Striped uniforms from Auschwitz, clothing buttons torn off upon arrival at the Sobibor extermination camp, letters and photos... Eighty years after the Second World War, the Netherlands is preparing to open its first museum of the Holocaust, hoping to raise awareness at a time when the war in Gaza has increased anti-Semitism.
In total, the museum exhibits 2,500 objects, most of which have never been shown to the public.
Before the war and the Nazi occupation, the Netherlands was home to some 140,000 Jews, mainly in Amsterdam.
102,000 of them were killed in the Holocaust, or about 75%.
The building housing the museum, a former daycare center located in the historic Jewish quarter of central Amsterdam, itself played a vital role in the history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.
Across the road is a theater where Jewish families were taken while waiting to be deported to the death camps.
Children were separated from their families and taken to kindergarten before being deported.
Around 600 children were smuggled out, most in boxes or baskets, under the noses of Nazi guards, and brought to safety by the Dutch resistance.
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Visitors to the museum have the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of these children, down the corridor through which they fled.
Photos of babies and children who did not survive adorn the walls.
The museum also shows texts of the anti-Jewish laws the Nazis imposed on the community, including the 1942 requirement to wear a yellow Star of David, and photos of victims along with information about their lives.
“We are telling this story of extreme humiliation and we have restored dignity to the victims by presenting their objects in a very particular way
,” Annemiek Gringold, curator of the museum, explained to AFP.
On a few hundred square meters in the city center of Amsterdam, we find the story of the deportation, of the collaboration, the dark part of the story.
And on the other side, you have a building which represents the humanity, the solidarity and the tremendous courage of the Righteous who saved Jews at the risk of their lives.
Not far from there is the house of Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who took refuge with her family in a secret annex for two years to escape the Nazis before dying in Bergen-Belsen, at the age of 16, in 1945. Her diary has become one of the most memorable stories of the Holocaust.
“Exclusion and dehumanization”
King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands will officially open the museum on Sunday, amid rising anti-Semitism in the country.
The number of anti-Semitic incidents doubled in 2023, according to official figures.
In a recent attack that made headlines, swastikas were painted on a synagogue.
Amsterdam allocated 900,000 euros to secure the museum, in front of which concrete blocks were placed to prevent a car-ramming attack.
The Dutch Jewish Quarter Association which runs the museum has so far refrained from commenting on the October 7 Hamas attack, which sparked the current war in Gaza.
“Now, just days before the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, a museum about the consequences of exclusion and dehumanization, but also the courage to resist it, that is exactly what we are doing "
, she said in a press release.
The association said it was
“seriously concerned”
about anti-Semitism, polarization and Islamophobia in the Netherlands since the start of the conflict in Gaza.
“It is unfortunate that the opening of the National Holocaust Museum coincides with this ongoing war.
This only makes our mission more urgent
,” she continues.
Also read: “Germany’s Jews have never been in such danger since the Holocaust,” warns anti-Semitism commissioner
The museum highlights themes with current resonance such as propaganda, nationalism and the weakening of the rule of law, raised Annemiek Gringold, affirming that we must all
“be aware of what human beings are capable of do to others
.
The museum displays the shoes worn by 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Roosje Steenhart-Drukker when her Jewish parents left her at the age of two in the hope that someone would find her.
“I am extremely happy that our history is not lost after all this tragedy, all this sadness
,” she told AFP.