Holland Remembers Nazi Horrors in Its New Holocaust Museum

The museum is small — in a Holocaust landmark building — direct, and packs a punch.

W hen I was in the Netherlands in March I visited the new National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. I missed the grand opening in 2024 by a day but made a point to visit this year. In a compact space, smack in the middle of where the Dutch Holocaust unfolded, it uses art, artifacts, video, and succinct labels to tell a tragic, pitiful story. There were about 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, a neutral country, when the Germans arrived in 1940. Some were refugees. By 1945, it’s believed that 102,000 were killed, a far greater percentage than in France, Belgium, or Italy. Anne Frank’s story is the most famous, but there are tens of thousands more.

This year is the 80th anniversary of the denouement of the Nazi era and Japanese imperialism. So far, we’ve passed the milestones for the liberation of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, the Dresden bombing, Yalta, Iwo Jima, the death of FDR, and the firebombing of Tokyo. Hitler died 80 years ago this past Wednesday. The Soviets captured the Reichstag on May 2, 1945. V-E Day is May 8. Liberating the Netherlands was a slog, mostly borne by Canadian troops. Westerbork, the notorious depot from which Dutch Jews were sent to death camps, wasn’t freed until April 12. It wasn’t until May 5, 1945, that the Germans in Holland surrendered.

The new Holocaust Museum tells the dreadful story from the late 1930s to those last days in 1945. The first thing we see is a shocker. It’s a wall-size photograph originally published in Life magazine in May 1945 showing Sieg Maandag, then seven years old and born in Amsterdam, confined at Bergen-Belsen, walking past rows of bodies. His family was in the diamond business. His father died at Bergen-Belsen. He was reunited with his mother, assigned to another camp, a few months later.

To say the least, the photograph puts us in a solemn and questioning state of mind. What’s his story? How did we — the world — get there? What happened to him? The museum’s nitty-gritty work focuses on lots of individual stories as well as big themes, starting with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. On what happened to Maandag, that’s a personal story and a big theme, too. Before he and his family were sent to the camps, they spent months in hiding, moving between secret addresses, evading police, seeing friends and family nabbed before their own deportation. “His life was defined by fear, courage, and a quiet resilience that would shape the rest of his life,” the label reads. Maandag survived the camps. He became an artist and died in 2013. “He refused to let hatred define him. . . . Instead, he spoke about tolerance, memory, and the importance of never forgetting the past.”

“You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,” I thought, remembering my Kipling. I got gentlemanly C’s in tolerance in Sunday school. The Life photograph suggests that the target audience for the Holocaust Museum isn’t the geezer class but young people, and not only young Jews, of which there aren’t many in the Netherlands. The day I visited, on a weekend, the visitorship was a mix of all ages but mostly young adults.

I’ve visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington — a very big place. But Holland is Holland, not only a little, insular place — and they drained their swamp — but it’s a hub of the Dutch Holocaust. The Dutch museum starts with the neighborhood and the building. Soon after German tanks rolled into town, the new Nazi masters decreed that Jews would be excluded from all cultural venues and public life, with the sole exception of the Dutch Theater, built in 1892. Jewish actors, actresses, musicians, and crews could work only there. In 1942, Nazis converted the theater to the central spot where Jews were to be summoned, sometimes for questioning, often for days or weeks before they were transferred to Westerbork.

The theater was soon crowded with frightened people and unsanitary. Jewish babies and children were sent across the street to the Hervormde Kweekschool, a teacher-training school and day care center. In 1943, the theater was closed as a holding cell, after the local Nazi officials declared that there were no more Jews left in Amsterdam.

The Dutch Theater is now a Holocaust memorial. The Holocaust Museum is in the Kweekschool building. During the war, the school, still training teachers, became a resistance center and a point for smuggling Jews, mostly the babies and children, to hiding places. The buildings are in Amsterdam’s Waterlooplein neighborhood, mostly Jewish before the war but emptied by deportations and then gutted in 1944 and 1945 by locals desperate for wood to burn to heat their homes. Nearby is Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum and the Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1675 and then the largest synagogue in the world. It’s still intact and lovely, the Germans having been persuaded not to sack it. All of these buildings are now part of the Jewish Cultural Quarter.

Though it’s now a museum, the old Kweekschool still feels like a school, which it was until 2012. From the lobby to the small café and the galleries, spaces feel like classrooms. They’re human-scale. Video kiosks are textbook-size. Many of the objects are small, but each case gives them space so viewers can have intimate encounters while not being overwhelmed. Most of the objects are mundane, things like a locket, a child’s painting palette, pigments dulled by decades, dolls and puppets, and lots of photographs of children and families. Mundane, like the things we see in everyday life. And children’s smocks, except the ones displayed have a yellow Star of David sewn on them.

There’s a pair of baby shoes donated by a Holocaust survivor. She was wearing them the day the Germans took her parents to the Dutch Theater. She never saw her parents again.

In one gallery, snippets of laws stripping Dutch Jews of their liberties cover the walls from floor to ceiling. Jews were barred from universities. They had to surrender their bikes. Jewish professionals couldn’t serve non-Jewish clients. Jews couldn’t have phones, then radios, then kosher food, then bank accounts. In one gallery, five glass cases shaped as columns display objects from the camps where Dutch Jews died: Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, and Theresienstadt. Names of the deported line the walls. They’re tiny and pathetic. On a piece of cardboard are attached three passport-size, black-and-white photographs — a woman, a man, and a child, likely a family. “Don’t forget us” is scribbled at the bottom.

