AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A news website collected nearly $30,000 for a Dutch Holocaust survivor couple who were robbed and beaten in their Amsterdam home and called “dirty Jews.”
Jan Roos, a journalist for the Geenstijl.nl website, last week presented octogenarians Samuel and Diana Blog with a check for 25,672 euros ($27,898) to compensate the couple for losses they suffered — $15,000 and jewelry — during the 2015 attack.
“We know you suffered a lot of pain, but you also lost a lot of money,” Roos said while presenting Diana Blog with flowers and then a cardboard check. The money was collected online through crowdfunding.
A tearful Diana Blog sat in a wheelchair as she received Roos at the old-age facility where she moved with her husband following the attack. 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 rendered blind and also is confined to a wheelchair. Last year, Diana Blog said the attack caused her to lose the desire to live.
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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