As a four-year-old boy, Guus Luijters rode on the back of his father’s bicycle. They drove through Kattenburg, one of the Eastern Islands in Amsterdam. Little Luijters saw broken, empty houses that you could look right through. “Where are all those people?” he asked. “They’re gone,” his father replied.
It is this memory that prompted writer, journalist, poet and city chronicler Guus Luijters to write his important book In Memoriam. The deported and murdered Jewish, Roma and Sinti children 1942-1945which was published in 2012.
Last Friday, January 3, Guus Luijters died of cancer at the age of 81. In April 2024, he was diagnosed with cancer, but decided not to seek treatment. Two months later, on June 7, he was awarded the Andreas Medal for his services to the city.
Luijters was born on November 3, 1943 in Amsterdam, in the Bos en Lommer district. He attended the Erasmus School, then the five-year Hogereburgerschool on Keizersgracht and then the Spinoza Lyceum.
During his studies at the University of Amsterdam, he started writing columns for the student magazine Propria Curesof which he was editor between 1969 and 1971. Immediately afterwards he started a long career from 1971 to 2019 as a literary critic and columnist Het Parool. During his editorship of the ‘men’s magazine’ Playboy (1983-2003) he offered leading writers, including Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve, a platform.
Walks through Amsterdam
Luijters was an avid reader from his earliest childhood. At the age of eleven, he read Edgar Allan Poe’s stories in a Prisma paperback, which he said “completely confused him.” Decisive books followed later Guilt and penalty from Dostoyevsky, Lolita from Nabokov and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. He continued to read and write until the last moment of his life. Luijters was married to filmmaker Olga Madsen and, after their divorce, to Ruth Visser; daughter Sara Luijters is also a journalist. Luijters wrote with her Ode to the egg (2021).
Jeroen Brouwers finally wrote his colleagues into the ground. Why exactly, and does something like this still happen?
At the end of 1979, Luijters was fiercely, and also unfairly, attacked by polemicist Jeroen Brouwers with the pamphlet The New Auditor. Brouwers accused Luijters and some of his fellow columnists of having contributed to the then prevailing “boys’ literature by nice boys” and the “childish childish deification” of literature. Luijters was wise enough to keep his distance from Brouwers’ allegations.
Luijters officially debuted as a prose writer with Circus Melancholia (1972), followed in 1992 by the poetry collection Canigou. Childhood memories play an important role in his oeuvre, as do the walks through the beloved Amsterdam. The dilapidated houses in the city center of his youth inspired him to write three publications about the Second World War and especially the fate that befell the Jews. Luijters knew every place and every tram stop in Amsterdam from where Jews were deported.
Critical image
In Lost city (2023), written with documentary maker Willy Lindwer, he provides a critical picture of the Amsterdam Municipal Transport Company (GVB) that enriched itself with the deportation of Jews to Central Station or Amsterdam Muiderpoort. Luijters and Lindwer conducted revealing research into the invoices that the company sent to the occupier. But the GVB “never showed a trace of remorse,” Luijters said in the book. Of In Memoriamin collaboration with Aline Pennewaard, he provides a biography of almost 20,000 deported and murdered children, based on seven years of archival research. He wanted to find out where the children lived before they were deported, in which concentration camps and in what year they were killed.
One year after In Memoriam appeared Children’s Chronicle 1940-1945: letters, testimonies and diaries from the Shoah.
At the same time as the appearance of In Memoriam An exhibition of three thousand photos that Luijters had discovered during his research into the deported children took place in the Amsterdam City Archives. These photos were often unknown even to many family members. The photos were exhibited four rows high over a length of 130 meters. Just like the book, this tribute to the slain Amsterdam children was moving. Luijters calculated that there had been 102 train transports that transported the children via Westerbork to the concentration camps.
One of the very last transports was that of Anne Frank and her family. Luijters says in the book that from the tram, which followed the route Rozengracht-Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal-Centraal Station, they “could see the Secret Annex”.