Site of Deportation, Site of Memory: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Holocaust 9789048536726

Table of contents :
Table Of Contents
Preface
1. Occupation, Persecution, And Destruction
2. In And Around The Theatre
3. In The Shadow Of Nazism
4. ‘Building Of Tears’
5. Site Of Memory, Site Of Mourning
Sources, Literature, And Quotations
About The Authors

Citation preview

Site of Deportation, Site of Memory

Site of Deportation, Site of Memory The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Holocaust

Edited by Frank van Vree, Hetty Berg, and David Duindam

Amsterdam University Press

Parts of this book have previously been published in: F. van Vree, H. Berg, D. Duindam (red.), De Hollandsche Schouwburg. Theater, Deportatieplaats, Plek van herinnering. Amsterdam University Press, 2013 © 2013 F. van Vree, H. Berg, D. Duindam / Amsterdam University Press Translation: Vivien Collingwood This publication has been made possible by material support and financial grants from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Amsterdam University Fund (AUF), the Amsterdam Jewish Cultural Quarter, the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Cover illustration: The Joodsche Schouwburg [Jewish Theatre], 1941. Collection foundation Jaap Kaas / Sculptuur Instituut, Scheveningen / photographer unknown, probably Abraham Abrahams. Cover design: Suzan Beijer Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 557 5 e-isbn 978 90 4853 672 6 doi 10.5117/9789462985575 nur 680 © F. van Vree, H. Berg, D. Duindam / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Preface 7 Emile Schrijver

Introduction 9 Frank van Vree, Hetty Berg, and David Duindam

1. Occupation, Persecution, and Destruction: The Netherlands under German Rule, 1940-1945

13

2. In and Around the Theatre: Jewish Life in Amsterdam in the Prewar Era

35

Frank van Vree

Frank van Vree with contributions from Hetty Berg and Joost Groeneboer

3. In the Shadow of Nazism: Theatre and Culture on the Eve of Deportation 71 Esther Göbel

4. ‘Building of Tears’: Sixteen Months as a Site of Assembly and Deportation 111 Annemiek Gringold

5. Site of Memory, Site of Mourning

155

Sources, Literature, and Quotations

191

About the Authors

203

David Duindam

Preface The first edition of this standard work on the Hollandsche Schouwburg was published in Dutch by Amsterdam University Press in 2013. It anticipated a need for information among the general public and quickly sold out. The need for this fully revised version, intended for an international audience, which includes the most recent insights, was just as great. I am pleased that this gap in the literature on the persecution and murder of 102,000 Dutch Jews has now been filled, thanks to the editorial team of Professor Frank van Vree, Dr David Duindam, and Hetty Berg. This is the first publication in English to be fully dedicated to this unique historical site in Amsterdam. The Hollandsche Schouwburg is unique for various reasons. Nowhere else in Europe has another site of deportation in a large city been preserved in such good condition. In addition, its future has been assured by the Hollandsche Schouwburg Foundation, which supervises the site’s use as a war monument, and by the connection with the Jewish Historical Museum, which has been responsible for its daily management for a number of decades. The Hollandsche Schouwburg is visited by an ever-growing number of visitors, many tens of thousands each year, who want to remember their family members, fellow believers or compatriots, or who are seeking signs of and information about the Holocaust in the Dutch context. Since May 2016, this informative role has been shared with the National Holocaust Museum that is being founded; it is the final component in the Jewish Cultural Quarter, which also includes the Jewish Historical Museum, the JHM Children’s Museum, and the majestic seventeenth-century Portuguese Synagogue. The National Holocaust Museum is being established in the former Reformed Teacher Training College, which played a role in the rescue of hundreds of children from the crèche that lay opposite of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. In a few years, the Hollandsche Schouwburg, as a site of deportation, and the former Reformed Teacher Training College, as a historical rescue site and the first and only museum in the Netherlands to be completely dedicated to commemorating the murder of the Dutch Jews, will together form the National Holocaust Museum. We believe that this will make an important contribution to the Dutch museum landscape, to the commemoration of the persecution in the Netherlands, to the provision of reliable information, and to countering growing indifference in society. Professor Emile Schrijver General Director, Jewish Cultural Quarter

Introduction The Hollandsche Schouwburg, which lies opposite Artis Zoo in Amsterdam’s leafy Plantage neighbourhood, is one of the most emotionally charged, contested, and meaningful sites in the Netherlands. In July 1942, this building – where famous names in the history of Dutch theatre once celebrated triumphs – was requisitioned by the Nazis as an assembly and deportation site for Jews, with the intention of making the whole of the Netherlands judenfrei. A great number of Jews from Amsterdam, but also Jews from elsewhere in the Netherlands, were assembled in the Schouwburg. Between 20 July 1942 and 19 November 1943, more than 45,000 Jews, including refugees from Germany and Austria, were interned at the Hollandsche Schouwburg for shorter or longer periods. They were then put onto transports, mainly bound for the transit camp Westerbork in the north of the Netherlands, or for the concentration camp Vught in the south; from there, they were sent onwards to the east, to the concentration and extermination camps of Sobibór, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt. In short, the Hollandsche Schouwburg fulfilled the same role as the notorious Drancy internment camp to the northeast of Paris, or the somewhat smaller Belgian assembly place at the Dossin Barracks in Mechelen. It is such an important site; yet, until today, no book – nor even an article – was available to enable those who do not read Dutch to discover what had happened there. This volume aims to change this, by telling the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg from different perspectives: from its foundation as a theatre in 1892, to its establishment as a place of memory, and as a monument with an educational exhibition in the 1990s.

Persecution and occupation In order to allow us to put the developments that occurred around the Hollandsche Schouwburg during and after the Second World War into perspective, the book opens with an outline of the German occupation and the persecution of the Dutch Jews. In the introductory chapter, Frank van Vree paints a broad picture of how the National Socialist occupying forces, actively assisted by collaborators and Dutch agencies, gradually isolated and eventually deported the Jews, a process that ended with the death of more than 100,000 Dutch citizens in the National Socialist concentration and extermination camps. Less than a quarter of Dutch Jews survived the

10 

German occupation, a number that is considerably lower than that in other Western European countries.

Jewish Amsterdam In the following chapter, the reader is taken back in time, to Jewish Amsterdam in the decades preceding the occupation. To a certain degree, the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and Amsterdam’s theatre life forms a leitmotif in this account. The theatre was founded in 1892, at a time when Amsterdam was becoming a bustling city with a rapidly growing population and rising prosperity – developments that also had a decisive influence on the city’s Jewish population. A new middle class emerged, one that was strongly attracted to liberal politics and culture, whilst a sizeable working class turned en masse to socialism in a short period. In other words, from the turn of the century onwards, the Jewish community in the Netherlands was characterized by advancing integration and the secularization that came with this. These developments were reflected in the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg as a theatre: located in a new, prosperous neighbourhood, built in the dominant architectural styles of the day, it offered not only entertainment, but also serious, innovative theatre – naturalistic drama that also appealed to the emancipated workers, with the socialist playwright and director Herman Heijermans as their undisputed hero.

A gateway to terror and death The second part of the volume contains two chapters and covers the years of the occupation. These chapters are written mainly from the perspective of the persecuted Jews: the Hollandsche Schouwburg as an essential link in a process that began with the exclusion of Jews from social life, and ended with the mass deportations from the Netherlands to the concentration and extermination camps. Particularly in the sixteen months that the theatre functioned as a place of assembly and deportation, the character of the Hollandsche Schouwburg changed irrevocably: the site irreversibly lost its innocence. Initially, however, in the summer of 1940, there was no radical break as far as the Hollandsche Schouwburg was concerned, as Esther Göbel shows in the second chapter. In the first year of the occupation, the usual programming



11

continued as normal. In June 1941, the theatre was made a site exclusively for Jews, where only Jewish artists were allowed to perform for exclusively Jewish audiences. When, three months later, the order was given that Jews were to be excluded from all other cultural and social activities, the theatre became a social-cultural centre, hosting weddings in addition to plays, operettas, and concerts and, for a short time, a school specializing in arts and crafts. As mentioned above, between 20 July 1942 and 19 November 1943, more than 45,000 Dutch Jews were interned at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, as Annemiek Gringold, the author of the following chapter, has established on the basis of archival research. Some stayed for only a short time, most were there for around five days, and some were there for weeks. Packed into a stuffy, filthy space that was far from suited for this role, lacking as it did basic facilities, the Jews collected there were supported as far as possible by each other and by the employees of the Jewish Council. With external help, some of these people set up clandestine networks to help prisoners to escape and – in particular – to get them to a place of safety, for, without the prospect of a hiding place, such attempts were doomed to fail. In this way, hundreds of children and many adults were able to evade the clutches of the Nazi occupying forces and their Dutch accomplices. Most of the prisoners, however, were not so fortunate; for them, the Hollandsche Schouwburg was a gateway to terror and death.

A theatre of memory The final chapter of this book, by David Duindam, is written from the perspective of remembrance; a story that begins with endless controversies over what should be done with this tainted legacy of the occupation. The attempts by the new owners to restore the building to its original function as a theatre encountered so much resistance that an action committee was established to collect funds and purchase the building. Their efforts were successful, but the question became: what should be done now? In the following years, Amsterdam’s Jews proved deeply divided over the answer to this question, while the Dutch government took a restrained approach: in the first years after the liberation, the culture of remembrance was dominated by the national perspective, in which much attention was paid to fighters and heroes, but none to specific groups of victims. The idea that the 100,000 Dutch Jews, just like the Sinti and Roma, might form an exceptional category of victims – victims of a racist war of extermination – hardly played a role in the national culture of remembrance of that time.

12 

This eventually changed: in 1958, the city council of Amsterdam approved the decision to transform the Hollandsche Schouwburg into a site of memory, as the first important public monument to commemorate the victims of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands. Its unveiling on 5 May 1962 marked not only a milestone in the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, but also in the culture of remembrance in the Netherlands. From this time onwards, the mass murder committed by the Nazis would slowly but surely shift from the periphery to the core of the culture of remembrance. This process happened more rapidly in the Netherlands than in most other countries, as shown by the large number of similar monuments that were also established elsewhere in the country in the following years. The question of the function of the Hollandsche Schouwburg was, in effect, no longer raised, including within the Jewish community. Now that the monument existed, it would gradually and increasingly fulfil the role that the socialist-Zionist Sam de Wolff, a major player in the initiative to establish the Hollandsche Schouwburg as a site of memory, had envisaged at an early stage: as a place of memory, a museum and/or a library, the theatre would form an exceptional site where all Dutch people would be able to keep the memory of the deported and murdered Jews alive. The Hollandsche Schouwburg thereby became a theatre again – but a theatre in the sense propagated by the British historian Raphael Samuel: a theatre of memory. A place that gives shape to our relationship with the past. The Hollandsche Schouwburg is not only a monument, but also a site where we can learn, where we can imagine what happened; a site where we can engage in diverse forms of remembrance, from silent reflection to prayer, and from speeches to – indeed – drama and music. Frank van Vree, Hetty Berg, and David Duindam

1.

