A new Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam aims to tell the full story of the persecution of Dutch Jews during World War II.
ADVERTISEMENTAs Flip Delmonte walks around the soon to be opened National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, he's reminded of the city's dark history.
Delmonte was just a baby when a relative and the Dutch resistance spirited him away from a teacher training college in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter during the Dutch capital's World War II Nazi Occupation.
His parents were detained across the street at a theatre used by the Germans as a collection point for Jews to be deported to death camps in eastern Europe. They were among the 102,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands and murdered in the camps.
The college Delmonte, now 80, was taken from as a baby has been transformed into the new museum that will be officially opened on 10 March by King Willem-Alexander.
“The Jewish people were murdered. There are people, children who survived and we cannot forget them. They must be remembered also in the future,” Delmonte, who is deaf, says through an interpreter.
The museum tells the story of the Holocaust through video images, photos, scale models and mementoes of the Dutch victims of Nazi occupation.
Three-quarters of the pre-war Jewish population of the Netherlands were murdered by the Nazis, the largest proportion anywhere in Europe.
Head Curator Annemiek Gringold pulled together exhibition rooms that show the atrocities of the Holocaust, and also small mementoes of the lives lost - a collection of 10 buttons excavated from the grounds of Sobibor.
“Perhaps this is the closest I can come to the thousands and thousands of anonymous people that were rushed into the gas chamber," Gringold says.
"This is something that they chose to wear, and it is one of the last items that they touched,” she adds.
For Gringold, the museum opens at a vital time. “The generation that survived the Shoah (Holocaust) is slowly leaving us,” she says.
"It is our responsibility, we feel, in the Jewish Cultural Quarter, to tell their story from generation to the next. For the Netherlands, to know about this history, to be aware of where anti-Semitism might lead to in certain circumstances.“
The walls of one room are filled from floor to ceiling with the texts of hundreds of laws discriminating against Jews that were enacted by the German occupiers of the Netherlands, to show how the Nazi regime, assisted by Dutch civil servants, dehumanized Jews ahead of operations to round them up and send them to their deaths.
Delmonte was happy to contribute a photograph to the museum, but he kept his most treasured keepsake for himself.
“I have a cookie plate at home which used to be my mother’s and my aunt has given that to me at my birthday," he says. "I still have that at home. So that’s very special for me.”
The National Holocaust Museum is situated in the Dutch capital's historic Jewish Quarter and officially opens on 10 March.
