Liesbeth Heenk doesn’t just publish Holocaust memoirs — she tracks, in real time, how the world reads them. And since the bloody Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, what she’s seeing has changed dramatically.

As the owner of the largest publisher of Holocaust memoirs in Europe, Heenk lives and breathes stories of brutality and resilience from the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews. Some 14 years after she launched Amsterdam Publishers as a one-woman crusade to make a difference, she has more than just a good feel for what types of stories people buy, and which messages and emotional levers hit the hardest.

She has the data to prove it.

“On Amazon alone, I can see that people have read 73 million pages [of Holocaust memoirs] on Kindle ebooks, besides everything in print,” Heenk said in a video call with The Times of Israel. “Each of those is a page read by a person somewhere in the world, one at a time.”

A non-Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, Heenk trained as an art historian and once managed elite art collections at major auction houses, even working with the Dutch royal family. But she left the field in search of greater meaning.

“There were times when I couldn’t tell myself what I was doing all day, because it did not move me in any way,” she said. “Now, I don’t do anything but dream about the Holocaust, and books, and editing, and I find it so much more worthwhile.”

Today, Heenk is driven to build what she describes as the largest possible reservoir of Holocaust testimony before it is too late.

Her company currently has about 130 memoirs in print in multiple languages, alongside others that have gone out of print or been taken over by other publishers. But with fewer than 200,000 Jewish survivors still alive worldwide, according to data from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the opportunity to share their stories is rapidly dwindling.

And with demand for Holocaust stories cratering since October 7 amid rising antisemitism and the widespread distortion of Holocaust history online, Heenk believes her effort to document the genocide of 6 million Jews is more urgent than ever.

Reading the Holocaust

Heenk works from her desk seven days a week, without employees. (“I had three assistants last year, but I actually published fewer books,” she........

© The Times of Israel