.
Look a name up before you arrive — the memorial keeps an online index of all 102,000, and knowing which letter and which wall turns a long hunt into a short walk.
Find the blank bricks near the southern entrance — one wall was left uninscribed so that names recovered later can still be cut into it, which means the memorial is not finished.
Leave a stone rather than a flower — visitors set small pebbles along the brick ledges, following the Jewish custom of marking a grave, and they are left where they are put.

Things to do

1
Find the one name you looked up
Choose a surname from the online index before you come, then walk the wall until the letter turns up. The same surname runs along several bricks in a row, so what you reach is not one line but a block of them, each with a different birth date and a different age at the end.
2
Walk the four letters without turning back
Enter at one end and keep going. The route bends four times, once for each Hebrew letter, and the shape only resolves from the air, so at ground level you are walking inside a word you cannot read. Count the turns and you have traced the whole inscription with your feet.
3
Come back when the traffic drops
Return after eleven at night. Weesperstraat finally empties, the passages glow from lights set low in the brick, and the polished steel overhead picks up the streetlamps. Only then is it quiet enough between the walls to hear your own footsteps.