King Willem-Alexander of Amsterdam unveiled on Sunday a Holocaust monument, which listed 102,163 Dutch victims.
The monument is the first national memorial in the Netherlands.
Daniel Libeskind, a 75-year-old artist who lost relatives in the Holocaust, designed the monument.
It now resides in the center of Amsterdam and is a maze of brick walls that reads “in remembrance” when read from above.
Each stone has the name of a Roma or Sinti Jew, who was deported from the Netherlands and died in Nazi concentration camps in WW2.
The monument is the first memorial to honor all the victims from the Netherlands in one site.
“It gives the feeling that they really existed,” said Hetty de Roode, a Jew whose family died in Nazi camps.
De Roode, who attended the ceremony, survived because he hid with a family in the northern Netherlands.
Most of the Jews in the Netherlands faced deportations during the German occupation.
“It’s a black page in the history of our country,” PM Mark Rutte said.
“It forces us to question whether we should do more to prevent it, and that anti-Semitism is never far away.”
Libeskind has supervised the master plan for the ‘Ground Zero’ monument in New York.
However, he said it was overwhelming to witness his design revealed in Amsterdam.
He added, “It is a warning to all of us what can happen in so-called civilized societies.”
The memorial’s construction was delayed for many years due to disputes over building location, cost and design.
Private donations, Amsterdam’s government and other municipalities funded the 15-million-euro project.