Occupation, Persecution, and Destruction The Netherlands under German Rule, 1940-1945 by Frank van Vree

When writing the history of the deportation and murder of more than 100,000 Jewish citizens from the Netherlands, there is much to be said for starting in Germany; for it was there that the genocide was conceived and organized, with an unparalleled degree of fervour and systemization. At the same time, this is primarily a history of people: innocent individuals who fell victim to a racist policy of persecution, individuals with their own stories, stories that are worth telling. It is possible to tell the stories of some of these individuals, because they kept diaries during the war; they include Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum, two youthful, witty spirits who perished in the camps, yet their testimonies became famous across the world and joined the canon of testimonial literature. Others were able to tell their stories after the war, some having escaped death in the most miraculous ways; they include Jules Schelvis, one of the few survivors of Sobibór; Sedje Hémon, the visual artist, violinist, and composer who joined the resistance, was betrayed by her neighbours, and survived Auschwitz as a member of the camp orchestra; and the writer and lawyer Abel Herzberg, who was in Bergen-Belsen with his wife, Thea. Both survived the war, as did their three children, who were in hiding in the Netherlands. But there are also many victims of whom we know little or nothing, sometimes no more than a name on a transport list. Some, mere babies and small children, were too young to leave traces behind. We know little or nothing of others because the potential witnesses in their surroundings – family members, colleagues, and neighbours – met the same fate: they were rounded up, deported, and murdered. This was true of millions of victims of the Nazi persecution and it is also precisely why the culture of remembrance, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, pays so much attention to the naming of names – at remembrance ceremonies or on monuments and digital sites – in order to restore their identities, which the perpetrators of the genocide deliberately attempted to erase.

14 

Abel Herzberg, survivor of Bergen-Belsen, in his younger years, c. 1913. Collection NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) / Photo J. Merkelbach.



Anne Frank, December 1941. Collection NIOD.

15

16 

Occupation The German army needed five days to bring the Netherlands to its knees after it invaded the country on 10 May 1940. It did so as part of Fall Gelb, the strategic plan devised by the supreme command of the Wehrmacht to launch a surprise attack on the Low Countries and advance directly on Northern France, the country with which the Third Reich had officially been at war since the invasion of Poland in 1939. The lightning attack caught the Netherlands off guard, although the signs had been there for all to see in the preceding months. In the Netherlands, however, the idea had been fostered that the country would be able to remain neutral, as it had done in the First World War; an anxious, unrealistic hope that left the country materially and psychologically unprepared for a large-scale military conflict. The Dutch army hardly proved a match for the superior German forces, ­ rebbeberg although some places – around Rotterdam and The Hague, at the G and at the head of the Afsluitdijk – saw a courageous response, which delayed the German advance. To avoid losing momentum, the supreme command of the Wehrmacht turned to more radical measures: on 14 May, between 13:27 and 13:40, the German Luftwaffe destroyed almost all of the historic city centre of the key port city of Rotterdam. Partly as a result of the fires that broke out, an estimated 800-900 people died and almost 80,000 residents were left homeless. After Warsaw in September 1939, it was the second European city to have been terrorized from the air in this way. Faced with the threat that Utrecht would also be bombed, and in view of its hopeless strategic position, the Dutch government decided to capitulate and flee to London. The German invasion, the rapid capitulation and the departure of the government, including Queen Wilhelmina, caused great shock among the population. In the immediate wake of the invasion, thousands of people, including many Dutch Jews and Jewish refugees, attempted to escape across land or sea, often in vain. Others opted for a more drastic way out: in May 1940, more than 350 people committed suicide, sometimes entire families at the same time; more than half of them were Jewish. Among the dead were celebrated Dutch figures such as the militant anti-fascist writer Menno ter Braak and the Amsterdam alderman Emanuel Boekman, but also ordinary citizens such as Simon Dekker, a fisherman who declared, according to witnesses: ‘I am absolutely unable to live under the Germans.’ Four days after the capitulation, he killed first his wife and children and then himself. The fear of what the German occupation might bring was not unfounded. On the contrary, since the rise of Hitler and his party, the Dutch press had



17

Arrival of German troops at the Amsterdam City Hall at Oudezijds Voorburgwal, 15 May 1940. Collection NIOD.

reported meticulously, in overwhelmingly critical tones, on the aggressive and violent anti-Semitic campaigns, the imprisonment of thousands of political opponents – including priests and clergymen – in concentration camps, the intimidation of the media and civil society organizations, and other forms of repression. The Dutch could only imagine what might await them: terror, arrests, anti-Semitic campaigns? What would the future bring? Temporary or permanent occupation, annexation by Germany? In short, many people had every reason to be deeply worried. In the weeks and months that followed, however, these fears did not materialize. The German soldiers behaved in a disciplined, calm, and correct way. It did not take long for the Dutch prisoners of war to be freed, and there were no house searches or mass arrests, with a few exceptions. This was a deliberate policy: the occupying forces were keen to reinforce the impression of ‘normality’ wherever possible. In contrast to Belgium and France, the queen’s departure had cleared the way for the establishment of a civilian, rather than a military, administration in the Netherlands. The prominent Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart who, a few years earlier, had actively helped to bring his native country, Austria, into the Third Reich, was appointed ‘Reich Commissioner for the occupied Dutch territories’.

18 

It was Hitler himself who ordered him to lead the Dutch, as a ‘fraternal Germanic people’, to National Socialism with a light hand; with the ultimate aim, not yet explicitly formulated, of incorporating the country into the Greater German Empire. The Dutch therefore had to be treated ‘magnanimously’. Three weeks after the invasion, this was precisely the message that was communicated by Seyss-Inquart at his inauguration on 29 May 1940. After making a detailed apology of the German invasion as a form of self-defence against a possible allied attack, he underlined the deep kinship and mutual respect between the Dutch and German peoples, with the promise that: We are not coming here to oppress and destroy a national character and to deprive a country of its freedom. […] Neither do we want to bring this land and its population to bay in imperial fashion, nor force our political convictions on this country and its people. In our actions, we want to be led only by the necessity of the special circumstances we face. […] It is my desire to leave in place those Dutch laws already in force, to involve the Dutch authorities in the exercise of government, and to guarantee the independence of the judicial system.

The speech inspired feelings of relief and reassurance, which was precisely what the occupying forces had intended. Thus, although most Dutch citizens had very little sympathy for National Socialism and the German regime, the ‘magnanimity’ proved to be effective. By the summer of 1940, life seemed to have more or less resumed its normal course. The new regime’s restrained approach also had the result that the administrative apparatus, including the judiciary and the police, accepted the new relations almost without any resistance. This was important, because the civilian administration in the Netherlands, like the military authorities in France and Belgium, was utterly dependent for the implementation of its policy on the existing official hierarchy. To put it another way: the Netherlands was governed by senior officials who operated under German supervision and who were led by a desire ‘to make the best of it’, in which economic considerations played an important role. This cooperative stance was then adopted by the rest of the administrative apparatus. The far-reaching, disastrous consequences of the decision to place the Dutch, as ‘a fraternal Germanic people’, under a civilian, rather than a military, administration would only become clear in subsequent years. For these German officials were no ordinary citizens, but die-hard National Socialists. Seyss-Inquart, for one, was Obergruppenführer in the SS, and his



19

Arthur Seyss-Inquart during his inaugural speech as the Reich Commissioner of the occupied Netherlands, in the Ridderzaal [Knights’ Hall], the historic centre of the Dutch Republic in The Hague, 29 May 1940. Collection NIOD.

compatriot Hanns Rauter was leader of the Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer and, as such, was chiefly responsible for the persecution and suppression of the Dutch resistance and jointly responsible for the deportation of Dutch Jews. In other words, from the outset of the occupation, in contrast to Belgium and France, among others, the Netherlands was more or less handed over

20 

to devoted adherents of National Socialist ideology who hailed from the heart of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the SS. Most of them already had administrative or political experience of the enforcement of anti-Jewish measures in Austria and Germany. None of this was evident in the f irst months after the invasion. As suggested above, the dominant theme was one of ‘magnanimity’; there seemed to be no reason to panic. Dutch officials clung to statements made by individual German authorities, who said that they could see no ‘Jewish question’ in the Netherlands. All the same, those who were sensitive to them could not fail to notice the signs: the seemingly limited administrative measures that nevertheless revealed the true nature and intentions of the occupying regime. On the first day of the occupation, Jewish journalists at the ANP national press agency were fired; on 1 July, Jews were forbidden to work for the civil air raid defence agency; on 31 July, there was a ban on ritual slaughter; on 6 September, there was a ban on employing Jews in government service; and on 26 September, there was a general ban on Jewish newspapers, with the exception of the weekly Het Joodsche Weekblad. Shortly afterwards, on 5 October, this was followed by a more serious measure, which constituted the first major step towards the registration and the isolation of Dutch Jews: a measure whereby all officials were obliged to file a declaration of their ancestry. This so-called Ariër-verklaring [Declaration of Aryan descent] was also the first decision to inspire protest beyond Jewish circles, be it on a limited scale. The great majority of non-Jewish Dutch citizens paid little attention to the process of isolation and exclusion that unfolded with a cast-iron logic in the period between 1940 and 1942. Most Dutch men and women lived in villages and towns that had few or no Jewish residents, or moved in circles that did not include Jews; not unusual in a country characterized by a high degree of religious and ideological segregation. There were also those, of course, who simply had no interest in their Jewish fellow citizens or, indeed, were ridden with anti-Jewish prejudices or anti-Semitic ideas and who approved of these discriminatory measures. Only much later would the great majority of non-Jewish Dutch citizens feel the full force of the occupying regime, when the tide gradually began to turn for the Third Reich and Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda, announced total war and a full mobilization of all available civil and military resources in February 1943. For most Dutch men and women, the consequences of this came in the form of mass summons for forced labour, often in Germany, the confiscation of goods, a lack of food and fuel, and, ultimately, starvation. People rejected this by engaging in minor and major



21

acts of resistance, varying from innocuous harassment and symbolic activities to strikes, sabotage, and armed raids, with ‘going into hiding’ being one of the most common, but certainly not the most innocent, type of resistance. But all of this took place from the spring of 1943 onwards – and by that time, more than half of the Jews who were eventually murdered had already been deported from the Netherlands.

Registration and isolation As the French academic Jacques Semelin has written, the first step on the path to genocide is to define minorities as ‘the Other’; as groups of people who do not belong in ‘our’ society and who even pose a threat to it. This is precisely what the Nazis had done in Germany after Hitler had taken office there in 1933: the Jews were stigmatized and isolated, and then stripped of their civil rights and their possessions, whilst their music, literature, and films were banned and their synagogues were burned down. At that time, in the 1930s, these campaigns and measures were not yet aimed at systematic physical annihilation – although various Nazi leaders were already entertaining such ideas in those years –, but on driving all Jews out of the Third Reich. This policy was not unsuccessful: at the beginning of the war, in September 1939, around 300,000 Jews, roughly 60 per cent of the original number in January 1933, had left the Reich. After the conquest of the western part of Poland at the end of 1939, it was decided that the Jews who remained behind would be transferred there. Defining and isolating: the first measures taken by the Nazi regime in the occupied Netherlands also focused on achieving these twin aims, as part of a strategy that strongly resembled the one taken in Germany in the preceding years, but at an accelerated pace. In the first place, the Jews had to be ‘detached’ from Dutch society, made visible and brought together in what might be called a ‘coerced community’; a community that had never actually existed, as shall be explained at length in the second chapter of this book, as Jewish life in the Netherlands had always been characterized by great diversity and a high degree of integration into society. The measures that were introduced by the Nazi authorities in the first months after the invasion have already been mentioned, with the Declaration of Aryan decent in October 1940 being the most far-reaching measure. In order to be able to implement their orders and commands, the National Socialists suspended the relevant articles of the constitution and put pressure on reluctant Dutch officials. The next crucial step was to establish a

