Dutch news site collects $30,000 for assaulted Holocaust survivors

Cnaan Liphshiz

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A news website that followed the slow rehabilitation of Dutch Holocaust survivors who were savagely assaulted in their home collected nearly $30,000 for them.

Jan Roos, a journalist for the Geenstijl.nl website, last week presented octogenarians Samuel and Diana Blog with a check for 25,672 euros that his website had collected to compensate the couple for losses they suffered during the 2015 attack, which they said was a violent robbery that featured anti-Semitic abuse.

A tearful Diana Blog sat in a wheelchair as she received Roos at the old-age home where she moved with her husband following the attack at their Amsterdam home. The perpetrators were never caught. Beaten and threatened with the amputation of her finger, she is no longer able to walk freely after the attack. Her husband was beaten so hard he was rendered blind in the attack. He also is confined to a wheelchair. Last year, Diana Blog said the attack caused her to lose the desire to live.

“We know you suffered a lot of pain but you also lost a lot of money,” Roos said of the $15,000 and jewelry that the robbers took as he presented Diana Blog with flowers. He then gave her a cardboard check for the amount, which the website collected online through crowd funding.

Dutch media this month revisited the robbery, which shocked the Netherlands because of the Blogs’ age and the cruelty they described, following the Feb. 15 visit that the anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders paid the couple.

Relying on their description of the perpetrators as having a Middle Eastern appearance, he said the Blogs were “victims of Moroccan violence.”

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