Guus Luijters is a historian, writer and poet. He is the editor of the anthologies Modern French Poetry (2001) and Amsterdam: The city in poems (2001), and the author of Song of Stars (2011) and Empty City: collected memories 1943-1950 (2014). In 2012 he published In Memoriam: The deported and murdered Jewish, Roma and Sinti children 1942-45 and the accompanying Addendum, which gives the names of all the 18,000 children who were murdered, and contains 3,700 photographs.
(Nieuw Amsterdam, 2013, 255 pagina's)
Children’s lives during the Second World War often seem to be represented by just one life, that of Anne Frank. Anne was gifted, loveable, rebellious and hopeful at a time when Jewish life was being sucked out of the cities of Europe. Her personal story stands for that entire almost incomprehensible period, while the sheer extent of the deportations is gradually being lost to our collective memory. Anne Frank represents a vast number who are now out of reach, no longer visible, their very existence in many cases forgotten.
