Israel has a name for a term that perhaps marks the ghastliest period of time in all of its human history. It calls it Shoah. The world understands the term slightly differently, calling it ‘The Holocaust.’ From the onset of 1939-to-1945, the world witnessed perhaps the cruelest and single-most largest coordinated wipeout attempt of a religious sect: the Jews.
Such terse and bitter were the events of the Second World War.
It’s reported that 6 million were wiped out in the worst massacre ever perpetrated against the Jews. But, truth be told, there’s always a discord between the official number and what many believe would have been the real quantum of the victims’ suffering.
Many are ready to argue and endlessly so that in reality, way more than the reported figure went down the hell-hole devised by Hitler’s core circle of evil, who called the systematic elimination of the Jews: the ‘Final Solution.’
But decades have passed on since the bloody massacre of WW2 struck a race that’s often been subjected to merciless hatred, irrational and defunct that it is.
And the world’s made poignant and thought-provoking symbols to pay respect to the hundreds and thousands who were slaughtered mercilessly during the horrors of the war. In fact, that’s the least that one could do to spare a thought for the innocents who perished. America has it. Europe’s built it in wide numbers and rightly so.
And now, with the coming of the Amsterdam Holocaust Memorial, it seems, one of the most culturally-evolved and scientifically-driven of all peoples are going to have a brand new emblem to pay respect to their departed.
The Amsterdam Holocaust Memorial will, in a few months’ time emerge as a memorable new structure that will unite the Jews to remember the fallen. In fact, it only makes sense that one of Europe’s liveliest of capital cities erected a memorable structure.
For after all, over seven and a half decades back in time, Anne Frank and her family; and their subsequent struggle against the Nazis, leading up to their fatal capture symbolised a struggle that meant that the Jews weren’t going to give up and that they were determined to live out the period of gory horror.
In fact, centuries before the start of the WWII, Amsterdam had witnessed the settling of several hundreds of thousands of Jews who together formed a bustling community that generations later would go on to establish its thriving diamonds business.
And during the peak of the tectonic events of the Second World War, as many as 80,000 Jews were deported for concentration camps. The Nazi butchers called them ‘death factories’ as if all of that suffering was just banal for them.
Now, with the coming up of the Amsterdam Holocaust Memorial, a thought goes out to the collective fighting spirit of Israel and the Jews worldwide. And it appears that after a brief period of struggle between those who sought permission to build one and those who opposed its construction, the government has given a nod of approval to begin the construction of the same.
DW.com reported the following on the matter:
A Holocaust memorial is set to be built in Amsterdam after a court dismissed complaints from local residents. Locals had argued that the monument is too big for space and that too many trees would have to be removed.
A Dutch court ruled against a group of Amsterdam residents on Tuesday, who were trying to block construction of a Holocaust memorial in their neighborhood.
The court said that the monument was in the public interest and outweighs the complaints from residents. Amsterdam’s local government granted a construction permit for the project back in 2017, but was halted by a legal challenge from locals.
The Dutch Auschwitz Committee welcomed the court’s decision, with the organization’s chairman saying that construction could begin “swiftly.”
In their lawsuit, residents argued that they hadn’t been included in the project planning process.