“Now that you know, don't forget”: Netherlands confronts its collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust

The National Holocaust Museum, open to the public since last Monday in Amsterdam, illustrates the persecution of Dutch Jews.

It is a tragedy that has taken the Netherlands decades to confront despite the fact that the Nazis murdered the largest number of members of that community in Western Europe here: some 102,000 people, according to the Anne Frank Foundation.

The walls of one of the rooms of the center, located in the same neighborhood where they lived before the Second World War, are covered with the texts of the discriminatory laws enacted during the occupation.

Assisted by Dutch officials, the Nazi regime methodically dehumanized Jews to death.

Almost 80 years have passed since the liberation of the country by allied troops, and the opening of the museum comes at a special time because many of the survivors are disappearing due to their advanced age.

Several institutions portray parts of the history of Jews in World War II, including the Anne Frank House, but none fully documents the Holocaust on a national scale.

“For us, it is crucial to tell it in its context: before the war, during the occupation and how the population faced this painful chapter after 1945,” says Annemiek Gringold, museum curator.

According to her, the local situation was different from what happened in Central and Eastern Europe.

“The sequence that lasts is the one that goes from the ghetto to the concentration camp and to death,” she says.

In the Netherlands, on the other hand, it was carried out through law.

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Since May 1940, with the invasion itself, the Nazis were dismantling the legal order.

“By imposing new rules that excluded Jews from society, they were stripped of their property and kicked out of work and school.

All of this, applied by Dutch officials,” says the expert.

Written on the walls of one of the rooms, a myriad of laws show that the Nazis saw non-Jewish Dutch “as part of the dream of greater Germany.”

Because of this, the occupation was based on a civilian administrative structure, rather than a military one, as in Belgium or France.

“In the Netherlands there were hardly any German soldiers on the streets.

It was about excluding Jews from society, but accepting the rest of the population,” says Gringold.

She admits it was “very effective.”

A sign reads that some 25,000 Dutch volunteers joined the German Waffen-SS (protection squads) “in search of adventure or motivated by Nazi ideals.”

A 7-year-old boy walks past a row of corpses in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Sieg Maandag

The museum has taken advantage of and renovated the facilities of a former Protestant teacher preparation school, whose director, Johan van Hulst, cooperated in 1943 with Henriette Pimentel, the director of an adjacent nursery school.

This no longer exists, but through the back garden it connected both centers, and by passing them through there they managed to save 600 Jewish children who were awaiting deportation along with their parents.

The adults were grouped in an open theater in front, and their children were taken out of school camouflaged in bags, baskets or suitcases, taking advantage of the passage of the trams - which continue to circulate today in both directions - and with the help of the resistance.

In one of the hallways on the ground floor, footprints projected on the floor with flashing lights remind us that minors were smuggled there.

Their destiny was to camouflage themselves as Aryans in families in the countryside or to hide in other places.

Emanuel Flip Delmonte, 80, was one of the lucky ones and was one year old when he was clandestinely evacuated from daycare.

His entire family was murdered and, as he walked through the rooms on Monday, he asked “that the dead be remembered by the living.”

He has donated a photo of himself taken after the war.

Last Sunday, King William of Orange inaugurated the museum amid a citizen protest over the presence of Isaac Herzog, president of Israel, when the war in Gaza is still open.

Clothing of Dutch Jews with the symbols they were forced to use to differentiate themselves. National Holocaust Museum in the Netherlands

To try to restore their personality to the victims, more than 2,500 personal objects have been collected.

Sought among all social strata to reflect the diversity of Dutch Jews, they have great emotional value.

Some pieces come from those who lived in Suriname and Indonesia, the former colonies.

There are, among others, some faded passport-sized photos of an unknown family.

In a few hurried lines, without names or surnames, they asked: “Don't forget us.”

Next to a striped shirt of those imposed in the concentration camps, you can also see the silk wedding dress of Leny Zondervan, whose parents perished in Auschwitz.

In a display case there are photos of the brothers Raphael (six years old) and Franklin Altmann (four)—murdered in the same place—along with the dolls that their grandfather made for them.

They are accompanied by the table football of Nico Kroese, who died at the age of 11 in Sobibor;

a cloth full of yellow stars with the word “Jew,” which had to be worn on their clothing;

a nursery crib;

or the voluminous first volume of the Auschwitz death register, dated 1942.

In one of the rooms they have installed mural-sized photos that take your breath away.

Like that of Sieg Maandag, a seven-year-old boy who passes by a row of corpses lying on the side of the road in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, liberated in April by British troops.

The horror contrasts with the bright day and the trees full of leaves.

Only 25% of the Dutch Jewish community survived, and upon their return from the extermination camps and their hiding places (of around 28,000 such refugees, around 16,000 survived) they were barely paid any attention.

According to the conservative, “the country was more anti-Semitic than before the war due to propaganda, and was not prepared to listen to the Jewish victims.”

Within two years, the application of German laws was such that Berlin declared the Netherlands “free of Jews” in 1944. Recognition of their suffering dates back to the late 1990s and always within the framework of commemorative ceremonies. from the war.

Before the war there were 77,000 citizens of Jewish descent in Amsterdam, according to the Anne Frank Foundation.

Records and documents of Jews in concentration camps. National Holocaust Museum of the Netherlands

The Holocaust Museum has taken two decades to gather public and private funds to be able to establish itself and, among them, four million euros from the German Government and 5.3 million from the Dutch Executive stand out.

On a sign you can read that the new center is also a way of warning that, under certain social or political conditions, ordinary people are capable of committing terrible crimes.

He says this: “The vital message is that indifference should never be shown in the face of injustice.”

Johan Van Hulst died in 2018, at the age of 107, and he always remembered the little ones that he could not rescue.

Henriette Pimentel died in Auschwitz, in 1943, at the age of 67.

Another phrase, projected on the wall, asks this: “Now that you know, don't forget.”

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