At the start of his lifelong career the Magnum member Leonard Freed, who lived from 1929 to 2006, spent many years in Amsterdam, from 1957 to 1970. As an American Jew from a family of Russian immigrants he felt at ease in a historic city with a liberal spirit and a long tradition of tolerance towards Jews.

He was fascinated by the remarkable postwar recovery of Jewish life there, where only twenty thousand out of eighty thousand had survived the Shoah, and this became the subject of his first major project: a many-sided and penetrating portrait of a community that had endured unimaginable horror.

“Resilience and vitality, within a community that has lost almost everything. This is what he wanted to record when he arrived in 1957: something between documentary and an ode to survival.”