Hundreds of people to read the names of 104,000 Camp Westerbork holocaust victims

The first group out of about 800 people began to read the names of more than 100,000 victims of the Holocaust on Wednesday at the terrain of the former Camp Westerbork. This event called Namen Lezen, is being for the fifth time and will continue during day and night until Monday, January 27, which is the international day of commemoration for the Holocaust. This is the date that the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated.

A spokesperson for the memorial center said that the start of the fifth edition was well attended, and several thousand names had been read by the end of the afternoon. There is space for approximately 75 to 100 visitors in a tent on the former site.

Eva Weyl, an 89-year-old who was a prisoner in Camp Westerbork during the Second World War, was scheduled to read the first names along with her granddaughter on Wednesday. The first victim that was named is Anna Aa, a toddler from Amsterdam. Aa was killed in the Sobibor extermination camp with her parents and sister during the Second World War.

According to Minco, it is "no small thing" to read out the names of Holocaust victims. Each participant reads out about 150 names in a ten-minute reading session. "But it is a way to pay tribute to all those women, men and children," said Bertien Minco the director of the Westerbork Camp Memorial Center. He said it is like a living monument to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust in this manner.

Several mayors, including Femke Halsema (Amsterdam), Jan van Zanen (The Hague), Sybrand Buma (Leeuwarden), and Peter Snijders (Zwolle) will take turns reading names on Wednesday. The same will happen in the following days with several other mayors, parliamentarians, presenters, writers, and artists.

Among them are Arnon Grunberg and Jessica Durlacher. The presenters include Janine Abbring, Jeroen Wollaars, and Ruben Nicolai. Two of the reading sessions will be skipped on Friday in connection with the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest for the Jewish community. The ending of the Sabbath will be marked a day later, by skipping one reading session.

The last name that will be read out on Monday, January 27, is Henrich Zysmanowicz, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 at 19 years old. There will have been a total of 104,000 names read out of Jews, Sinti, and Roma, most of whom were deported from the Netherlands during World War II to be killed by the Nazis. This year will mark the first time that names will also be read of Jewish fugitives from Germany and Austria, and of Dutch people who were deported from Belgium and France.

The Namen Lezen event can be followed via the live stream of NOS and at the location itself in Drenthe. People planning on visiting the reading do not have to make special arrangements prior in advance