22 

central register of Jews in January 1941, in which all people with at least one Jewish grandparent had to enrol. Dutch municipal registers – probably the most advanced in the world at that time – were thereby Nazified, in effect: whereas the prewar system had recorded the religious denomination of individual citizens, with the 1930 census as the reference date, the occupying forces demanded that Jews be registered on the basis of descent, in accordance with the Nuremberg race laws. A new definition of what it meant to be ‘Jewish’ was introduced, based on the religious denomination of one’s grandparents rather than that of the individual. Because such data had traditionally been recorded painstakingly in Dutch municipal registers, they could easily be checked by the persecutors. On the basis of this new definition, thousands of nonreligious citizens were declared to be ‘Jewish’ on the basis of descent, without having a say in the matter. Ultimately, more than 160,000 citizens were registered as ‘wholly’ or ‘partly Jewish’, 22,000 of whom were of foreign origin. Based on descent – that is, having three or four Jewish grandparents – more than 140,000 of them were considered to be ‘fully Jewish’. The registration process coincided with the introduction of identity cards for all Dutch citizens, whereby the documents of citizens with three or four Jewish grandparents, who were deemed to be ‘Jewish’, bore the letter ‘J’. The idea for this was conceived by the State inspector Jacob Lentz, the celebrated architect of the Dutch municipal register. All of this meant that the regime had a perfect instrument of control in its possession: a municipal register in which every citizen’s relevant data, including those of Jewish residents, could be accessed directly, along with identity cards based on the register, complete with photograph, address, signature, and fingerprints, allowing people to be checked in the street. This greatly facilitated the monitoring of compliance with anti-Jewish measures and, later, the preparations for the persecution and deportations. That the Germans had more than administrative measures in mind became clear just one month later. Protected by the German authorities and with a show of violence, Dutch Nazi paramilitary groups paraded through Amsterdam, provoking resistance from gangs of Jewish youths and communists. One incident followed another, and when this resulted in the death of a Nazi activist, the occupying forces closed off the part of Amsterdam that had traditionally been known as the Jewish Quarter with barbed-wire fencing and notices reading ‘Jewish Neighbourhood’. German police troops then moved into the area, searching for weapons. At the same time, the authorities forced Amsterdam’s Jewish community to establish a ‘Jewish Council for Amsterdam’, which had to ensure the restoration of order. This



23

German razzia arrest of 247 Jewish men at Jonas Daniël Meijerplein in Amsterdam, 22 February 1941; these men were later deported to Mauthausen. Only two of these men survived the war. Collection NIOD.

Council, chaired by two prominent Jewish citizens, diamond merchant Abraham Asscher and professor of classical languages David Cohen, would eventually become the sole representative of the Jewish community in the Netherlands that was recognized by the Nazis and thereby, at the same time, a reluctant instrument of the Nazis’ degenerate policies. Whilst the Jewish Council immediately set to work to avoid further escalation, the provocations from the Nazi side simply continued. The authorities responded to this with large-scale raids, a new phenomenon in the Netherlands. On 22 and 23 February, German police troops picked up 427 Jewish men from their homes and the streets around the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, in the heart of the Jewish quarter. The men who had been arrested were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; it did not take long for the first reports of their deaths to reach Amsterdam.

24 

The raids caused great consternation among the population, with unrest reaching far beyond Amsterdam. Just two days later, a two-day mass strike was held, an event that has gone down in history as the February Strike. Many thousands of workers and officials in Amsterdam and surrounding towns, stretching as far as Utrecht, took part in these activities. The Germans broke the strikes with violence and intimidation, in the course of which nine people were killed and dozens wounded. Many of the strikers were arrested and the towns where protests had taken place were subjected to heavy fines. Later, this was followed by the execution of several strike leaders, most of them communists, and other resistance fighters. In the end, the February Strike proved to be the first and only campaign of mass solidarity against the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. Anyone who still had doubts in February 1941 about the intentions of the occupying forces and their accomplices heard, one month later, what the National Socialists were planning from the mouth of Seyss-Inquart himself. In a long speech on the Dutch nation and its relations with Germany, ‘the power centre of a reorganized Europe’, he referred back to the speech that he had made on his accession to office, nine months earlier, removing the mask for good: I declare that my statement that ‘we do not want to oppress the Dutch people and force them to accept our convictions’ remains valid, but it applies only to the Dutch people. We do not consider the Jews to be part of the Dutch people […] We do not see the Jews as Dutch citizens. They are an enemy with whom we shall never be able to agree a truce or come to a peace […] We will hit the Jews when we find them, and anyone who takes their side will suffer the consequences.

According to cast-iron logic, the occupying forces, aided by their Dutch sympathizers, but also by Dutch institutions such as the police, the civil service, the municipal authorities, and other services, would implement their policies of segregation, deprival of rights, and economic marginalization. One prohibitive order followed another at a rapid pace, all – without exception – focused on excluding Jews from Dutch society, from education and healthcare to zoos and markets. Step by step, the Germans confiscated businesses and assets. In the meantime, violence and intimidation spread across the country. Incidental raids were held in Amsterdam, but also in the provinces of Twente and Gelderland. In October 1941, the decision was taken to set up special ‘Jewish labour camps’ in the east and north of the Netherlands, where thousands of men who had deliberately been forced



25

out of employment were, in effect, imprisoned in what were often wretched conditions. The Nazis used the Jewish Council and its organs, including the only newspaper permitted by the regime, Het Joodsche Weekblad, to keep a semblance of normality and to communicate orders and prohibitive measures to the Jewish population. The Council, in turn, reluctantly cooperated, not only to ‘prevent worse’ from happening and to maintain the hope of a better future, but also due to the unremitting – and not unfounded – fear that the Germans would meet resistance or obstruction with reprisals. On the other hand, the Council’s leaders did not realize, or hardly realized, how seriously it was being manipulated under the pretext of ‘self-government’. The leaders believed that the Council was working in the service of the community, but, in reality, the Council’s actions gave the Nazi policies a veneer of legitimacy, thereby further obfuscating the situation and relations, not least within the Jewish community itself. We might add that it was these same motives, including the notion of ‘avoiding worse’, that drove many non-Jewish Dutch institutions and administrators towards more far-reaching collaboration with the Nazi occupying forces. In this way, in the course of 1941-1942, the Jews’ living space shrank both literally and figuratively. All over the Netherlands, Jews increasingly lived in a closed-off world, with segregated institutions such as schools, medical care, and cultural bodies, cared for by the Jewish Council or local committees and religious councils. Due to the imposition of curfews, contact with the outside world also became ever scarcer. The situation deteriorated further when, from early 1942, increasing numbers of Jews in other parts of the Netherlands were ordered to move to Amsterdam and settle in three designated ‘Jewish’ neighbourhoods. The Nazis thereby created a phenomenon that could be described as a ‘visual ghetto’; a clearly demarcated, though not hermetically sealed, Jewish quarter – the only one of its kind in Western Europe.

Deportation In hindsight, we can see that the isolation of the Jews in the Netherlands was no more than an intermediary phase. The Nazis’ original objective to allow the Jews to emigrate from Europe, as had happened in Germany in the 1930s, now proved utterly unfeasible and unworkable. For a start, following the German conquests, the number of Jews within the Reich had become much too large; and second, the ongoing war blocked all

26 

possible exits. The original ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ was therefore no longer available. The consequence of this became clear immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. With the German troops’ advance, many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe fell prey to frenzied mass slaughter. At the end of September 1941, for example, almost 34,000 Jews from Kiev were driven to the ravine of Babi Yar and murdered. The mass murders in Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and Western Russia, ordered by SS-leader Heinrich Himmler and committed by the Einsatzgruppen of the German police and the Waffen-SS, pointed the way to the new ‘solution’. The situation in Eastern Europe, the impracticality of forced emigration, and the idea that the forces of ‘international Jewry’ were conspiring against Germany eventually led to the Nazi leadership’s decision, taken on 20 January 1942 during a secret conference at Wannsee, near Berlin, to physically annihilate Europe’s Jews by gassing them in special camps – by way of an Endlösung der Judenfrage: ‘a final solution to the Jewish question’. In this way, ideas that had been playing on the minds of some Nazi leaders, not least Hitler himself, became a reality. In hindsight, as suggested above, the isolation of the Jewish population, including the compulsory moves and forced labour camps, proved to have been an intermediary phase. After the decision was taken at Wannsee, it was time for the next step: the total extraction of the Jewish population from Dutch authority, their estrangement from the national community and, subsequently, their deportation as ‘non-citizens’, first to transit camps in the Netherlands, beyond the sight of non-Jewish citizens, and subsequently to the recently conquered regions in Eastern Europe. There, in that ‘no man’s land’, as Timothy Snyder has called it, the Nazis could develop and implement their policy of genocide. During the Wannsee meeting, all of the agencies involved, including those in the occupied Netherlands, were placed directly under the authority of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt led by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s right-hand man. Agreements were made on the organization and implementation of the deportation of no fewer than 11 million Jews from across Europe, and the decision was made to build large camps in Eastern Europe and to manufacture the poison gas Zyklon B. In the following weeks, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who, in the preceding years, had played a key role in the forced migrations and worked directly under Heydrich, drew up ambitious transport schedules for the mass deportations, including from the ­Netherlands. His department was responsible for coordinating the transports



27

Eva Granaada, nurse at the Dutch Israelite hospital, Amsterdam, 25 May 1943. Some of her patients had been arrested earlier that day Amsterdam. Eva, 27 years old and single, decided to stay with them, effectively volunteering for deportation. She was deported to Westerbork and, three months later, on 31 August, to Auschwitz. She was gassed immediately upon arrival on 3 September. Collection NIOD.

and timetables for the trains to the ghettos and the concentration and extermination camps. In the months following the Wannsee Conference, the net closed swiftly around the Jewish community in the Netherlands. In March 1942, Rauter, the most senior SS-officer in the Netherlands, announced that the Jews no longer fell under the authority of the Dutch government, meaning that they were de facto stripped of all their civil rights. Their only remaining form of support was Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, which had already been designated as the only recognized representative body for Jews in the whole of the Netherlands. One month later, on 29 April, the Council’s chairs were summoned by Ferdinand Hugo Aus der Funten, one of the main perpetrators of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands. They were informed that as of Sunday 3 May, it would be compulsory for all Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothing. Their protests were of no avail, and Asscher and Cohen eventually gave in for fear of reprisals. As the historian Peter Romijn has written on this:

28 

At that time, it was still difficult to realize that this measure marked a transition in the persecutors’ aims […]. The introduction of the star was the concluding piece in the process of segregation and, at the same time, the starting shot for the deportations.

All subsequent measures were seamlessly linked to this strategy, such as the comprehensive travel ban for Jews (5 June), the ban on shopping outside certain hours (12 June), the introduction of a curfew (12 June), and the ban on telephones and the ban on visiting non-Jews (6 July). Shortly beforehand, Eichmann and the Gestapo’s Judenreferat in Berlin, which formed part of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, had ordered preparations to be made for mass deportations in July and August. Camp Westerbork, until then a refugee camp run by the Dutch government, was expanded to serve as a Polizeiliches Durchgangslager and placed under German command. Thus, at the beginning of July, everything was ready to carry out the deportations. The events that followed are described at length in the third and fourth chapters of this book. From the beginning of July 1942, thousands of Jews were summoned to report for departure to Westerbork;

Transport of Jews at Camp Westerbork after April 1943. Collection NIOD.



29

when insufficient numbers presented themselves, the occupiers turned to a proven method for instilling fear: raids. In the night of 14-15 July, the first 962 Jews were transported from Amsterdam Central station to Westerbork. On 15 July, the first train – carrying 1,135 people, most of them German refugees – left for Auschwitz. It was the beginning of the mass deportations, in a chain in which the Hollandsche Schouwburg, from 20 July, formed a vital link as a central assembly place, as did the transit camp in Westerbork, the concentration camp in Amersfoort, and Camp Vught, opened in early 1943 and known by the Germans as Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch.

