Three quarters of the Dutch people are Jewish Population – 102,000 people – People killed by the Nazis during World War II, the highest percentage in Western Europe. However, unlike some other countries, the Netherlands did not have a national museum dedicated to these horrors.
Eighty years after World War II, things will change on Sunday. presence of president of israelDutch King Isaac Herzog will open the country’s first Holocaust museum on the site of a nursery school and teaching college where 60,000 children were smuggled to safety.
“We will place these momentous national events in our collective memory within their vast international context,” said Emil Schreiber, director general of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. Stated.
“This reflects a very long history of processing and the invisibility of this subject in Dutch public spaces. For a long time, many in the community felt there was no room to specifically talk about the Jewish war experience. was.
“But now we are here, and the question is, why now? Because we are telling the original owners of this history, the survivors, that we are keeping their history here. Because we can write about it and show that in 10 or 15 years, when they are no longer here, we are still here to pass it on. And it gives new generations the importance of Dutch history. It’s about showing an awareness of sexuality and what can happen when people are differentiated, treated as “other” and ultimately dehumanized. ”
Herzog’s attendance at the opening ceremony, which comes amid Israel’s continued offensive in Gaza, is not without controversy. Dutch pro-Palestinian group Rights Forum called it a “slap in the face of the Palestinian people.” Parts of central Amsterdam will be closed on Sunday, with a pro-Palestinian demonstration taking place at Waterloo Square, the main square.
Salo Müller, who was smuggled into the country through a daycare center when she was three years old, said the opening of the museum was an important moment.
Muller, now 88 years old, said: “I’m really happy to have a Holocaust museum.” “It’s essential that people understand what happened to the Jews. It’s not for me, because I know everything, it’s for people who are not Jewish and don’t know.”
Some, including Johannes Houwink ten Kate, emeritus professor and former researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, say it has been a long journey. “We have considered ourselves a nation of tolerance and resistance,” he said.
“We didn’t want to think of ourselves as a nation collaborating with the Nazis. We thought of ourselves as a nation of Anne Frank. It is painful to be forced to see ourselves as a nation of tram drivers transporting families to the station, from there to the transit camps, and from there to the extermination camps. Recognition of the Holocaust was delayed. is.”
Across the street from the museum is the Old Dutch Museum. shoburg The theater, which housed 46,000 Jews on their way to the concentration camp, is now a monument.
this week, Evidence of 23 bills revealed that GVB Amsterdam tram The journey was chronicled in the critically acclaimed film and book Occupied City by Bianca Stigter and her husband, British filmmaker Steve McQueen. Femke Halsema, Mayor of Amsterdam, Calls GVB’s cooperation ‘shameful’.
According to Bart Wallet, professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam, the Holocaust museum is a “defining moment in Dutch memory culture”, with a focus on the resistance, military rescue and victims in general, but with a clear He says there is more to be done. . “Society is not finished with the Holocaust yet,” he said. “It’s still more or less an open wound, and parts of society are still coming to terms with the history of the war.”
But the museum was a beginning, Mueller said. “At the Dutch Theater, there are ‘drops’ on the walls, each with a photo, and you can listen to people’s stories,” he said. “I’m a drop of that too. Like a museum, it’s a place full of meaning. It makes you still. You can’t look away.”
