Amsterdam Publishers

Amsterdam Publishers is the largest publisher of Holocaust memoirs in Europe. It was founded in 2012 by Liesbeth Heenk. Since 2019 it focuses on Holocaust-related literature.

History
Amsterdam Publishers started publishing ebooks on art in 2012. One of their earliest releases was an ebook on Rembrandt etchings, and accompanied an exhibition on Rembrandt at the Teylers museum in Haarlem in 2013. It was the first time a digital publication accompanied an exhibition. In 2015, the imprint started running self-publishing workshops, which was later accompanied by an instructional handbook published in Dutch.

Amsterdam Publishers added their first non-art titles in 2014. Manny Steinberg’s Outcry – Holocaust Memoirs was an early commercial success. Since 2019, the publisher has focused exclusively on Holocaust Memoirs. The founder, Liesbeth Heenk, has stated that the mission of the imprint is to fight anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Heenk's stable of writers includes a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors as well as second and third-generation members of survivors’ families.

Amsterdam Publishers is one of the few international publishing houses based in the Netherlands. Its authors are international (mainly from the US), and books are (being) published in English, Albanian, Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Sinhalese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

On the occasion of the 10-year anniversary of the publishing house, the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York hosted an Amsterdam Publishers authors event on 12 September 2022. In November 2022, a 7-day booktour in Albania and Kosovo took place to promote Dr Anna Kohen's Flower of Vlora in the Albanian language, Lulja e Vlorës.

Liesbeth Heenk on her motivation to publish stories of the Holocaust:

''My motivation is connected to a sense of injustice. It most likely started with my mother telling me and my siblings at the dinner table how she, as a young girl, used to carry pamphlets in her bike for the Dutch resistance. One doesn’t realize the significance of these things until much later. On a deeper level, I feel a strong need to do something meaningful, to change the world as much as an individual is capable of changing the world.''

In 2024 the publishing house will release its 100th Holocaust book.