Special commemorations have been held today to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the Netherlands, hundreds of people took turns reading out the names of the 102,000 Dutch Holocaust victims.
 
 

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International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held every year on 27 January, the day Soviet troops liberated the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
 
 

The readings of names of the Dutch victims began on Saturday and continued 24 hours a day until Wednesday. They took place at the former concentration camp Westerbork in the northern province of Drenthe, Here, Dutch Jews were held in barracks until they were transported to death camps such as Sobibor and Auschwitz.
 

Reminder
"It's important for today's society to be reminded of what happened then and what impact it had", says Dirk Mulder, director of the Westerbork museum. "By hearing the names of the victims, it keeps the memories of these victims alive."
 
 

Every single name has been read out loud, as well as the age of each victim -  varying from a few months to over 80. It's a stark reminder of what happened more than 65 years ago. "If you hear those names and ages, you realise that the Second World War and the Holocaust were about individual lives and individual human beings", Mr Mulder says.
 
Hundreds of readers
The reading ceremony took place in the square where camp inmates had to assemble before being transported to other concentration camps. The hundreds of readers, each of whom read for ten minutes, came from different backgrounds: school children, actors, relatives of those who died in death camps, Holocaust survivors and others from all walks of life. They included a delegation from the Israeli embassy in the Netherlands.
 
Emotional
Hamutal Rogel-Fuchs, part of the embassy group, says it's very emotional to read and hear all those names, even though she never knew these people. "It's not just a name and an age", she says. "By reading out those names you give them some kind of character. It gives me the creeps, to be honest. I was practising the list when I was putting my children to bed and I read the names of children of their age. That's unbearable".
 
 

Westerbork and Auschwitz survivor Leny Boeken-Velleman also took a ten-minute turn reading the names. At 87, she still works tirelessly to tell her story. She has written a book and gives lectures across the country. She also travels to Auschwitz every year to show other people what really happened there.

 
"I come from a very large family", she says. "More than 180 of my relatives didn't survive the war. I was the only one. So I feel it is my duty to do this - my duty to them."
 
 

Therapy
Mrs Boeken-Velleman, who was taken from Westerbork to Auschwitz on the same transport as Anne Frank, regards her efforts to keep the memory of the World War II victims alive as a form of therapy. "I feel I've got to do this, otherwise I wouldn't be able to cope. I look happy on the outside, but on the inside, it's a different story."
 
The approximately 110 names she read during her ten minute session (in alphabetical order) were a mixture of young and old, male and female: Rebecca van Sisteren, 45 years; Saartje van Sisteren, 58 years; Lea van Sisteren-Haagman, 25 years. Names unknown to her, she says. "Last time I did this was in 2005, in Amsterdam", she recalls. "Afer I finished, I heard someone else read my mother's name. That was just too much."
 
Eyewitnesses
She was joined by two other women - one in her 50s and her daughter who is in her 20s - whom she met during her annual trip to Auschwitz. "I can't do these things on my own anymore", she says, almost apologetically. "But I'll continue for as long as I can. There aren't many eyewitnesses left, you see."
 
"There will be no end", says Dirk Mulder. "We'll still be doing this in decades to come, even after the survivors have all gone. Places like Westerbork and Auschwitz will remain the living testaments to what has happened."

Photo: The monument  "102,000 Stones" at the assembly square at camp Westerbork, where the reading ceremony took place. (Photo by Johan van Slooten/RNW)