Daniel Libeskind will have the memory of an entire lost city on his mind at Sunday’s official unveiling ceremony of the National Holocaust Memorial of Names in Amsterdam.

“I grew up in Poland in Lodz, a city that had hundreds of thousands of Jews. There was nobody Jewish left. It taught that you should never give in to authoritarianism. You should never bow your head to fear,” the 74-year-old architect said in a recent interview about his forthcoming memorial for the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Libeskind took the memory of his birth city into his design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, one of the architect’s first major commissions when it opened in 2001. 

Now, 20 years later, Libeskind’s latest project pays tribute to the memory of the Dutch Jewish, Roma, and Sinti populations that fell victim to the Holocaust. 

Located in heart of the Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, the memorial’s four volumes form the Hebrew word ‘לזכר’, or ‘In Memory of’,  arranged overlooking the Weesperstraat between the city’s Hermitage museum and Herengracht canal.

Visitors will enter a labyrinth of two-meter-high stacked brick walls, each with the name of one of the country’s 102,000 victims displayed underneath a mirrored-finish stainless steel covering. A separate stack of 1,000 bricks will represent unknown victims. Both give off a haunting and tangible sense of the quantities of loss and pain the Holocaust engendered. 

“History is not over, it hasn’t passed,” Libeskind told Archinect in a phone interview. “There’s always new generations who have to take on that burden of history, which is irreversible. We can’t bring those people back. 100,000 people cannot come back.” 

Construction on the 1,550-square-meter memorial began in 2019. The opening ceremony will be presided over by the Dutch Auschwitz Committee with Libeskind and King Willem-Alexander, who will inaugurate the memorial through a symbolic placing of a stone near its declaration wall.