Wertheim Park Gates
The Wertheim Park is in the Plantage area of Amsterdam.
It’s quite an unusual part of town. With it’s broad, wide streets and white, elegant buildings, it has something a little stately about it. A little, well, unlike Amsterdam, which is a city I have come to associate more with dark narrow alleyways and crooked brown bricked facades.
There are plenty of areas in Amsterdam that can challenge this view I have of the city and the Plantage is one of them.
It is also one of my favourite parts of town. The elegance of the buildings lends it a grace that appeals to me.
It hides its secret melancholy well however.
In the Second World War, this part of town housed an administration office of the occupying German forces.
The Jewish community that once thrived here, and lived behind some of these elegant facades, has long since gone.
All that remains is a memorial to the Holocaust, in the grounds of the Wertheim Park.
A slab of shattered glass, which I assume represents the terrors of the “Kristalnacht”, the sad, delicate testimony to the loss that was suffered in this city, not so long ago.
