by On a lively avenue in Amsterdam Oost, one of the city’s brightest neighborhoods, there are two buildings where one of the great escapes of the Second World War took place. On one side of the street is a former teacher training college. On the other side is an old theatre, the Hollandsche Schouwburg.
In 1942, the Nazi rulers of Amsterdam turned the Hollandsche Schouwburg into a deportation center, where the Jewish families of Amsterdam were rounded up and processed, like animals on the way to the slaughterhouse. Forty-six thousand people passed through here, on their way to the concentration camps, where almost all of them were killed. But mercifully, about 600 children escaped, through that teacher training college across the road.
For the Nazis, housing fragile children in a suspiciously converted theater was an administrative headache, so they housed the youngest in a nursery across the road. This creche shared a yard with that teacher training college.
Thanks to Walter Süskind, a German Jew who worked in the theater, and the noble staff and students at the training college, hundreds of Jewish children were sent away, from the theater to the creche and from there into the college, down a hidden and exiting path to safe houses in Amsterdam and beyond.
It was a heartbreaking decision for their parents, trapped in the theater – to put their trust in Süskind, to hand their children over to their unknown comrades, not knowing if they would be safe, or if they would ever see them again. .
For the children, it was just as difficult. In that hidden path, they were given new identities, and handed over to complete strangers, who took them away and hid them, at great personal risk, until the end of the war.
Last week, some of those children, who are now in their 80s and 90s, returned to that teacher training college, which has now been moved to the new National Holocaust Museum of the Netherlands. The exhibition inside is very informative and very moving, documenting the persecution and genocide of over 100,000 Dutch Jews, but the most impressive exhibition is the building itself.
The opening of the Dutch National Holocaust Museum is the first of many events this year across the country to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands from the Nazis by British and Allied forces (parts of the Netherlands were liberated in the autumn of 1944, ie although the whole country was not free until the spring of 1945).
May 4 and 5 are red-letter days in the Netherlands every year – Remembrance Day and Independence Day – but in this 80th anniversary year these dates will be even more significant, because after 90 years, there will certainly not be many people left alive gave witness to those times. Of particular note to visitors from Britain is the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden, the daring Allied effort to establish a bridgehead on the Rhine River. This heroic effort, executed in the 1977 film, A distant bridgewill be celebrated in Arnhem from 20-22 September.
But for me, as someone whose two grandfathers fought on opposite sides (my British grandfather lost a brother fighting for Monty at El Alamein, my German grandmother lost a brother fighting for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front), Holocaust memorials feel particularly appropriate, the ultimate expression of the barbarism of Hitler’s Reich.
Most of the Dutch Jews detained at the Hollandsche Schouwburg were sent to Kamp Westerbork, a transit camp 110 miles east of Amsterdam. I then traveled by train, nice and comfortable first class, remembering that the Jews who made the same trip were crammed into cattle trucks.
Kamp Westerbork was a sinister halfway house. There were no gas chambers here, no mass exterminations, but almost everyone who was held here (some for a few days, others for a few weeks or months) was sooner or later sent on to Auschwitz, and death camps another, where they were almost all murdered. Of the 105,000 prisoners who came through here (including Anne Frank and her family), only 3,000 survived.
While incarcerated here, the prisoners were subjected to all sorts of horrors, but as one of the ‘best’ camps, Westerbork became an insidious Nazi propaganda tool, used to try to deceive the outside world. their camps were not as bad. as people feared. The suave camp commander, Albert Gemmeker, even forced one prisoner, a German Jewish photographer named Rudolf Breslauer, to make a good film showing happy prisoners gardening, playing football and performing musical revues.
Breslauer’s life and work are the subject of a fascinating new exhibition at Westerbork, which addresses the moral ambiguities of this film, which he felt he had to make, to try to keep his family alive. Without interest. After his film was completed, Breslauer and his wife and three children were sent to Auschwitz. Only his daughter Ursula survived.
Westerbork is still a sad place. Most of the buildings have been demolished, but you can still make out where the huts were. The most prominent remnant is the commandant’s house, on the perimeter of the camp (strangely reminiscent of the Oscar-winning film, The Interest Zoneabout the home life of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss), a strange cocoon within a giant greenhouse.
Breslauer’s photographs of his son Stefan, working in the camp workshop, making children’s wooden toys, are incredibly affecting. But even though the site is sideways, I left there with a feeling of hope. This is where evil triumphed, for a time, only to be overcome by good in the end. Today this brutal place is a forest. Trees grow where those huts once stood.
I finished my freedom pilgrimage back in Amsterdam, at the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The ornate facade of the theater remains, but the building behind it has been demolished and left open to the elements. There is a garden, and a memorial to the thousands of Jews (and hundreds of Roma and Sinti) who left here for the death camps, including Walter Süskind, who led the brave rescue of all those Jewish children.
On an outside wall is a reproduction of a blurry black-and-white photograph. During the war it was Lydia Riezouw, a sweet teenage girl whose house is behind the theatre. Her photo shows a crowd of Jews, taking fresh air in this backyard before they were finally deported to who knows where. Lydia recognized her Jewish friend Greetje Velleman in the crowd, so she took a photo of her. In the photo, Greetje is smiling and laughing. She died in Auschwitz a few months later. Lydia became a resistance fighter. She died in 2005 in Amsterdam at the great age of 82 years.
You might think that a trip to these grim sites is a thrilling experience, and for the most part you’d be right. It is very disturbing to see the evidence of so much cruelty, so much suffering. But the zeal with which these sites have been preserved is inspiring – the memory of the victims, the tribute to heroes. The liberation of the Netherlands is a cause for rejoicing, but memories of the Holocaust are an integral part of that celebration.
It’s a sunny afternoon in Amsterdam and the National Holocaust Museum is full of visitors. Outside, people of all ages are queuing to get in. The facade of this building has changed most of all, but the deportation center across the road looks very much like it would have in Anne Frank’s day. It even has the original title, Hollandsche Schouwburg, in big, bold letters above the door. Inside there is a newer inscription, which Anne Frank did not live to see. It is a quote from If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz: ‘It happened, so it can happen again; this is the essence of what we have to say.’
How to do it
To visit the National Holocaust Museum travel by train from London St Pancras to Amsterdam via Eurostar or fly with KLM from London Heathrow, with British Airways from Heathrow or Gatwick, or with easyJet from Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, Southend or Bristol .
Kamp Westerbork is about two hours’ drive from Amsterdam, or just under three hours by train. If you’re returning to Amsterdam, I’d recommend spending the night nearby (it’s a long way for a day trip). Hotel de Jonge is a smart modern four-star hotel with a good restaurant, in Assen, a pleasant little city 12 miles from Westerbork. Doubles, breakfast included, from €119.
