Dutch Holocaust Survivors Suffer Anti-Semitic Abuse in Robbery

By JTA September 7, 2015

An elderly Dutch Jewish couple said they were subjected to anti-Semitic abuse by robbers who broke into their Amsterdam home.

Two men in their 40s or 50s, who the couple said had a Middle Eastern appearance but spoke fluent Dutch, presented themselves as police officers on Aug. 4 to Samuel and Diana Blog, Holocaust survivors ages 87 and 86 respectively, so the couple would buzz them into their apartment building and home, the Nieuw Israelitisch Weekblad, or NIW, reported. The attack was first reported in the Dutch media on Sept. 3.

The men broke Samuel Blog’s hip. They made his wife, whose father was a diamond dealer and had a large collection of jewels, drink a barbiturate at gunpoint.

When Diana, who grew up in Paris and survived the Auschwitz death camp, had trouble removing one of her rings from her fingers – she told NIW she was too stressed to get it off immediately – one of the men threatened to cut off her finger and called her and her husband “dirty Jews,” she said.

The robbers made off with over $15,000 in jewelry and cash.

Following more than a week in hospital, the couple was released to a rehabilitation center as police look for the culprits. The couple’s son is living in Spain, NIW reported. Samuel Blog, who survived the Holocaust in hiding in the Netherlands, has had his vision deteriorate radically after the attack and now can barely see.

“I don’t feel like eating anymore,” Diana Blog told NIW of her feeling after the attack. “I am broken from the inside.”

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