The Final Phase Within one year, 93,000 citizens from the Netherlands whom the Nazis had identified as ‘Jews’ were transported to the extermination camps; 20,000 of them had been taken away from labour camps, hospitals, institutions, and other social organizations. This dreadful number eventually rose to 107,000. The last of the 93 transports from Westerbork left on 13 September 1944, bound for Bergen-Belsen; among its passengers were 77 children who had been picked up from their places of hiding. This fate also befell Anne Frank and her family, who had been deported to Auschwitz ten days earlier. When Camp Westerbork was liberated on 12 April 1945, 900 prisoners were still there.

Metal train sign ‘Westerbork-Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Westerbork’, indicating a return trip that nobody would ever make. Collection Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre / Photo collection NIOD.

30 

Map of Nazi camps in Europe. Source: Wikipedia / Creative Commons.

Of the 107,000 Jews who were deported, 102,000 were murdered in the concentration and extermination camps; hundreds of Sinti and Roma met the same fate. Just 5,200 Jews survived the horrors; from some places of terror, such as Sobibór, almost no one returned. Of the 140,552 citizens identified by the occupying powers as ‘fully Jewish’, fifteen per cent of whom were immigrants, over one quarter eventually survived the war. Five thousand of the survivors had been exempted from deportation, whilst over 10,000 Jews in mixed marriages were likewise given permission to remain ‘legally’ in the Netherlands. Furthermore, more than 16,000 Jews survived the war in hiding, and over 2,000 managed to escape abroad. In hindsight, it is difficult to imagine how these events could have taken place and how the percentage of survivors in the Netherlands could have been so much smaller than in other Western European countries, including in Denmark, France, and Belgium. At his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Adolf



31

Eichmann, who was responsible for the logistics of the mass deportations, looked back with satisfaction on the events in the Netherlands: ‘There, the transports ran so perfectly that they were a delight to behold.’ The Dutch historian Jacques Presser used comparable words in his ground-breaking study on the persecution of the Jews, published in 1965. In order to explain why such a high percentage of Dutch Jews died, historians have identified various factors and circumstances. It has been suggested, for example, that the Netherlands, with its high population density and open, flat landscape, with no extensive forests or mountains, offered few opportunities to escape the occupying forces; whilst, on the other hand, their high concentration in Amsterdam and a handful of other cities made the Jews an easy target. Of great significance, in any case, was the fact that the German agencies in the Netherlands that were directly involved enjoyed almost unlimited freedom of action, as the historians Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller have shown in a comparative study of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Fanatical Nazis played a major role in the so-called ‘civilian administration’ that was established in the Netherlands in May 1940, whereby the SS, in particular, was able to exercise considerable influence. On the other hand, almost the entire Dutch administrative apparatus – in effect decapitated, after the head of state and her cabinet had fled to London – acted in a relatively cooperative fashion, in order to avoid further unrest and to prevent the Dutch National Socialists from gaining more power. This collaborative stance also extended to the persecution of the Jews: from the highest to the lowest echelons, Dutch officials and police agents played an active role in preparing and implementing the deportation policies. In many respects, the passive stance of Dutch institutions in relation to the fate of the country’s Jewish citizens was typical of that of most of the population. In historical and political terms, there was an explanation for this: the Netherlands was a deeply bourgeois, law-abiding country, with no militant traditions and utterly lacking in recent experience of war. Moreover, the population was highly segregated along religious and political lines: real contact among the different groups in the population – Catholics, Protestants, and socialists – and mutual solidarity was largely absent. The fact that some circles harboured anti-Jewish sentiments and anti-Semitism strengthened this isolation. Finally, there was fear of tough reprisals, a fear that the Germans nurtured systematically, as shown in the days following the February Strike. Only in the spring of 1943, after Goebbels had declared a state of totale Krieg and the German regime considerably stepped up its oppressive tactics, did the passive mood of the people change and a breeding ground for active resistance develop. From that time, it became easier to go into hiding and

32 

to look for other illegal channels. For most Jews, however, this turnaround came far too late: by then, the majority of them had already been deported. This state of relative passivity and law-abidingness was also characteristic of the Dutch Jews themselves: most had lived in the country in peace and harmony for centuries, and they were completely unprepared for a life of resistance or unlawfulness. The suggestion that the Dutch Jews allowed themselves to be taken away en masse, however, does not hold up. There was certainly resistance, as shown by the history of the Crèche opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg, from which hundreds of children were rescued (see chapter 4). Many Jews were also active in the socialist and communist resistance. Furthermore, around 25,000 Jews went into hiding, the majority of whom survived the war – although thousands of them were arrested, some as a result of betrayal, whilst in hiding. It should also be noted that, for a long time in Jewish circles, there was often little awareness of the incongruous, dreadful predicament in which they found themselves. This was true of the Jewish Council, for a start, which the occupying forces – in this case, the SS – exploited to achieve their objectives. To quote the Dutch historian Peter Romijn: For the Germans, for the sake of efficiency, it was of the utmost importance that the victims themselves cooperated with implementation. The Jewish Council played a leading role in this plan: the leaders did not choose to do so, but were coerced, step by step. On the eve of the deportations, the Jews as a group were held hostage; they were still on Dutch soil, but they had been placed outside Dutch society. They were destitute, desperate people, with hardly any means of collective or individual resistance any more. As such, they could be controlled and guarded without many Germans needing to intervene.

At the same time, the Jewish Council, by means of a complicated system of exemptions (temporary exemptions, it later proved), maintained an illusion of legitimacy and space for negotiation. This led to sharp criticism and helpless anger, but this was an illusion to which many Jews also clung, with often catastrophic consequences.

Return When the country was liberated by allied troops and the war ended on 5 May 1945, the impact of the occupation became clear. The Netherlands had been hit



33

Foeliestraat, part of the desolated Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, 1945. During the last, severe winter in 1944-1945, people in the western part of the Netherlands were starving. They began to strip houses of deported Jews of everything flammable, convinced that its occupants were never to return. Collection NIOD.

heavily – more heavily than other countries in Western Europe. The economy and infrastructure had been destroyed, almost everything was in short supply, and some parts of the country had been completely disrupted. Many thousands had been made homeless and hundreds of thousands of people were scattered across Europe as prisoners, soldiers, or forced labourers. The number of deaths, including the victims of the Nazi genocide and the famine during the final winter of the war, amounted to 250,000, or 2.7% of the population. And then there was the legacy of the various forms of collaboration with the enemy, deliberate or not, for which 150,000 people were arrested. For Dutch Jews, the consequences were more radical in every respect; they were irrevocable. They had been uprooted, orphaned, and deprived of their loved ones. For those who remained behind, many of whom had survived the war in hiding, the liberation marked the beginning of a long wait to see who might have survived the hardships in the East. With growing awareness of the inconceivable nature of what had happened in the Nazi camps, hope faded that they would ever return. The Netherlands that they had once known, in which they had felt free and safe as full citizens, had become completely unrecognizable.

2.

In and Around the Theatre Jewish Life in Amsterdam in the Prewar Era by Frank van Vree with contributions from Hetty Berg and Joost Groeneboer

In many respects, the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg is characteristic of the development of the Dutch Jewish community between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Second World War. The theatre had Jewish owners for decades and famous Jewish actors and directors celebrated triumphs there, but, at the same time, no one would have called it a Jewish theatre. The companies that performed there were mixed, as were the audiences, and the plays that were put on could seldom be described as ‘Jewish’. In other words, the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg mirrored the political and cultural integration of Dutch Jews from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. In this chapter, this development is described with a particular focus on Amsterdam, the city that had formed the heart of the Dutch Jewish community since the seventeenth century.

An Unusual Production Christmas Eve, 1898. It is bitterly cold. From all around, people are walking towards the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the grand theatre built in classical style in Amsterdam’s leafy Plantage neighbourhood. It is the evening of the premiere of Ghetto, the most recent play by the flamboyant socialist writer and journalist Herman Heijermans. The play has been the subject of media speculation for weeks. The tension is great, including for the playwright himself, who does not attend the performance, but awaits its reception in a nearby café. The play’s theme promises to be explosive: the ‘Jewish isolation from the world’, an issue on which public controversy had raged for months, fuelled by a campaign for the founding of more Jewish schools by Joseph Hirsch Dünner, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam. Dünner, who was also a public school inspector, was concerned about the decline of Jewish life in the Netherlands. He wished to reverse this tendency by means of education based on religious foundations, among other things. This provoked a sharp response from

36 

Actor Adriaan van der Horst as Rabbi in Ghetto by Heijermans, c. 1903. From: Herman Heijermans. Schrijversprentenboek, Gerrit Borgers a.o., The Hague: Letterkundig Museum 1964.

defenders of public education, namely liberals and socialists – both Jews and non-Jews – and a fierce and lengthy public debate between Dünner and the city government of Amsterdam. There could not be any doubt as to where the Jewish socialist Heijermans stood in this controversy; this was something he had already made clear.



37

Sabbath, for example, a short story that functioned as a preparatory study for Ghetto, and the novel Diamantstad [Diamond City] painted a pitch-black picture of the degradation and subjection in the impoverished parts of Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. There was but one way out, in his opinion: a break with tradition. At the premiere, Heijermans did not disappoint his audience – a motley collection of socialists, Christians, supporters of Dünner, Jews from the surrounding neighbourhoods, critics, and other theatre-lovers. Emotions were already running high during the performance, as shown by the catcalls and clapping, audible comments, murmurs, and hissing. But there were also moments of profound silence, for Ghetto was more than a display of conflicting opinions; it was also a true tragedy, as suggested by the subtitle, a compelling, moving play performed by first-class actors, with a tearjerker for an ending. Ghetto – Burgerlijk Treurspel in 3 Bedrijven [Ghetto: A Bourgeois Tragedy in 3 Acts] tells the story of the passionate love between Rafaël, the son of a blind Jewish secondhand dealer, and Rose, a Christian girl who is employed by the family. Their love promises to build bridges between two strictly segregated worlds – and this is precisely what Rafaël declares, full of pathos: the future lies beyond the narrow, depraved world of his father, beyond oppressive religious and moral traditions, beyond class differences. Their dream has a rough awakening, however: the father, the rabbi, and the whole neighbourhood make every effort to derail the relationship in the hopes that Rafaël will return to the fold and marry the daughter of his father’s friend, a trader who can afford a considerable dowry. Although Rafaël refuses to yield, Rose, the ‘Sabbath maid’, is so affected by all of the strife that she drowns herself in the canal. This summary – a very concise one at that – immediately reveals several of the play’s central motifs and themes. After all, Ghetto was more than an Amsterdam-based variant on classical dramas about sons who rebel against their fathers or love that knows no borders. Heijermans was an engaged writer who practised his literary art in the spirit of realists and naturalists such as Zola, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Hauptmann, as a form of political and social criticism. With Ghetto, he pursued a crusade against bourgeois values and norms, in favour of free love – and, above all else, in strident tones, against the shackles of belief, against the stuffy closed-mindedness and self-satisfaction of Jews and Christians. At the same time, his protagonist Rafaël displays messianic qualities: he proclaims a new world in which origins are of no consequence; he is the herald of enlightenment, of the elevation of the masses, of the dawning of a new world in which all races and religions unite in a new community.

38 

Herman Heijermans, undated. Collection Netherlands Theatre Institute / University of Amsterdam (TIN).

