Some 1.5 million buttons needed for monument to Jewish children killed in Holocaust

The Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre, located in Hooghalen at the site of a former concentration camp, is looking for 1.5 million buttons to build a monument to Jewish children who were killed during World War II. It is estimated that 1.5 million children were killed in concentration and extermination camps during that time.

Dutch actor and artist Jeroen Krabbé launched the button collection drive on Friday during an event De Nieuwe Veste, a secondary school in Hardenberg, Overijssel, according to a spokesperson for the Centre.

Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The fate of the six million Jews who died in concentration camps during the war is memorialized all over the world annually on January 27, the date that the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was liberated. Some 102,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma were transported from Camp Westerbork to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Sobibor and Mauthausen. Tens of thousands of children and young people were among them.

Jeroen Krabbé is one of the guest curators of the annual exhibition The Memory of Camp Westerbork. About eighty relatives on his mother's side were killed in camps during the war, including his grandfather and an aunt, according to the Centre.

Krabbé's inspiration for the memorial came from the Bialik Button Project at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in Australia, where buttons were also collected. Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre said that buttons were often the last remains found during the excavation dead bodies. In addition, buttons have a relationship with the textile industry, where many Jewish people were employed. The textile industry was important in Hardenberg in the past.

Krabbé will unveil the new monument during the period when he will serve as a curator, and he will put objects from his family's private collection on display. He hopes to use this exhibition to tell stories about his grandfather and his aunt.

Those who want to hand in buttons for the monument can send them to the school in Hardenberg. Students there will sort and count them. They will also conduct research at the archives of Camp Westerbork, and will speak with survivors and next of kin.