The vicious attack on Jews following a soccer match in Amsterdam left one New Yorker who fled the Dutch city as a child to escape the Holocaust “in shock.”
“It’s like a modern-day Kristallnacht,” railed Lore Baer, an Amsterdam native who was born three months before the infamous “Night of Broken Glass” on November 9, 1938 that left scores of Jews beaten.
“This is history repeating itself. It’s really haunting,” the 86-year-old Upper West Sider told The Post on Friday, ahead of the 86th anniversary of the terrifying night.
The unprovoked attack on Israeli soccer fans in town to see their Maccabi Tel Aviv team Thursday is being called a “classic pogrom.”
Jewish men, women and children were rammed by cars, beaten on the street, stabbed, and thrown into canals by Arabic-speaking mobs, according to reports.
Police “inaction” enabled it to continue for hours, according to watchdogs.
“They told the Israelis to go into the hotels and not leave,” StandWithUs Netherlands executive director Yahly Bar-Lev told The Post, adding that Jewish victims reportedly “didn’t feel safe with the local police.”
The shocking attack on Jews more than eight decades after the Holocaust feels “very close to home” for Baer, who lived in Amsterdam until age 5, when she was whisked away to wait out the war with a Gentile family.
“That saved my life,” said the multimedia artist.
As she watched eerily familiar scenes of Jews being hunted and pummeled on the street, scrambling to escape, with police doing little to stop it – Baer recalled the horror of Kristallnacht for “the crime” of being a Jew.
“I’m sitting here crying,” said the grandmother of eight, who fears for her family’s fate in the US.
“It’s not that different than what’s going on at Columbia,” she asserted, noting that the mobs of Arabs in Holland made good in deed what the keffiyeh-clad protestors on college quads promised in word.
After emigrating to the US in 1947 with her parents, who also survived the war, Bear returned to her native Amsterdam some dozen times over the years.
The last visit coincided with Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
“There was nothing except horror for what happened – I felt only love,” said Baer of the warmth and support she felt in Amsterdam during the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
“Things have clearly changed,” she said, noting she’s unsure she’ll ever return.
Holocaust organizations are blasting the shocking attack – and its haunting timing.
“Eighty six years after Kristallnacht and we’re reliving pogroms in the streets of Europe – it’s unacceptable,” said Greg Schneider of the Claims Conference, which launched a “Inside Kristallnacht” educational project aimed at school-age children.
“It depresses us about not learning lessons from the Shoah.
“It’s not history – it’s news.”