Art in the service of society – that was Heijermans’ credo. When making harsh accusations against the existing order, he did not mince his words. He was not one to shrink from exposing taboos in ruthless fashion. In this, he succeeded, as shown by the premiere of Ghetto. Even before the dailies were able to publish their reviews – no papers were published on



39

Christmas day – the rumour was already circulating: this was a play one had to see. At the next performance, every one of the 900 seats was sold-out, and the same happened the next evening, and the next, for three months on end – exceptional in those years. Each time, there was uproar in the auditorium or outside, in the street and in the cafes, with heated discussions that continued long after the performance had ended. The play subsequently toured the Netherlands and abroad, starting with London, where the play was performed as early as 1899. There is much to say about Ghetto from all kinds of perspectives. To start with, the title in itself is somewhat problematic; the term ‘ghetto’ was rarely used in relation to the Jewish community in the Netherlands, either then or later. Dutch cities, including Amsterdam, had ‘Jewish quarters’, but these had never been closed quarters, as had been the case elsewhere in Europe. Heijermans thus seems to have used the term primarily in a metaphorical sense: the ghetto as a state of social and mental isolation. This raises the question of what the Jewish community in the Netherlands in the years around 1900 was actually like, and how it developed in the period leading up to the fatal years of Nazi oppression.

Mokum and the Mediene Although there was no ghetto in Amsterdam nor elsewhere in the Netherlands, the old Jewish Quarter was clearly defined, as Heijermans describes in his naturalistic stories. Around 1900, more than half of Amsterdam’s Jews – and in particular, the poorest among them – still lived in the part of the city that had been home to Jews for centuries. The Jewish Quarter consisted of four islands: Vlooienburg, Uilenburg, Valkenburg, and Rapenburg (see map). These islands had been built at the end of the sixteenth century as part of the expansion of the city. The first Jewish emigrants, who hailed from Portugal and Spain, had settled in Vlooienburg, followed by the Ashkenazi Jews, often poor and mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, who made their homes on the other islands. An impressive synagogue complex was built on the edge of this neighbourhood; its first prayer house, the Grote Sjoel [Great Synagogue], was built in 1671. The building of the complex was financed in part by a loan from Amsterdam’s city government; just like other minority groups in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, the Jews in Amsterdam formed a tolerated ‘nation’ – an ethnic group with limited self-government – under the direct responsibility of the local government, with the freedom of practise of their

40 

The Jewish neighborhood. Detail of a map of Amsterdam, 1727. Naaukeurige afbeelding van de wydvermaarde koopstadt Amsterdam, published by Reinier and Josua Ottens. Collection Atlas Kok / Collection Stadsarchief Amsterdam (SAA).

religion [exercitie van haere religie]’, as the great republican jurist Hugo Grotius put it in his proposal for a Remonstrance or Jodenreglement [Law for the Jews] in 1615. With the recognition of the principle of ‘freedom of conscience’, which saw the toleration of other religious communities in addition to the Dutch Reformed Church, which enjoyed privileged status as a ‘public church’, the Republic’s stance was exceptional in Europe. Due to the decentralized character of the Republic, however, these principles were far from upheld everywhere. In Amsterdam, the city government’s policy was relatively liberal, despite the restrictive measures imposed on the Jews, but this was not the case in every part of the Republic. Extensive local autonomy led to great differences in the position of Jewish communities at the local level, although nowhere was it the case that Jews were obliged to

41



wear a form of identification or live in a particular neighbourhood once they had been admitted to a town. There were all sorts of professional restrictions, however, such as exclusion from almost all guilds and public offices, a fate shared by most other religious minority groups in the Republic. In 1796, the Jews were granted full civic rights, one year after other minority groups such as the Catholics, Huguenots, and Mennonites, by the National Assembly of the Batavian Republic, founded in the spirit of the French Revolution. At this time, around 90 per cent of the 25,000 Jewish residents of Amsterdam – almost one tenth of the city’s total population – lived in the old Jewish Quarter. The rest of them, mainly the better-off, had settled in other neighbourhoods, mostly nearby, such as the eastern canal district. It should be noted, though, that the islands of the Jewish Quarter were also home to a substantial number of non-Jewish residents. At that time, the conditions in large parts of the Jewish Quarter were utterly impoverished. When the census was taken in 1795, the officials complained that the extent of overcrowding made it almost impossible to do an accurate count: The population density in the Jewish Quarter is so great in some places, every little place, right up to the attic, full of so many people, the immodesty of many of that nation in such houses was of such a nature that the neighbourhood inspectors dared not vouch that they had not overlooked a few people, especially children.

This situation changed little during that time. Those who were able to move, moved elsewhere, either within Amsterdam or beyond, to the provinces. After legal emancipation, many Jews settled in smaller towns and villages spread over the whole country, called the mediene, a Yiddish term used, for convenience’s sake, to refer to roughly everything outside Amsterdam. In the middle of the century, one third of Dutch Jews – around 2 per cent of the total population – lived outside the western provinces; just 45 per cent of Jews lived in Amsterdam. This demographic shift had little effect on the capital’s reputation, however; although The Hague, Rotterdam, and Groningen had sizeable Jewish communities, Amsterdam remained the unequivocal centre of Dutch Jewry. Mokum was the name the city called – and continues to call – itself by, a name derived, via Yiddish, from the Hebrew word makom, meaning ‘place’. Amsterdam had a reputation as the ‘Jerusalem of the West’, despite the fact that, from an international perspective, the city – with the exception of the

42 

publishers and book printers, for example – had not played a leading role in the history of Jewish culture or religion.

A New Era Although the legal and political position of the Jews was changed by the emancipation of 1796, the social, religious, and cultural relations within the Jewish community remained largely unchanged for many decades. Traditional views and customs continued to dominate. There was no radical break; something that is unsurprising when one realizes that many Jews had seen little benef it in the revolutionary ideals of equality and fraternity. In their exasperation and impatience, a small group of radical reformers in Amsterdam even broke away for a short period. The religious leaders and administrators feared an erosion of tradition and, with this, of their own power and authority. Moreover, at the beginning, only a tiny upper class was able to profit from the emancipation. For example, Jewish dignitaries with sufficient income to make the electoral threshold took part in local government in both the cities and the provinces. Some of them became active and influential liberal reformers, such as Dr Samuel Coronel, one of the founders of social medicine in the Netherlands, the banker and philanthropist A.C. Wertheim, and Dr Samuel Sarphati, one of the most active social reformers around the middle of the nineteenth century. Sarphati, who was born in 1813 to a Portuguese-Jewish family and trained as a doctor, developed an incredible range of activities during his short lifetime (he died in 1866). Inspired by his experiences as a doctor, whereby he had been confronted with the consequences of the woeful social and hygienic maladministration in Amsterdam’s impoverished neighbourhoods, he devoted his unbridled energy to improving living conditions. He played an important role in the establishment of a refuse collection system, for instance, and contributed to numerous initiatives on public health, education, industrialization, and urban development. He wanted to make Amsterdam into a modern industrial city, and it is for this reason that he is compared to the French urban planner Haussmann, who, in the same period, transformed the appearance of Paris beyond recognition with his large-scale reforms. The difference, though, was that Hausmann was working under the patronage of a powerful emperor, Napoleon III, whereas Sarphati was largely dependent on fluctuating political support and private initiatives.

43



Notwithstanding their visibility in public and political life, figures such as Sarphati were quite rare, for, around the mid-nineteenth century, the Jewish elite was still relatively small. This situation only changed after 1870, when the wave of industrialization and modernization also hit the Netherlands. These developments brought a definitive end to the relatively isolated social position of the great majority of Dutch Jews and their strong inward orientation. In the words of historians Hans Blom and Joël Cahen: There were thus strong tendencies towards the integration, acculturation and assimilation of Jews and the Jewish population into Dutch society. This was not a unilateral process of Jews adjusting to a fixed and unequivocal Dutch way of life. Precisely because the dynamic was so strong, it was a matter of interaction, whereby Jews were undoubtedly influenced by and involved in developments in their surroundings, but in turn, they made significant contributions to these developments with their own activities.

One of the most visible consequences of the rapid economic development from 1870 was that of Jews returning from the mediene to the cities in the west of the Netherlands, especially Amsterdam; that city in particular saw growth in economic activity and employment. Whereas Amsterdam had had 25,000 Jewish residents in 1849, this figure rose to more than 60,000 by 1909 – almost 60 per cent of all Jews in the Netherlands. The strong growth of the population, due to this migration and the high birth rate, increased pressure on the Jewish Quarter, leading to distressing conditions. The quarter fell even more deeply into poverty. A slum clearance plan had been drawn up as early as 1866, on the grounds that the ‘dirtiness and uncleanliness’ encountered there exceeded that ‘in perhaps any other place in the world’. This made little difference, however; in 1900, one researcher counted more than twenty refuse dumps in Uilenburgerstraat, one of the narrow streets in the Jewish Quarter. This was the world in which Heijermans set his Ghetto; this was home to the Jews who would have to find their salvation in socialism. On the other hand, increasing numbers of Jews were establishing themselves in other parts of the city, starting with the surrounding neighbourhoods. These included the Plantage, a new neighbourhood that had arisen in a leafy area that had, for centuries, been an important pleasure resort for Amsterdam’s citizens, due to its gardens, the botanical garden, and Artis zoo, but also for its taverns, cafés, and summer theatres. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Plantage gradually filled with buildings;

44 

The Poor Quarters of Amsterdam, 1878. From: A. Hubert, Le tour du Monde, 1878. Collection SAA.



45

not only homes for the wealthy middle classes, but also theatres and other places of entertainment, such as the Hollandsche Schouwburg. In a certain sense, the gradual dispersal of the Jewish population reflected their social emancipation. This, at least, was the case for the bourgeoisie; the proletariat was yet to benefit from the changes. Economic development and rising prosperity had also created a new middle class among the Jewish community in the Netherlands, made up of industrialists, shopkeepers, traders, and bankers. Jews gained access to an increasing number of professions from which they had long been excluded, in sectors such as public administration, education, the administration of justice and the bar, but also the arts and the media; they included Herman Heijermans’ father, who was a journalist for the NRC, a leading liberal paper. In short, by around 1900, a Jewish middle class was emerging, whose members considered themselves as ‘Dutch citizens of Jewish religion’ and not as ‘members of the Jewish nation in the Netherlands’, as had been the case a century earlier. This is not to say, though, that other Dutch citizens accepted them as equals. For many years, there continued to be many organizations that Jews were not permitted to join.

