Amsterdam to mark homes where Jews lived in WWII

AMSTERDAM — A commemoration committee is asking thousands of Amsterdam homeowners to mark their houses if a former Jewish resident was arrested or deported to Nazi death camps during World War II.

The May 4-5 Committee, named for the date of the Netherlands’ liberation from German occupation in 1945, made posters available Friday for display in windows of the former Jewish homes.

The poster reads: “1 of the 21,662 houses where Jews lived who were murdered in World War II.”

Residents can look on the committee’s website to see if their house had been occupied by a Jewish family during the war and the names of the people who had lived there. More than 70 percent of Holland’s wartime Jewish population were killed by the Nazis. The Dutch mark the end of the war on May 4 with solemn ceremonies of remembrance, followed the next day by parties and music to mark Liberation Day.

The poster was the initiative of Frits Rijksbaron, a marketing executive who discovered the title deed to his new home showed that it had once belonged to a Jewish family.

He told Dutch broadcaster NOS that he hoped to remind Amsterdam’s citizens of the horrors of the Nazis’ sweep of their city, during which some 61,700 Jews were arrested and killed.

He wanted “to show how big a trauma it was for the Jews and for Amsterdam, and how Jewish Amsterdam was.”