Open Wounds Hurt: Amsterdam Is Slowly Processing Second World War Trauma

Cinco De Mayo Means Something Different In Holland

Tram line 8, through the Jodenbreestraat, Amsterdam

-by Toon Janssen,

DWT correspondent, Amsterdam

What do people abroad know about the Netherlands? Windmills, polders, tulips, cheeses, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, the red light district, coffee shops and drugs… that all is common knowledge, right? (Except, maybe a polder which is a piece of low-lying land reclaimed from the sea, protected by dikes). But there’s more. This small country is a superpower in the agricultural field with astonishing exports, invests by the billions in the US, harbors high tech ASML within its borders, gets flooded with tourists year round, recently pushed out-going prime minister Mark Rutte forward as NATO Secretary General and… there’s a lot  more.

Of course achievements Dutch people may be proud of but, what goes beyond this? What are the challenges of living in The Netherlands? What keeps the Dutch themselves busy in social and political arenas, short-term and locally? To answer these questions, let’s leave the classic image and dive into what really matters to the Dutch, since seemingly little things can get stuck, with great impact and after-effects. Believe it or not, but I want to inform you about a huge trauma the Netherlands, in particular Amsterdam, has been affected by since WWII, pain whose wounds have not healed. It mainly bubbles up in the months leading up to the anniversary of the liberation from the Nazis, after 5 years of occupation and war, officially on May 5th 1945, next week. Each year on that day there are festivities, parades, ceremonies and commemorations all over the country, widely covered by the media, in particular the Remembrance of the Dead ceremony at Dam Square in Amsterdam, each year attended by the king and queen.

                                                                                                                   If anyone thinks that during WWII everyone in the country was against the German occupiers, then that person is very wrong. It is generally believed that about 45,000 people were part of the organized resistance, among them communists and Jews, many of whom were shot by the Nazis. The number of individually operating participants in resistance, and people in hiding and their helpers was bigger however, an estimated 350,000, among them also many Jews. In addition there was also minor resistance or attempts thereto, actions by which people showed their dissatisfaction, by striking or using false distribution coupons or doing courier work. In general however, there was a feeling of powerlessness and resignation, embedded in a mentality of loyalty to authority among the vast majority of the population.

Capitulation took place quickly, after just 5 days of fighting; bombing the port city of Rotterdam was the tipping point. The Germans were militarily unbeatable and the new authorities called on adapting to the new situation. People thought it might not be so bad, and the Nazis characterized the Dutch as Germanic peers. The massage strategy boosted by Nazi-State Commissioner Seyss-Inquart gradually prepared the Dutch for national socialist ideology and inclusion into a Greater-German empire. 

NSB's Mussert, sentenced to death & shot after the war

According to reports, the resigned attitude contrasted sharply with the post-war pretention by some who claimed there were only heroes in wartime, and neither collaboration nor treason. On the contrary, the Nazi movement, NSB, the only party allowed to stay, grew to about 100,000 members in 1943, despite the hate encountered from people who called them “traitors who contributed to the agenda of evil.” They wore black shirts, had the seagull as insignia, and stirred things up in Jewish neighborhoods hunting Jews. They protected Anton Mussert, their leader who enriched himself with millions by extorting Jewish businesses and shamelessly taking their property. NSB members were considered worse than German soldiers because they were volunteers while the Germans “were here for their number.” But let it be clear, relatively few people, over the entire spectrum, actively resisted; according to sources maybe just 0.5% of the population over 5 years of war. The number grew a bit, fueled by large-scale deportations of Jews and the Arbeitseinsatz, forced labor input of citizens in the Nazi war industry. Opposition culminated opportunistically even more after the Normandy landing and liberation of the southern part of the country, which heralded the final liberation.

At the beginning of WWII, Amsterdam counted some 800,000 inhabitants, including with certainty 80,000 Jews, who helped give the capital its own unique character. They had their own typical professions, with associations, customs, markets and neighborhoods, and nicknamed Amsterdam Mokum, Yiddish for place, or Dutch Jerusalem. The vast majority had Dutch nationality but there were also many who had fled from Germany after Hitler’s 1933 rise to power as Chancellor, among whom were Anne Frank and her family. During the occupation most of them were arrested and deported to concentration and extermination camps; some 75% of the Amsterdam Jews did not survive the Holocaust.