Social Contrasts Economic growth and the liberal political climate combined to create a fertile seed-bed for the emancipation of the expanding Jewish bourgeoisie. The impoverished majority of the population benefitted little from this development, however. Around the turn of the century, the poverty among the proletariat was still dreadful, as described by Heijermans and other writers, including Israel Querido. Nor do other historical sources, such as the many reports that formed the basis of the City of Amsterdam’s slum clearance policy, hesitate to describe the pollution, decay, and impoverishment. The woeful conditions in the Jewish Quarter were some of the worst in the Netherlands. The social contrasts within the Jewish population were also accentuated by a religious conservatism that was imposed from above. In contrast to other countries, such as Germany, the integration of the Jewish bourgeoisie into Dutch society was not accompanied by modernization in the area of religion. Organized Jewish religious life was and continued to be orthodox, and the Jews appeared to be a united group, although a significant part of the bourgeois elite privately followed a different, more liberal way of life. One striking example of this tendency was the above-mentioned banker and

46 

philanthropist A.C. Wertheim (1832-1897), a central figure in Amsterdam’s political and religious life. Abraham Carel Wertheim – a political liberal, member of the Senate and chair of the chief synagogue of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam – was the ideal personification of the Jew who was highly integrated into Dutch society and secularized to a far-reaching degree. His personal lifestyle and membership of the Freemasons proved no impediment to his concluding an alliance with the above-mentioned chief rabbi Dünner, appointed in 1874, and to devoting himself to the preservation of orthodoxy. In his opinion, the mass of believers would ultimately be best off by following orthodox traditions. The Dutch political scientist H. Daalder described this alliance between the orthodox and liberal elites as a marriage de raison; and, thanks to new generations of administrators, such as Abraham Asscher, it persisted far into the twentieth century. As wealthy and prominent citizens, Wertheim, Asscher, and their fellow administrators, the Parnassim or religious leaders, gave the ‘Jewish religious communities their characteristic bourgeois, class-conscious and paternalistic character’. This preference for orthodoxy did not mean, however, that nothing changed. Under Dünner’s leadership, religious Judaism in the Netherlands underwent a radical transformation in the final decades of the nineteenth century. For example, meetings were stripped of numerous traditional elements, whereby Yiddish – which had previously been banned on government authority, but continued to be used informally – and various kinds of other, more popular elements also disappeared. In other words, he opted for a compromise: by modernizing orthodoxy, he wanted to prevent the emergence of a split between liberals and the orthodox in the Netherlands, as had occurred in Germany, where Reform Judaism had made significant inroads decades earlier. Everyone, from the devout to the liberal, should feel at home in the Jewish community, a position that was fully supported by the bourgeois Parnassim, under Wertheim’s leadership. At first sight, this strategy appeared effective: indeed, the first liberal community would not be founded until 1929. But the price that was paid for this was considerable. One unforeseen consequence of the policy followed by Dünner and the bourgeois religious leaders was that they largely alienated themselves from the poorer part of the Jewish population. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that indignation at the poverty and the social contradictions was expressed, in part, in the form of a straightforward attack on orthodoxy. Heijermans was thus certainly not alone in his unadulterated anti-clericalism. As historian Jaap Meijer put it:

47



Jozef Israëls, The Jewish Wedding, 1903 Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Great was the resentment that Jewish workers harboured against bourgeois fellow Jews; a resentment that they would ultimately vent on the social and spiritual structure of their former status: the Ghetto and Orthodoxy.

This estrangement between the poorer masses and the bourgeois-religious organizations had far-reaching consequences. Jewish workers sought their salvation elsewhere – precisely as Heijermans had prophesied in Ghetto.

Socialism and Emancipation Whilst the up-and-coming Jewish bourgeoisie found its political home in liberalism and secularism, the Jewish proletariat turned in huge numbers to socialism around 1900. In doing so, the tone was set by workers in the

48 

diamond industry, a trade in which Jews – owing to the lack of a guild – had worked since the seventeenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sector had almost 10,000 workers, the great majority of whom were Jews. Conversely, around a third of Jewish workers were directly dependent on this unpredictable sector – ‘the trade’, as many Jewish diamond workers called it. Whereas the employment and labour conditions were liable to fluctuate, they were not bad in comparison with other sectors, although memories of the golden years around 1870, when the diamond market had briefly exploded, persisted. The concentration and relative homogeneity of the sector formed a fertile seed-bed for a powerful trade union movement. During a major strike in November 1894 that had been set in motion by the socialist diamond cutter Jan van Zutphen, he and the young, charismatic diamond worker Henri Polak, both members of the Principal Committee of the United Diamond Workers’ Association, decided to join forces permanently. This resulted in the founding of the General Dutch Diamond Workers’ Union [Algemene Nederlandse Diamantbewerkersbond, ANDB], the first modern trade union in the Netherlands. In subsequent years, the ANDB played an exemplary role in various respects, both within the trade union movement and social democracy, and within the Jewish community. From the outset, the ANDB presented itself as a general organization. The union’s leaders, Henri Polak and the non-Jewish Jan van Zutphen, made every effort to avoid a division between ‘Jews’ and ‘Christians’. Indeed, when Jewish diamond cutters and lower-paid ‘Christian cutters’ found themselves at odds during a meeting on wages policy one year after the trade union’s foundation, and the debate degenerated into wild accusations, the entire board, led by the chair (Polak) and the secretary (Van Zutphen), decided to resign. The events that followed were of crucial significance to the ANDB, to social democracy in the Netherlands, and to the Dutch Jewish community. The board members’ anger at the course of the meeting and the announcement of their resignations caused a veritable shock wave. That very same day, late in the afternoon, diamond workers in a few large factories in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter spontaneously put down their tools. The following morning, the strike rapidly spread over the rest of the city. Highly aware that this escalation could spell the end of the still-young trade union, thousands of workers flocked to the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, not to demonstrate for higher wages or for better labour conditions, but against their own trade union board’s decision to resign. To noisy cheers, the demonstrators on the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein accepted a motion



49

Meeting of the diamond cutters on strike in the ANDB building in Amsterdam, 1900. This campaign, which ran from 7 August to 17 September, concerned the so-called ‘bort charge’. Workers had to buy their own ‘bort’ (diamond powder used for cutting). When its price rose, they demanded compensation – and eventually won. Collection International Institute for Social History (IISG).

calling on the board members to revoke their decision. Impressed by such loyalty, the board yielded, albeit on condition that the members accepted all of the proposals. At first sight, this unusual event appears little more than a drop in the ocean of social unrest at the end of the nineteenth century, but, if we look more closely, it marks a crucial transition in a number of respects. First of all, the restoration of unity both established the ANDB and propelled it towards becoming the most powerful trade union in the Netherlands. Confident, well-organized, disciplined, decisive, and financially powerful, it concentrated its efforts primarily on advocacy, not on political campaigning, like the trade unions of the early socialist movement in preceding decades. A search for the origins of the modern trade union movement in the Netherlands thus inevitably takes one to the Diamond Workers’ Union. Although the ANDB primarily assumed the role of advocate, not political organization, at the same time, it formed one of the first and most important cornerstones of the reformist Social Democratic Labour Party (SDAP), which had been founded shortly beforehand. The same Henri Polak was one of its ‘twelve apostles’, as the party’s founders were known,

50 

thereby highlighting his key position in the labour movement. It was almost a given that ten years later, he would become the first chairman of the overarching socialist-oriented Netherlands Confederation of Trade Unions (NVV); Polak had become the very embodiment of the trade union movement. The growth and flourishing of the ANDB mirrored the development of the Jewish proletariat in Amsterdam and its integration into Dutch society. The fact that no separate Jewish trade unions were founded in the Netherlands, in contrast to Belgium, France, England, and the US, was, to a significant extent, due to the fact that the Jewish proletariat was ‘autochthonous’ and did not consist largely of immigrants, as was the case in the above-mentioned countries. Polak, Van Zutphen, and their Jewish and non-Jewish supporters not only shared the same ideals, but they also shared the same language and culture – those of the Netherlands. And there was another important additional factor: the absence of endemic, systematic anti-Semitism and accompanying propaganda. In many respects, the history of the ANDB – known in Jewish Amsterdam as ‘the Union’ – and the position of its leader, Henri Polak, highlight the emancipation of the Jewish proletariat and its turn towards socialism. The trade union was a beacon on the road to gaining full rights in Dutch society, a way out of the poverty and the ‘ghetto’ – whereby the latter term should be understood, above all, in the way that it was defined by Herman Heijermans, who himself was active in the burgeoning social democratic movement: the mental condition of the impoverished masses, imprisoned by tradition. It was their task to lead the masses out of their prison. As far as Polak was concerned, this was not merely a question of fine words. He was what is known as a cultural socialist, someone who spent his whole life combining political and administrative activities with forms of oratory and writing that were as industrious as they were inspired. He aimed to bring the diamond workers together as socialist stalwarts, for whom cultural development and moral edification were as important as the social struggle and material progress. The headquarters of the ANDB, opened in 1900, was steeped in these ethical-aesthetic ideals: the ‘Burcht’ (‘Castle’), situated in the Plantage neighbourhood, a few hundred metres from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, was designed by the father of modern Dutch architecture, H.P. Berlage, and richly decorated by leading artists. It had a splendid meeting room and its own ‘boekerij’ or library, which was the pride of the union’s members. Over time, Polak grew to become an almost mythical figure within the Jewish community, revered yet also familiar and treated as a close family member.



51

Picture postcard of the headquarters of the General Diamond Workers' Union by architect H.P. Berlage, c. 1912. Collection Jewish Historical Museum (JHM).

People spoke affectionately of his personal dedication and approachability, his paternal severity, and his consideration for the thousands within and beyond the Union. By combining the roles of popular educator, trade union leader, and confidante, he became the ‘rabbi’ of the diamond workers, as it were. Polak did not consider it problematic to combine these roles, associated as they were with different traditions. In a certain sense, it was appropriate, given his experiences as a youth – when he had lived on Botermarkt outside the Jewish Quarter, but had entered the old quarter almost every day to go to school, or to attend synagogue with his father on the Sabbath.

52 

Henri Polak, with signature, ‘In memory of 18 November 1939’, referring to the 45th anniversary of the General Diamond Workers’ Union ANDB. Collection JHM.

53



An Old Neighbourhood Disappears The emancipation of the Jewish proletariat was not the achievement of a single person, of course, just as it took decades, not merely years. Such poverty could not be eradicated overnight, no more than the deplorable accommodations could be – although the first Housing Act (1901) gave city governments the means to develop an active policy for the first time. In Amsterdam, this led not only to plans for expansion, but also to an active redevelopment policy, which included the four islands of the Jewish Quarter. A council decree of 1916, for example, provided that part of Uilenburg should be demolished – a decision that sparked an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum with the revealing title, Het verdwijnend Amsterdamsch Ghetto in beeld [Images of the disappearing Ghetto of Amsterdam]. More than 1,500 items were gathered for the exhibition, including drawings, etchings, photographs, manuscripts, and religious objects. The exhibition conveyed the impression that the demolition of Uilenburg, the neighbourhood that had always lain at the heart of Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter, had brought an end to Jewish life. Here and there, this prompted nostalgic, romantic views, such as in the liberal daily Algemeen Handelsblad: … but a strong, intimately living, warm-blooded vein of the wonderful city of Amsterdam is now being cut away! […] What would Amsterdam’s popular life be without the Jewish Quarter, without the heart of the Jewish Quarter, which Uilenburg was?

The poet Jacob Israël de Haan captured the same feelings in Een joodsche tentoonstelling [A Jewish exhibition], a 270-line ode to the wealth of JewishAmsterdam history on display, saturated with nostalgic sentiment: The many-hued splendours of Jewish life Cause the heart of many an artist flutter. Of fine draughtsmen, bold etchers, Contemplative painters and rapid sketchers.

A feeling that is combined with the awareness that modernization is inevitable: Life goes on; an old Neighbourhood disappears. Is it good fortune: liberation from constraints? Is it dangerous: the threat of mixing?

