Since its launch in 2012, Amsterdam Publishers has released or scheduled 116 Holocaust memoirs, nonfiction narratives, and a handful of novels in English. These include 10 books in 2024, 18 books this year, and several lined up for 2026. Founder and editor-in-chief Liesbeth Heenk, whose home is in the Netherlands and whose main market is the United States, builds her list with the firsthand recollections, diaries, and letters of survivors and with stories retold by survivors’ children and grandchildren.
“I am an agnostic non-Jewish person, and I am on a mission,” Heenk told PW. Though she has acquired several fiction titles—including Roslyn Bernstein’s Goldberg Prize-winning debut novel, The Girl Who Counted Numbers and Elizabeth Rosenberg's May release, To Love Another Day—Heenk intends, going forward, to publish only verifiable accounts of actual events. She said she sees her press as “a safe haven for publishing true stories about the Holocaust.”
All Amsterdam Publishers titles are English-language originals, available as either e-books or print-on-demand paperbacks and hardcovers sold on Amazon and distributed through IngramSpark. Their authors come from nations that include the U.S., Europe, Canada, Israel, South America, Australia, and New Zealand, Heenk said, “and my readership is worldwide.”
An art historian and expert on Vincent van Gogh, Heenk started Amsterdam Publishers to offer a series of books, Secrets of van Gogh, on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace. “I started out doing little booklets, and I noticed how easy it was” to use KDP, Heenk recalled. She still sorts her titles into series, for better discoverability.
She left art books behind in 2014, when she published Holocaust survivor Manny Steinberg’s memoir, Outcry, and accompanied Steinberg to Dachau for the 50th anniversary of liberation in 2015. “That’s when I realized the importance of publishing Holocaust memoirs, not just for the survivors but for their children,” Heenk said. “I thought, if I can do it financially, I’ll focus on nothing but that.” She devoted herself to finding an audience for Outcry, which now is available in many languages including English, French, Chinese, Czech, French, German, and Italian.
Amsterdam Publishers’s most popular title is The Redhead of Auschwitz, published in 2021 and now available in 11 languages. It’s a third-generation book, in which Nechama Birnbaum retells the stories of her grandmother, Rechel Chana Greenstein. For Heenk, the book’s immense success is “not thanks to me, but thanks to [Birnbaum],” whose social media posts feature her grandmother.
Birnbaum was among seven Amsterdam Publishers authors who attended this year’s American Library Association Annual Conference with Heenk. Among the authors were Oren Schneider, whose The Apprentice of Buchenwald tells how his Czechoslovakian father, Alexander Rosenberg, helped resisters sabotage armaments; Peter Wiesner, whose Bipolar Refugee describes his mother Mary Krotoczynski’s childhood escape on the Kindertransport and her mental health struggles; and Evelyn Joseph Grossman, who wrote about her parents in Hidden in Berlin and worked with Heenk to ready the book for print, in time for her then-97-year-old mother, Lilo Jacoby Joseph, to see it.
These and other authors participated in a June 29 event honoring Heenk and Amsterdam Publishers at Philadelphia’s Congregation Rodeph Shalom. Sponsors included the education organization Tikvah, the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center of Elkins Park, Pa., and Rodeph Shalom’s gender-inclusive pRiSm committee.
Heenk acknowledges that she doesn’t exactly know why she has made it her mission to publish Holocaust memoirs. She reflected that her mother, born in 1934, was about six years old at the start of the war, and “when she was young, she was riding her bicycle from her parents’ house to the farmers in the neighborhood, not knowing she was carrying pamphlets for the resistance. Maybe she instilled in me the idea that you can do something worthwhile” to combat injustice.
She also spoke about gaps in historical education today and the gradual disappearance of the World War II generation and its descendants. “I don’t think there will be a fourth generation who will be telling the stories, [not just] emotionally but in terms of knowledge,” Heenk said. For now, submissions to Amsterdam Publishers are open for limited periods, and she plans to republish out-of-print or otherwise unheralded memoirs from the mid-20th century. Since they receive personal papers and manuscripts, museums are another source of material. In one case, a Melbourne Museum curator and third-generation family member suggested a manuscript by Luba Wrobel Goldberg, her grandmother, which became Spark of Hope: An Autobiography.
“Many of my authors are first-time authors, and [their story] is the only thing they tell,” Heenk said. Survivors, their children, and their grandchildren might not see themselves as authors, yet they urgently want to connect with and inform the public. Writing “simply, from the heart” can be an effective means to convey our common humanity and teach history lessons that resonate today, Heenk said. “If you want to make a change in this world of ours, then it has to be via storytelling.”