Now let us take a closer look at what’s going on in the run-up to Liberation Day, May 5th this year, at something that constituted a long-standing problem, with Amsterdam City Council and GVB, the municipal transport company, as actors. They both want to install memorial sites, some kind of permanent markings, as quickly as possible at the tram stops from which Jews were deported in wartime. They were mainly taken away from stops where they lived, on Plantage Middenlaan close to the city center for example, to be transported via the Central Station to the most frightening camps elsewhere, like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank and her sister Margot were murdered. Partly due to GVB efforts Jews could efficiently be moved out of the city, and then further by train. At the stops, the one mentioned is in close proximity to the recently constructed National Holocaust Museum, the Council and GVB want to place these memorials, almost three quarters of a century after date and not yet shown to anyone outside their organizations.

The recently published book Verdwenen Stad (Lost City) by Guus Luijters, made into a documentary carrying the same title, shows that all GVB rides were declared on paper to the authorities. Because the trams were guarded by police armed with carbines they were practically like mobile prisons, with almost no way to escape. Tram line 8 in particular had a bad reputation, the overcrowded tram ran 3 to 4 evenings a week. Submitted invoices show 900 tram rides and GVB declared more than 9,000 guilders, an amount they actually almost fully received from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration that coordinated the deportations, and the transport company even earned from it. The money, converts to 100,000 euros today, which GVB and Council want to compensate, was recently decided, and Centraal Joods Overleg, founded to promote Jewish interests, was asked to make proposals for spending it. One of the invoices, dated September 4, 1944 concerned the transport of the Frank family and 4 more that were hiding in the Back Room, their names are on the transport list of more than 70 arrested, and of the ones hiding only the father survived, Otto Frank.

It is striking that the authorities showed no sign of apology, remorse or self-criticism over consecutive years, “it was always kept under wraps.” How fraught the reputation of line number 8 was became clear in 1997 when GVB decided to start a circle tram for tourists. Given the shape, the officially closed number 8 with its two loops seemed appropriate. As soon as the plan became known there were protests however— “GVB had no sense of history whatsoever. Didn’t they know the tram was used for deportations?” Shocked by all the complaints it was decided to give the circle line another number, 20. Mind you, this was in 1997.

Jews at the railway station, most of them on their way to the end

What can explain the overall mind switch the local authorities recently made, you may wonder. Well, “because the mayor and aldermen now bear the moral and historical responsibility to be accountable for the contribution of the municipal tram company to the deportations of Amsterdam Jews,” the municipality formally announced in a press release. Mayor Halsema ordered an investigation to provide more insight into the role of all municipal services involved and in anticipation she wanted “to generously express her sincere regrets.” She calls it “absolutely horrible and cruel” that the transport company sent invoices for the rides and collected money, even with liberation in sight and until well after the end of the war. “It is important that tram stops are now marked, also in light of what is currently happening in the Netherlands and because of anti-Semitic incidents in the city caused by the catastrophic situation in Gaza,” the mayor explained. “One must know what happened here 80 years ago and places from which the deportation of 63,000 Jews took place should be marked, for now and the future because many do not know about this,” said by Willy Lindwer, director of Verdwenen Stad. His documentary sensitively exposed one of the bleakest moments in the city’s history, and shows that the war still haunts Amsterdam and its citizens as a moral benchmark. the City Council could not lag behind and gave processing the trauma an extra impulse.

Razzia of Amsterdam, February 1941, 427 Jewish men were caught, put in trucks & deported

Addendum from Howie— Two Notes

1- An old friend of Toon’s and mine, Hilda Pommier Van Norden (RIP), was, with her two brothers, a resistance fighter as a young girl. She didn’t hand out anti-Nazi literature. She blew up a German troop train and was rewarded after the war with a lifetime pension.

2- Yesterday, I spoke with Thomas Witkop, a 25 year old congressional candidate in Florida. He told me that when a local right-wing board of education recently banned Anne Frank’s classic The Diary of a Young Girl, he was moved to make the decision to run for a House seat held by MAGA Republican Brian Mast, an immense undertaking. “As a kid, it was important to read a story about another kid from a long time ago in a society that was considered civilized but slipped down a barbaric path. Anne Frank's diary taught me to value our civil liberties and democratic institutions, but recently a Florida school district decided to ban this book. As a Florida resident whose fiance is a school teacher, this hit close to home. After hearing about this ban, I decided to run for Congress to protect free speech, uphold democracy, and preserve our history so that what happened to Anne Frank is never repeated.”