54 

The ‘liberation from constraints’ to which Israël de Haan referred had been under way for many years, of course, both demographically and in a sociocultural sense. Whereas better-off Jews had begun to settle beyond the traditional Jewish neighbourhoods in the nineteenth century, it was then the turn for the middle classes and the workers. The clearance of the old neighbourhoods, but above all emancipation and rising prosperity, led to the further dispersal of the Jewish citizens of Amsterdam across the city. In 1927, just one in three Jewish residents was still living in what was known respectably as ‘the Jewish Quarter’. This minority included many who belonged to the poorest part of the urban population, often lacking a steady income, and living from petty trade or casual labour. Those who were able to leave, left; an increasing number of other neighbourhoods therefore included a substantial number of Jewish residents, although, according to the censuses, the number of Jews in Amsterdam between 1899 and 1930 hardly increased in either an absolute or a relative sense: it continued to fluctuate at around 10 per cent of the city population. This development can be seen clearly from a map that was produced in January 1941 by public officials in Amsterdam, on the orders of the German occupying forces. Each dot represents ten Jewish residents; moreover, figures for each neighbourhood show how many Jews (blue) and how many non-Jews (red) lived there. The map reveals that not only the areas around the old Jewish Quarter, but also the neighbourhoods in the new parts of the city in the south and south-east included a considerable number of Jewish residents. The information recorded on this official ‘dot map’ is, by no means, unproblematic. For a start, according to the map, 80,000 Jews were living in Amsterdam in 1941, over 30 per cent more than had been recorded in the census of 1930. There are two probable explanations for this significant difference: first, in the 1930s, around 10,000 Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany and Austria, had settled in Amsterdam; and second, the census that was carried out in 1941 on the orders of the Germans was based on the ‘principle of descent’ introduced by the Nazis, whereby many who had registered themselves explicitly as ‘non-religious’ in the census ten years earlier, were now recorded as ‘Jewish’.



55

The notorious Dot Map (Stippenkaart) of Amsterdam, May 1941. The German regime demanded a detailed municipal map of Amsterdam, indicating the distribution of its Jewish inhabitants. With great dedication, the city officials went to work. Every dot represents ten Jewish inhabitants, defined according to Nazi standards. Collection NIOD.

56 

Integration, Segregation, and Anti-Semitism In many respects, the demographic developments in Amsterdam mirrored the increasing participation of Jews in Dutch society. This integration was accompanied by processes of acculturation and assimilation, whereby acculturation should be understood as a two-way exchange of cultural or social characteristics between social groups, and assimilation as a process of adaptation and mixing, with the relinquishing of traditional social ties and one’s own exclusive minority culture. If one is to describe the developments within the Dutch Jewish community in the decades prior to the Second World War in such terms, it can be said that there was far-reaching secularization and a high level of integration, especially in relation to politics, culture, and economics, which was more akin to ‘acculturation’ than ‘assimilation’. In other words, there were limits to integration. The number of ‘mixed’ marriages remained relatively small, for example, despite increasing secularization among the Jews; smaller, indeed, than among other religious groups – and that is saying something in a highly segregated country such as the Netherlands. Relatively few Jews made a complete break from cultural traditions and religious rituals, and a vast majority registered themselves as Jews in the ‘religious denomination’ section of the Census. It is thus hardly surprising that the term ‘assimilant’ had a negative ring in Jewish circles, as a denier of one’s own origins. Thus, despite the Jews’ active participation in virtually every area of social life – from the administration of justice to science, art, and feminism – a gap nevertheless remained between Jews and non-Jews; a gap that was preserved more or less explicitly, one should add, by the non-Jewish majority. Widespread anti-Jewish sentiments meant that Jews remained recognizable as such and were constantly reminded of their Jewish identity. It was not uncommon for Jews to be denied membership, openly or discreetly, to associations and societies; there were no Jewish mayors, or Jewish supervisory directors of non-Jewish businesses. At the same time, anti-Semitism was considered unseemly in many circles; even the influential orthodox Protestant politician Abraham Kuyper, whose writings bore witness to a Christian-inspired but frankly systematic anti-Semitism, believed around 1900 that the ‘Jewish problem’ was only of ‘theoretical’ significance as far as the Netherlands was concerned. Only in the 1930s, under the influence of the tidal wave of anti-Semitism in Germany, would the ‘Jewish problem’ also be implicated in the Netherlands itself, albeit somewhat furtively. One striking illustration of this is the

57



controversy that arose in the spring of 1933, sparked by a remark made by J.B. Bomans, a conservative Catholic politician, who considered it ‘undiplomatic’ that four of the six aldermen – three socialists and a liberal – in Amsterdam’s city government, plus the council’s secretary, were Jewish. In the public debate that followed, he was supported by the leading Catholic daily, De Maasbode, among others. The fact that the three socialists were secular and in mixed marriages was of no consequence, according to the newspaper: It is not about party or religion, but about race. One can close one’s eyes to the facts, but it is simply the truth that Jews are considered to belong to a different race. Would someone think it normal for an entirely Jewish state to be ruled by the representatives of a very small non-Jewish minority? Let us speak frankly about such things.

This had absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism, assured the paper – a claim that all of the other participants in this controversy never tired of making. One fascinating element of this debate was the contribution made by Eduard Gerzon, the director of a well-known retail business, who sent a public letter to the prominent Catholic newspaper, addressed to the Catholic politician Bomans, in which he stated that he was in complete agreement with him and, furthermore, that he spoke on behalf of the ‘great majority of my co-religionists’. According to Gerzon, three of the four aldermen were apostates who suffered from a lack of modesty; and it is ‘these kinds of Jews who give us the most trouble, for those who want to profit from the situation count them as one of us, without our having anything to do with it.’ The intervention of the orthodox Gerzon – ‘one of the leading and most intellectual Jews in the Netherlands’, claimed the Catholic paper De Tijd – shows that, behind the prevailing tendency towards integration lay a variety of views, attitudes, and moods. This variety characterized every aspect of social life. Although the majority of Jewish workers were supporters of social democracy, for example, at the same time, a minority was prominently active in the Communist Party and a few smaller revolutionary left-wing groups. Whilst the idea of a Jewish State was generally embraced – a Jewish People’s petition of December 1919 was graced by no fewer than 46,578 signatures – the great majority of these advocates appear to have seen this mainly as a solution for Jews, persecuted or otherwise, from countries other than the Netherlands. The number of committed

58 

Zionists was relatively small on both the right and left of the religious and political spectrum, although they attracted a considerable degree of attention. To a signif icant extent, the religious diversity was historically determined, with the Portuguese-Israelite Religious Community, the once-powerful Sephardim, on the one hand, and on the other, the many Ashkenazi Jews within the Netherlands-Israelite Religious Community. Both communities were dominated by a moderate, bourgeois form of orthodoxy, strongly modelled on the Dutch Reformed Church. This moderation was also expressed in the weak position of Jewish education, which, after a brief period of growth under the supervision and financial support of the government, had languished as a result of the 1857 Education Act. Most Jewish children attended public schools, whereby it was determined that a school would close on the Sabbath if over 50 per cent of its pupils were Jewish. Only a few parents, mainly from the middle classes, opted to send their offspring to unsubsidized Jewish schools. Neither the passionate appeal of chief rabbi Dünner in 1898 for the founding of Jewish schools nor the Education Act of 1917, whereby it was determined that ‘special’ – that is, denominational – schools had the right to full government funding, would change this. Liberal Jews were opposed on principle to special education and this was also the case for socialists. Thus, in the 1920s, Amsterdam had just one Jewish kindergarten, four Jewish primary schools – including the school of the Netherlands-Israelite Boys’ Orphanage –, and two Jewish secondary schools. Even the paltry few hours of religious education that were offered by public primary schools were followed by just one third of Jewish children in 1930. Although the city had more than 30 synagogues, including a few small prayer houses for Eastern European immigrants, the established Dutch Jewish church community and its leaders had lost its bond with the great majority of Amsterdam’s Jews. But there were exceptions, such as the engaged rabbi, philosopher, teacher, and writer Meijer de Hond, who rejected both the aloofness of established orthodoxy as well as socialism and Zionism. With his mystically inspired, far-from-dogmatic views, he repeatedly clashed with the established religious order. He was immensely popular, though, particularly with the poorest section of the Jewish population, from which he himself came. He was the ‘people’s rabbi’, appointing himself, by means of visionary speeches, plays, and literary sketches, as the leader and defender of the ‘respectable, silent poor’. For him, the ghetto was a place to cherish, for it



59

Interior of the synagogue in Uilenburgerstraat, around 1916. The building was constructed in 1766, replacing a home synagogue, and stayed in use until 1943. Collection JHM.

was home to the true bearers of Jewish piety and tradition, those he believed would prove to be Judaism’s saviours. Based on this same blend of social commitment and religious conviction, he took the initiative to found a care home for the elderly and chronically ill, De Joodsche Invalide, which was

60 

achieved thanks to a successful fundraising campaign entitled A Jewish heart is beating at your door. Despite De Honds’ ceaseless enthusiasm for strengthening the ties between the poor part of the community and orthodox Judaism, secularization advanced among the poor Jewish masses. Socialism, atheism, and secularism found fertile ground there, although radical breaks with tradition were rare. In the 1930s, for example, more than 90 per cent of boys born to Jewish mothers were circumcised – a practise that was often defended on hygienic grounds. Most marriages were consecrated religiously and almost everyone who died was buried in a Jewish cemetery. In other words, secularization seldom led to the total abandonment of religious ritual or the severing of traditions and social ties. Socialist Jews considered themselves to be socialists above all and Dutch citizens, as historian Evelien Gans wrote in her study of socialists and Zionists in the Netherlands. One’s own Jewish roots were often seen as a ‘marginal factor’ in this, as ‘a painted fringe that coloured one’s life slightly differently from that of other members of the red family’. In doing so, they often overlooked the significance of their Jewish background in the actual practice of everyday life in many cases, according to Gans: One often had […] Jewish neighbours, or Jewish relations or friends living in the same street, or on the corner. In working relations (and within the trade union) there were also various ‘Jewish islands’, such as in the diamond, textile and tobacco-processing trades, certain retail sectors and (market) trade … Family ties played a major role: on Friday evenings and on festive occasions, but also in situations of material and emotional need. Jewish charitable institutions were also emphatically present. And naturally father or mother, auntie or grandpa, frequently used words like chuppah, Bar Mitzvah or lewaje, the collecting box for the Jewish Invalide [care home] stood on the mantelpiece, grandma was buried in the Jewish cemetery, Auntie Mau was known for her sharp wit, the kitchen smelled different on Fridays from during the week, and there were whispers here and there when nephew Bram married a goyish girl.

Many of these ‘Jewish aspects’ of life, as Gans argues, were simply there, but they were not perceived, much less identif ied, as such. They were experienced as anything but an obstacle to integration; until the 1930s, in any case, when increasing anti-Semitism in Europe also made itself felt in the Netherlands.

61



In and Around the Theatre On no single aspect of social life did the process of acculturation – twoway mutual influence and exchange – have such a strong impact as in the area of arts and culture. The roots of this lay in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Amsterdam’s population grew rapidly and a modern entertainment sector developed around the Rembrandtplein, the Nes, and the Plantage neighbourhood. The theatres run by the Jewish proprietor Abraham van Lier, owner of the Grand Théâtre on Amstelstraat and the summer theatre in the Plantage, were legendary. In the early years, the repertoire of these theatres consisted of romantic melodramas with splendid scenery and costumes. The performances drew a varied audience from all classes, ranks, and religions, to the unease of orthodox Christians and Jews. The Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad complained bitterly: From various sides, we have been made aware that on Saturdays in the Plantage, Israelites are selling tickets for Van Liers’ summer theatre to passers-by, and that, regrettably, there are many eager Israelite buyers. It has rightly been noted that this will have a very harmful impact on the young Israelites who witness such things.

