Gretha Leijden van Amstel (1903-1981)

Greet van Amstel, that's what she called herself, was born on November 6, 1903 in Amsterdam. From 1920 - 1922 she lived with Lodewijk (Lo) Lopes Cardozo, her first husband, in Berlin. Here she came into contact with modern art for the first time. Returning to Amstedam in 1923, she became a student at the Institute for Applied Arts Education, where she worked under the sculptor Berend Jordens and later also in the studio of John Raedecker.

In 1930 she became a member of The Independents. Her sculptures are judged as expressive-figurative to moving absract. Nothing remains of her pre-war work: in their blind hatred the Germans destroyed all the sculptures! She was involved in politics from an early age; anti-fascist and she also felt connected to anarchist youth movements. No wonder that after 1940 she was active in one of the first resistance groups: the group around Henk Seevliet, who was later executed in the Amersfoort camp. Probably through treason she was arrested by the Germans in February 1943 and after a captivity in Scheveningen, deported via Westerbork with her husband and daughter Sonja (Rita) to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in early April 1944. During the selection, she saw her husband for the last; he will be gassed on April 8.

Was Greet also aware that a sister and two brothers and their husbands plus a few dozen other relatives had already been killed here from July 1942 to November 1943? She spends ten terrible months there, which she herself describes later in her collection "Forbidden to live" and in an article: "Auschwitz, where the rails ended". She has to watch how her nineteen-year-old daughter is taken away to the gas chambers on August 31. She miraculously survives. When the Russians approached the camp at the end of January 1945, most of the prisoners are taken to other camps (death marches), and others remain behind, including Greet van Amstel. In a sinister way she escapes the mass liquidation, which the SS is still carrying out at the last minute.

She is rescued by Russian soldiers. A long journey follows: via Odessa in Russia and Marseille she arrives back in Amsterdam in June 1945. She probably does not know yet that her son Matthieu died somewhere in Germany last month. She survives the war only with her son Paul.

She starts sculpting again: she expresses her camp experiences in stone sculptures. But that is becoming increasingly difficult due to a serious back injury that was inflicted on her in Auschwitz. Stimulated by the artist Willy Boers, whom she married in 1954, she later also started painting (abstract compositions).

In 1957 she begins to write and write poetry (see source). In 1958 she completes the long poem: "And there was no darkness on the earth". She participates in exhibitions where she shows her mixed painting techniques in 1971, among other things. In 1973 she became a member of the Amsterdam Artists Working Group. The police didn't let go either. In 1972, when she was almost 70 years old, she spoke in a hearing of the second chamber about the "Drie van Breda" (notorious war criminals).

Greet died on January 4, 1981 in her native city. A Leijden van Amstel, who has lived with a passion for art and sometimes for politics.