ANDB’s Bustling Building, circa 1940
11.00-12.00 uur
With: Dawn Skorczewski
The Rescue of Belsen’s Diamond Children
13.00-14.00 uur
With: Bettine Siertsema
Diaries of a Diamond Cutter
14.00-15.00 uur
With: Nina Siegal
Poetry and Survival
16.00-17.00 uur
With: Frank Diamond
ANDB’s Bustling Building, circa 1940
11.00-12.00 uur
From the late 1500s to the present, Amsterdam hosted a robust diamond industry, largely populated by Jewish workers. Diamond work was done in small spaces, with poor lighting, and it led to loss of eyesight and a variety of respiratory diseases. In the late 1800s, Henri Polak organized the ANDB. Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1939) was commissioned to build the De Burcht union building in 1899. As the headquarters of the Diamond Workers’ union, it was the throbbing cultural centre of the workers in the diamond industry before the war, a site for education, social events, and even community dances. Today’s programs, in English, chronicle the lives of those in the diamond trade who were changed forever by the deportations.
Dawn Skorczewski is Lecturer at Amsterdam University College and Research Professor of English Emerita at Brandeis University. Her recent work on Amsterdam’s Diamond Jews includes Sieg Maandag: Art and Life in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen (2020) and articles in American Imago (2023) and the Journal of Holocaust Research (2018).
The Rescue of Belsen’s Diamond Children
13.00-14.00 uur
In 1942 a large group of Jewish diamond workers was temporarily exempted from deportation, as the Germans needed their skills and contacts to set up a diamond industry of their own. In some cases the exemption included their wives and children as well. In 1943 they were nevertheless deported to Westerbork and on to Bergen-Belsen. Though their chances were more than slim, miraculously most of the nearly 60 children survived, thanks to the tireless efforts of a Jewish-Polish woman and some others, who cared for them and found them food in the camp where hunger and disease raged.
Dutch Historian and Professor Bettine Siertsema will describe her book about a group of diamond children from Amsterdam who survived Bergen-Belsen with the help of a Polish nurse.
Diaries of a Diamond Cutter
14.00-15.00 uur
Meijer Emmerik (born in 1894), was a Jewish diamond cutter who worked in the Amsterdam diamond industry. Shortly after the invasion of the Netherlands, his daughter, Lena, gave birth to twin boys, Maxie and Loetje. When the deportations began, Lena’s husband was one of the first Jewish men to be arrested, and Emmerik was blackmailed by the Germans to try to secure his release by “selling” them industrial diamonds. Emmerik was also given the option to buy the 120,000 “diamond sperre” to protect his family, but he was rightly suspicious of this scheme. During the war, Emmerik kept a diary about his attempts to protect his family through various means— his daughter and son and law, the tiny babies who both had health problems, and his wife, who was betrayed by a neighbor and died in the camps. He spent much of the war in hiding in Limburg and survived.
Writer Nina Siegal will discuss a chapter from her new book, The Diary Keepers, which focuses on a Jewish diamond worker Meijer Emmerik. She will talk about his life as a diamond worker, the 120,000 sperren, and the two year old twin grandsons that Meijer had to protect.
Poetry and Survival
16.00-17.00 uur
Frank Diamand was 4 years old when his family was deported to Bergen-Belsen. The grandson of Jewish Council President Abraham Asscher, Diamand was initially spared deportation. But even the owner of the largest diamond factory in Amsterdam and his family were not exempted from incarceration and near-death in a concentration camp. Diamand survived the camp and grew up to become a filmmaker and poet. His poems, read today, chronicle the harrowing effects of the camp on a small child and the struggle to make sense of suffering in its aftermath. His forms take the form of a kind of testimony: the power of art to represent and manage the effects of overwhelming childhood trauma.
Frank Diamand (1939), documentary filmmaker and poet, will tell the story of his childhood incarceration in Bergen-Belsen. and his memories as the grandson of Abraham Asscher