Amsterdam Publishers is the largest publisher of Holocaust memoirs in Europe. It was founded in 2012 by Dutch art historian Liesbeth Heenk. Since 2019 it focuses on Holocaust-related literature.

History

Amsterdam Publishers started publishing ebooks on art in 2012. One of their earliest releases was an ebook on

Rembrandt Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally consid ...

etchings, and accompanied an exhibition on

at the

Teylers museum Teylers Museum () is an art, natural history, and science museum in Haarlem, Netherlands. Established in 1778, Teylers Museum was founded as a centre for contemporary art and science. The historic centre of the museum is the neoclassical Oval R ...

Haarlem Haarlem (; predecessor of ''Harlem'' in English) is a city and municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of North Holland. Haarlem is situated at the northern edge of the Randstad, one of the most populated metropoli ...

in 2013. It was the first time a digital publication accompanied an exhibition. In 2015, the imprint started running self-publishing workshops, which was later accompanied by an instructional handbook published in Dutch. Amsterdam Publishers added their first non-art titles in 2014. Manny Steinberg’s ''Outcry – Holocaust Memoirs'' was an early commercial success. Since 2019, the publisher has focused exclusively on Holocaust Memoirs. The founder, Liesbeth Heenk, has stated that the mission of the imprint is to fight

anti-Semitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

and

Holocaust denial Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements: ...

. Amsterdam Publishers is one of the few international publishing houses based in the Netherlands. Its authors are international (mainly from the US), and books are (being) published in English, Albanian, Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Sinhalese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Chinese and Japanese. On the occasion of the 10-year anniversary of the publishing house, the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York hosted an Amsterdam Publishers authors event on 12 September 2022. In November 2022, a 7-day booktour in Albania and Kosovo took place to promote Dr Anna Kohen's Flower of Vlora in the Albanian language, Lulja e Vlorës. Liesbeth Heenk on her motivation to publish stories of the Holocaust: ''My motivation is connected to a sense of injustice. It most likely started with my mother telling me and my siblings at the dinner

table Table may refer to: * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (landform), a flat area of land * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns * Table (database), how the table data ...

how she, as a young girl, used to carry pamphlets in her bike for the Dutch resistance. One doesn’t realize the significance of these things until much later. On a deeper level, I feel a strong need to do something meaningful, to change the world as much as an individual is capable of changing the world.''

Bibliography

Holocaust Library Amsterdam Publishers specialises in memoirs by

Holocaust survivors Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and Axis powers, its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no unive ...

, Second Generation survivors and Third Generation survivors. These include memoirs by Manny Steinberg, Joseph Schupack,

Janina Altman Janina Altman (; 2 January 1931 – 24 July 2022) was a Polish-Israeli chemist, author and a Holocaust survivor. Life Janina Hescheles' father, Henryk Hescheles, was a journalist in Lwów and publisher of the Polish-language Zionist periodic ...

, Hank Brodt,

Nanette Blitz Konig Nanette Konig-Blitz (born 6 April 1929) is a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor and former classmate of Anne Frank. She has lived in São Paulo, Brazil since 1953. In 2015, she published a book about being a Belsen survivor called ''Eu Sobre ...

, Natalie Hess, Walter Leopold, Paul Davidovits, Salo Muller, Robert Krell, Leon Kleiner, Halina Kleiner, Sara Lustigman Omelinksi, Jan Yohay Remetz, Roman Halter, Elmar Rivosh and Leokadia Schmidt. Their memoirs are part of the series Holocaust Survivor Memoirs WWII. Many of these survivors can be found on this

List of Holocaust survivors The people on this list are or were survivors of Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe before and during World War II. A state-enforced persecution of Jewish people in Nazi-controlled Europe lasted from the introductio ...

. Memoirs by second and third generation survivors include Adena Bernstein Astrowsky, Evelyn Joseph Grossman, Fred Feldman, Ronny Hein, Zvi Wiesenfeld, Laura Beth Bakst, Nechama Birnbaum, Martin Bodek, Barbara Gilford, Anna Kohen, Ira Wesley Kitmacher, Max Friedman, Mark Prelas, Robert Wolf, Tammy Bottner, Ron Vincent, Ettie Zilber, and Emanuel Rosen. These publications can all be found in the series Holocaust Survivor True Stories WWII. The series Jewish Children in the Holocaust contains the stories written by children who have been hidden in Holland and Belgium during the Second World War, with books by Robert Krell, Joseph Gosler, Salo Muller and Agnes Schipper. In 2021, the publishing house added a series of New Jewish Fiction which includes novels by Annette Libeskind Berkovits, Ruth Rotkowitz, and Casey Hayes. A new series Holocaust Books for Young Adults has been added in 2022, featuring Running for Shelter, written by Suzette Sheft (2006) who started writing the true story of her grandmother at age 13. Amsterdam Publishers has also published the memoirs of Omar Ndizeye and of Hyppolite Ntigurirwa, which detail their experiences of the

Rwandan genocide The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu ...

. This topic has since been abandoned, in order to fully concentrate on Holocaust stories and Jewish literature.

References

{{Reflist Book publishing companies of the Netherlands