With a new Holocaust Museum, the Netherlands is confronted with its past
Three faces stare blankly from sepia-toned passport photos, haphazardly pasted onto a card for an unknown recipient. It’s probably two parents and their son, but we’ll never know for sure. Below their photos are the handwritten words: “Don’t forget us!”
It is unclear when this card was sent. But his plea has helped shape the permanent collection of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, which will open to the public next week. The new institution has been in the works for almost twenty years, during which time the project overcame lingering skepticism, driven in part by reluctance to confront this part of Dutch history.
“I think it is a remnant of a long-felt discomfort in the Netherlands about taking ownership of what happened,” says Emile Schrijver, general director of the National Holocaust Museum.
While other museums in the Netherlands cover aspects of the history of the Holocaust – such as the Anne Frank House, or museums that focus more broadly on the Second World War – the National Holocaust Museum is the first institution dedicated to telling the full story of the Holocaust. story of the persecution. of Jews in the Netherlands.
“The collective embrace of the fact that the fate of the Jews in the Second World War differed substantially from the fate of the Netherlands took a very long time,” says Schrijver. The opening of the museum, says Schrijver, ‘is a kind of conclusion to a process of acceptance.’
In the Netherlands, the Nazis deported 75 percent of the country’s Jewish population to concentration camps, the highest percentage in Western Europe. The new museum aims to answer the question of how such a large group of people – 102,000 Jews, but also 220 Roma, also known as Roma and Sinti – could be removed from their daily lives, and what those lives looked like before and, if they survived, after the war.
Part of the answer lies in the ruthless bureaucracy that the Nazis installed and implemented by Dutch citizens and officials during their occupation. On the second floor of the museum, an overwhelming stream of words with laws against Dutch Jews is printed on the walls, inescapable and overwhelming.
Examples catch the eye of visitors, whether they plan to read them or not. November 11, 1941: Jews are no longer allowed to attend tennis, dance or bridge clubs. June 11, 1942: Jews can no longer shop at the fish markets. June 12, 1942: Jews must hand in their bicycles. September 15, 1942: Jewish students are excluded from universities.
When you walk past it, “you feel the oppression and the dismantling of the rule of law and freedom for every Jew,” says Annemiek Gringold, the museum’s chief curator. “That crime, no matter how neatly recorded in legal texts, is always present.”
In the museum’s halls, the lives of Dutch Jews are explored in displays including clothing, jewelry, suitcases and other objects. The intention, Gringold said, was to portray people as full individuals, rather than solely as victims.
“That’s the only way to do justice to someone’s memory,” Gringold said. “Otherwise a person is reduced to what the Nazis have made of him. We don’t want that.”
A reckoning with history has slowly become part of Dutch society, partly due to apologies from the government and the royal family for the Holocaust and the country’s role in the slave trade.
Gringold said she first proposed opening a national Holocaust museum in 2005, but at the time many questioned whether such a museum was necessary. Since 2015, the Jewish Cultural Quarter, the organization that manages the museum, has organized temporary exhibitions in the space that is now the museum. But pop-up exhibitions weren’t enough to tell the whole story, museum leaders said. The Jewish Cultural Quarter purchased the building in 2021 and began renovating it to turn it into a space for the permanent collection.
The building – a former school – stands across the street from a theater that was converted by the Nazis into a major deportation center, and next to a daycare center where Jewish children were held before being sent to concentration camps.
The museum interiors, which have been redeveloped by the Amsterdam architectural firm Winhov, are illuminated by natural light, filtered through soft gray blinds. This deliberately refers to how the Nazis committed their atrocities in broad daylight for all to see.
Architect and artist Daniel Libeskind, who was not involved in this project but has designed several major Holocaust memorials or museums, including in Berlin and Amsterdam, said he had also faced skepticism throughout his career. For a long time after the war, it was difficult for people to face the shadows of their past, Libeskind said, and the creation of memorial institutions was left to later generations.
Dutch Holocaust survivors called the opening of the museum an important milestone.
“I teach about the Second World War in schools, and I always hear how little time is spent on the Holocaust,” says Salo Muller, who survived the war by going into hiding as a six-year-old in 1942. from his parents after a Nazi raid, and was taken to the daycare center next to the museum, but resistance fighters helped him escape. He never saw his parents again.
After a recent private visit to the museum before its public opening, Muller said he felt very emotional. “When I walk around there, so many things go through my head,” he says. “My family was here and was deported. My parents, my grandparents, my uncles and cousins. It really affects me.”
At the very end of the collection, which also includes video testimonies from survivors and photos and videos from death camps, visitors finally encounter the passport photos of the three anonymous people who asked not to be forgotten, but whose names have been lost to history. carelessly.
The museum used that command: ‘think of us!’ – as part of his own message, said Gringold, the curator. By the time a visitor encounters these three individuals, it is almost impossible not to remember.
“You can no longer say you didn’t know,” Gringold said. “Now you know it.”