Dutch National Holocaust Museum

Dutch National Holocaust Museum

Established	2024
Location	Plantage Middenlaan 27 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Coordinates	52°22′01″N 4°54′40″E
Website	www.jck.nl

Yellow Star of David with text "Jood" (Jew) that Dutch Jews were obliged to wear during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

The Dutch National Holocaust Museum (Dutch: Nationaal Holocaust museum) is the first official museum on the Holocaust in the Netherlands. It is located in an historic building in the Jewish Cultural Quarter of Amsterdam, near a former child care center that played a role in rescuing Jewish children. The museum tells the story of the Holocaust through the lives of individual victimised men, women, and children. There is a floor-to-ceiling display of all the laws limiting and obliterating the rights of Jews in the Netherlands, who since the eighteenth century had been Dutch citizens with equal rights.

Opening ceremony

Speech by Dutch king Willem-Alexander

The museum was inaugurated on March 10, 2024 by the Dutch monarch, Willem-Alexander. In his opening speech the king stated that the museum "brings to life the stories of people who were isolated from the rest of Dutch society, robbed of their rights, denied legal protection, rounded up, imprisoned, separated from their loved ones and murdered," identifying the root cause as antisemitism. "It is up to us all to stop antisemitism before it causes a hurricane that blows away everything that we hold dear. Let us never forget that Sobibor began in the Vondelpark with a sign that read ‘Forbidden for Jews’. There is no excuse for ignorance – no place for relativism, no room for ‘ifs and buts’. Knowledge of the Holocaust is not optional." As the monarch put it in his speech, "The walls of the museum are covered – wall after wall after wall – with the many hundreds of ordinances, rules, instructions and bans: the small steps by which the Jewish population was set apart. Mandatory termination of employment. Forced registration. Banishment from public life. No bicycle. No telephone. No savings. No home. No freedom of movement. No life."

Public reaction

The opening was broadcast live on Dutch national television and covered extensively by the international press. The opening ceremony on 10 March was held in the Portuguese Synagogue and attended by foreign dignitaries. Additionally, there was extensive reporting in the international press, largely due to the presence of protestors who objected to the attendance of the President of Israel Isaac Herzog, due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. About a thousand demonstrators gathered near the site, kept at a distance by police.

History of the Jews in Amsterdam

The city of Amsterdam played a major role in the history of the Jews in the Netherlands. Three-quarters of the country's Jews, the highest percentage in Western Europe, in total 102,000 people, were killed during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during 1940–1945. Scholars see the concentration of the Jewish population in one place, the single-mindedness of Nazi policies to separate Jews from the general Dutch population and then to eliminate them, the cooperation of Dutch authorities, as well as the Jewish Council in Amsterdam as factors resulting in the high percentage of Jewish deaths. The postwar Dutch population was seemingly not interested in the suffering of its Jewish population under the Nazis, but the museum now invites visitors to “Immerse yourself in the history of the persecution of the Jews.”

See also

• Dutch Jews
• Dutch Resistance Museum
• National Holocaust Names Memorial
• NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• The Holocaust in the Netherlands

Further reading

Rescue of Jewish children from the Amsterdam child day care

• Bakker, Alex (2005). 'Dag pap, tot morgen': Joodse kinderen gered uit de crèche (in Dutch). Hilversum: Verloren. ISBN 9789065508621. OCLC 905445167.
• Göbel, Esther; Meulenbeld, Henk (2016). Betty: Een joodse kinderverzorgster in verzet (in Dutch). Amsterdam: Gibbon. ISBN 978-94-91363-71-9. OCLC 961105701.
• Botje, Harm Ede; Cohen, Mischa (2017-04-18). "De kinderen van de Joodse crèche" [The children of the Jewish day care]. vn.nl (in Dutch). Vrij Nederland. Archived from the original on 2023-05-06. Retrieved 2024-03-20.

External links

• Official website (in Dutch)