During the war, the Nazis established the Jewish Council, initially a liaison between Jews and the German occupation but, before long, an instrument of oppression as councilors negotiated with Jewish groups on the best ways to comply with anti-Jewish laws and how to, in effect, buy a false peace. A floor-to-ceiling glass case displays dozens of cardboard boxes called the Cartotheek. Developed during the war, these contained files on thousands of Jewish families and were eventually used to advance the German deportation and extermination plan.

The museum is effectively balanced between videos, photographs, artifacts, and maps. I would quibble with its messaging on this point. Pitches for tolerance are all well and good. The museum tells us, though, that we ought to be nice to people “who are different from us,” a bland bit of guidance. It’s as if that was the problem leading to the Holocaust. The museum wanders too far from antisemitism as a unique, ancient evil, far more insidious than the dozens of other phobias we’re constantly bid to revile. This isn’t fatal by any means. Still, I’d sharpen and toughen the interpretation so that we don’t, for example, think that antisemitism and a thing called Islamophobia are to be equated, as Harvard’s president tried to tell us this week.

While in the lobby, I chatted with a couple who happened to be big donors to the museum. We talked about why it took nearly 80 years for the National Holocaust Museum to happen. I supposed that the default reason, at least in Europe, was not so much denial, though this played a part, as a national psychology that paints all Dutch or French or Austrians as themselves victims of an evil imposed by an outside force. The will to forget, or to move on, is also powerful. All of this diminishes the experience of Jews.

But in speaking with my new friends, with others, and in reading and thinking, I learned that this isn’t necessarily the reason. For Dutch Jews, and the Dutch Jewish Diaspora, the story was just too painful. It’s not only a story of death and destruction. It’s about the demolition of whole swaths of loved ones, generations, neighborhoods, memory-rich objects, and context. I learned about concentration camp syndrome, characterized by survivor guilt, depression, intellectual impairment, contact anxiety, and obsessive ruminations. Like Dutch Christians, many Dutch Jews did feel that remembrance can go too far and that looking toward the future was a priority. All of these things created a great silence that stalled a movement, starting in the 1970s, for a Holocaust museum.

In fits and starts, a museum started to emerge in the 1980s and ’90s in itinerant spaces, but with lots of debate. It was fine, for instance, to display documents but not photographs. If photographs were to be used, they had to be small so visitors wouldn’t recognize people they knew. Who was the audience? Holocaust survivors and their children wouldn’t sustain a museum. About 30,000 Dutch Jews lived in Holland by 1945. Many left for America or for what is now Israel.

And there were other museums. What about the Anne Frank House, also in Amsterdam? It’s about one story, and, I have to say, its immense size and huge staff — 250 people — seem to me a distracting appendage to her poignant, heartbreaking autobiography. It feels like a tourist attraction rather than a memorial, though it has its moments. There are World War II museums dotting the country as well as history museums, but these tend to be localized or, like the Rijksmuseum, covering a wide chronology. The Jewish Museum is also in Amsterdam, but it covers hundreds of years as well. By 2000 or so, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Yad Vashem, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington were inspirational templates. Survival, hope, and personal responsibility to fight evil became core themes.

The renovation of the Kweekschool into a museum cost about $30 million. Raising the money was an international effort — the otherwise odious Barbra Streisand was a generous donor — and the governments of the Netherlands and of Amsterdam gave millions.

The exhibition program is very odd. On view now is Sex: Jewish Positions, a show about Jewish sexuality. It has a “fitting playlist” assembled by an Amsterdam DJ, featuring tunes such as “I Wanna Be Down,” “Black Baby,” and “Stay Up! (Viagra),” performed by Kanye West, who, I think, hates Jews. There’s Eden and the Golden Rule, an edifying exhibition, and a children’s program on how to make gemberbolus — ginger buns. Between You and Me is a small exhibition of paintings of members of a Dutch Jewish family who have different, not conflicting, memories of the Holocaust, either personal or received from elders. I liked it, but, overall, the program is uneven. That said, the museum is new.

The museum’s website is difficult to use, incoherent at points, and is silent on the mission of the museum or what the permanent-collection galleries have to offer. This might be a Dutch cultural thing but, as a marketing tool, the website wouldn’t tempt me to visit. There’s an online database of the collection, which is good, but it needs to be searchable by subject, medium, and objects on view. An online research guide directs the curious on how to locate a grave and where families lived before the war, and how to learn about property stolen by the Nazis.

In the years immediately after the war, a special court investigated cases of Dutch collaboration ranging from treason to snitching, with about 425,000 people getting a look. For years, the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands has been working with other Dutch organizations to digitize the files of these people. It’s been a mammoth job. Starting this past January, researchers can access what’s been digitized in the reading room at the National Archives in The Hague. All the files — more than 30 million documents — are expected to be online and searchable by 2027. The online archives will also include documents about Dutch resistance efforts and Holocaust victims.

As with the release in 2015 and 2016 of files on French WWII collaborators, or on Stasi spies after the Berlin Wall fell, the release of these files will cause uncomfortable if not horrifying moments. Who betrayed Anne Frank might be clarified, to suggest the most famous example, but hundreds of thousands of Dutch living today also might, if they care to look, get a history lesson they won’t like or a mystery story they can’t solve. Soon, we’re told, the Dutch files will be accessible on home computers. Around the time the French archives went online, I read that Coco Chanel was found to be an avid Nazi agent. I learned the term “horizontal collaborator,” a role for which that Little Black Dress is best shed.

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, together opened the National Holocaust Museum on March 10, 2024, facing, alas, a protest rally from Hamas sympathizers organized in part by the hate group Amnesty International. The Dutch, whom l like, weren’t amused. They see the Holocaust Museum as a good that’s necessary for the psychological health of the country, and they seem to have embraced it. It’s well worth a visit.