The performers, actors, and singers who performed in the theatres, dancehalls, honky-tonks, and cafes, but also the producers, directors, and impresarios included a striking number of people from Jewish backgrounds; a disproportionate number in comparison with the proportion of Jews in the whole population. At the beginning, this had to do with the state of poverty in which many of them lived: there were few social barriers to the theatre and entertainment industry, and these therefore offered new opportunities. The phenomenon began with touring fairs, small circuses, and acrobats’ companies around 1850, but it only gathered real momentum in the final decades of the nineteenth century. During those dynamic years, the Artis Schouwburg was built directly opposite of Artis zoo; it was renamed the Hollandsche Schouwburg shortly afterwards. The theatre – designed by the architect Cornelis Antonius Bombach and built in renaissance style, its roof graced with statues, including those of Thalia and Terpsichore, the muses of theatre and dance – was an imposing, modern building. This was no labyrinth of little corridors and staircases, and there were no pillars to obstruct the view. It had excellent acoustics and could seat around 1,350 people. One notable fact is that all of

62 

The Hollandsche Schouwburg, 1917. Collection Spaarnestad Photo / Het Leven.

the seats offered storage for headwear, especially for the ladies who wore incredibly high hats in line with the most recent fashion. The Artis Schouwburg opened on 5 May 1892, but went bankrupt just two years later, whereupon the entire contents of the building, including the scenery and costumes, were dumped in the street. The building was subsequently sold for a song to the businessman Raphaël Sequeira Jr and a theatre company from Rotterdam that sought a permanent venue in the

63



capital. Under the leadership of the architect Eduard Cuypers, the interior of the theatre – then renamed the Hollandsche Schouwburg – was given a somewhat more chic appearance, and the number of seats was reduced to 900 in order to create more leg room. The company from Rotterdam also failed to revive the theatre, however, whereupon it was sold to the Netherlands Theatre Company (NTV). This was a company with socialist roots that specialized in socially engaged theatre, often of a naturalistic bent, with plays by Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Strindberg – playwrights whose work did not yet stand a chance in the ‘fashionable’ Stadsschouwburg. It was thus no accident that the writer and theatre critic Heijermans threw in his lot with this company and subsequently worked his way up to become the NTV’s ‘in-house writer’. After he had written a one-act play for the Social-Democratic Labour Party in April 1898, with a cast that included one of the NVT’s actors, he was commissioned to write a play to fill a whole evening: Ghetto. The play marked the beginning of a fruitful working relationship, with numerous box-office hits. Its pinnacle was Op hoop van zegen, written in 1900, its title directly referring to a deep religious saying: ‘Trusting Our Fate in the Hands of God’; in England, it was published under the simple title The Good Hope: A Drama of the Sea and produced for the first time by the Stage Society in 1903. Op hoop van zegen is undoubtedly the most-performed play in the history of Dutch theatre, including beyond the country’s borders. Upon his sudden death in 1924, it was evident that Heijermans had become a national figure, a development in which his Jewish origins and socialist views had hardly played a role. Even the conservative national paper De Telegraaf revealed itself to be deeply impressed in its reporting on the massive funeral procession that passed through Amsterdam: Wednesday morning on Amsteldijk was a good time to be a citizen of Amsterdam. Most of those standing there were the folk of Amsterdam: the common people, the poor, the wretched, the pitiful, waiting in silence to pay their final respects to their poet. There could be no better place for someone, wishing to know how Heijermans lived in the hearts of Amsterdam’s citizens, than among these people. All were familiar with ‘Op Hoop van Zegen’ […] It became more and more silent, and finally the cortege approached; only the muted, measured step of the mourners was to be heard, and tears welled in many an eye. A poet was buried here, but also a prince. And what I shall remember most from this day was the attitude of the young people, walking ahead of their warrior and leader on his last journey.

64 

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the almost seamless integration of Jews and non-Jews in the theatrical world was also evident from the popularity of plays with Jewish themes and – revealingly – the ease with which non-Jews played ‘Jewish roles’, and vice versa. The most famous actor in the Netherlands, for example, Louis Bouwmeester, celebrated triumphs such as Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and the great theatrical innovator Willem Royaards made a deep impression as the Jewish trader Mark Violier in De Violiers, a tragi-comedy by Willem Schurmann. This was even more true of Esther de Boer-van Rijk, whose acting career spanned from 1873 to 1934, and who was Heijermans’ star actress for many years. With her interpretation of the traditional Dutch fisherman’s widow Kniertje in Op Hoop van Zegen – a role that she played 1,200 times on stage and twice on the silver screen – this Jewish actress made an indelible impression on entire generations. In no area was the acculturation process – in the words of the Amsterdam historian Salvador Bloemgarten – as complete as in that of leisure and entertainment. This was shown less by the popularity of music-hall artists such as Heintje and Louis Davids, Sylvain Poons, and Max Tak, than by the fact that these were Jewish singers who turned out to be classic interpreters of the ‘Jordaan song’; a genre of nostalgically tinted sentimental songs centred on Amsterdam and especially the Jordaan, an old neighbourhood in the heart of the city with an overwhelmingly poor non-Jewish population. With songs with revealing titles such as De kleine man [The little man], Weet je nog wel oudje [Don’t you remember, old thing], and Als je voor een dubbeltje geboren bent [If you’re born for a dime], Louis Davids in particular made the Jordaan repertoire famous throughout the Netherlands, and it remained immensely popular. There was even room for Jewish refugees in this tradition, as shown by the success of the still-celebrated Ik hou van Holland [I love Holland], sung in 1937 by the Austro-Hungarian refugee, tenor and film actor, Joseph Schmidt. The remarkably high level of interest in various forms of culture also extended to the area of classical music. Years later, Eddy van Amerongen, at that time the chief editor of the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad, the most important national Jewish weekly, vividly remembered how orthodox Jews hurried to the famous Concertgebouw: On Saturday evenings, they went to the Matthew Passion. It began at half-past-seven in the Concertgebouw, then they walked to the synagogue that was closest to the Concertgebouw, they went to do Havdalah, as it’s called – celebrating the end of the Sabbath. That’s



Postcard of actress Esther de Boer-van Rijk, as Kniertje, a role inscribed into the memory of generations, c. 1933. Collection JHM / J. van Velzen.

65

66 

to say, at a certain moment there are three stars [in the sky]; then the Sabbath is over and then [the next day] begins, then you can do everything again, then you’re no longer bound by the laws of the Sabbath. But they were mostly too late for the opening scene, for the opening chorus. Mengelberg conducted the opening chorus, enormous choirs, wonderful music, and then the doors were opened and they entered. At the front walked the deputy principal of the Jewish seminary, next to him the seminarians, the cantors, very devout men with beards. It was interesting to see that procession of pious Jews at the Matthew Passion on a Saturday evening.

The Concertgebouw audience usually included many Jewish workers, too – tangible evidence of the success of the civilizing offensive by the ANDB and, in particular, Henri Polak. As a politician, journalist, conservationist, and public educator, the socialist leader continued to devote himself tirelessly to the notion that the movement should raise its supporters’ sights in both a moral and an aesthetic respect. The University of Amsterdam awarded him with an honorary doctorate degree for these efforts, an achievement that filled Polak – a man who had completed only primary school – with pride, because the decision to grant the honour not only made mention of his services to the labour movement, but also to his knowledge and love of nature, language, and literature.

In the Shadow of the Third Reich The last article that Polak wrote for the ANDB’s weekly paper was published on 9 May 1940, the day before the German invasion of the Netherlands. It was dedicated to Erasmus and the horrors of war. In the preceding years, he had tirelessly used his articles in the weekly and especially in Het Volk, the daily social-democratic newspaper, to attack everything that even touched upon right-wing revolutionary and racist views in Germany and the Netherlands. At the same time, he – although not a believer – defended Jewish culture and religion in extensive, almost apologetic views, mentioning the many services that the Jews had rendered mankind. The uncompromising way in which Polak fought fascism and national socialism frequently met resistance, including within his own circles; some fellow party members believed his polemics to be unproductive and even counterproductive, while others were upset by what they saw as his ‘overemphasis’ on Jewish sentiments. Polak could not be deterred, though: for



67

him, it was unacceptable that National Socialists and anti-Semites – but also Zionists – should make a distinction between Jews and Dutch citizens. Nevertheless, this was precisely what had happened since the Nazis had come to power in Germany. Whilst, in the preceding decades, the notion of a separate, more or less delineated Jewish community seemed to have largely vanished in the Netherlands under the influence of advancing integration and acculturation, from 1933, Dutch citizens of Jewish origin were more often explicitly described and addressed as such, whereby they drew more closely together again in response. Although politicians and the press responded in an overwhelmingly negative way to the aggressive agitation and anti-Semitic measures in the Third Reich, understanding was also expressed, especially in Catholic and Protestant papers, for the motives lying behind these measures, an understanding that, in the first years in particular, sometimes slipped into blatant anti-Semitism. In response to the first anti-Semitic measures of March 1933, for example, which sparked much protest worldwide, including in the Netherlands, the Berlin correspondent of the small Catholic paper De Grondwet – a title ironically meaning: ‘The Constitution’ – wrote that things were not as bad as all that and that, moreover, the Jews had brought this discrimination upon themselves. Aside from the ‘very unwelcome horde of so-called Ostjuden’ that had ‘poured like a plague of locusts into a country that was already stretched so thin’, German Jews were particularly to blame for the phenomenon of moral degeneration:

Press photo of a meeting in Amsterdam protesting against anti-Semitism in Germany, attended by 12,000 people, 30 March 1933, De Telegraaf, the conservative national newspaper.

68 

Everything that is taught by Christendom […] in a moral respect has been dragged through the mud by the Jewish press […] Every conceivable aspect of moral degeneration has been defended tirelessly in the Jewish press […] Haven’t papers such as the ‘Berliner Tageblatt’ not fought and struggled for the right to show pornography in the theatre, in film, in texts and in images? Suicide and cremation, family planning, divorce, abortion, pacifism, helplessness, defeatism; in a word, every form of collapse, of weakening, of cultural Bolshevism…

The newspaper added that the situation in the Netherlands was different: in this country, it had been possible to resist Jewish influence and to transform these people into ‘level-headed, law-abiding citizens’. Over the years, when the churches and denominational organizations in Germany also came under heavy pressure, and national socialism also appeared to have a foot in the door in the Netherlands in the form of the National Socialist Movement (NSB), such noises became weaker. Anti-Semitic agitation was increasingly seen as a threat to public order and political stability, both of which were prized by the powerful denominational parties and their newspapers. Moves in 1934 to criminalize collective insults – starting with anti-Semitism – should also be seen in this light. The dramatic developments in Germany had other, more concrete consequences for the Netherlands, starting with the flood of political and Jewish refugees that began immediately after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, and that surged again after the Anschluss with Austria and the Reichskristallnacht of 1938. It is not known precisely how many Jewish refugees came to the Netherlands between 1933 and 1940: 34,000 according to a recent estimation, mainly from Germany, some of whom had Polish nationality or were stateless. For many, the Netherlands was little more than an intermediate station; about 22,000 stayed, of which 15,000 came from Germany. Although there was much public sympathy for the refugees, the Dutch government had many reservations. It was afraid of the potential financial consequences and anxious about radical political elements among the refugees. Moreover, the government feared a negative response from its own people, who were suffering under mass unemployment as a result of the great economic crisis. Such fears also existed in parts of the Jewish community, however: the arrival of too many refugees might stir up antiSemitism in the Netherlands. In the end, all of this resulted in a restrictive policy, as it did in most other Western European countries. Care for refugees was left to private



69

organizations such as the Committee for Special Jewish Interests (CBJB) and the Committee for Jewish Refugees (CJV), under the leadership of the Amsterdam professor and classicist, David Cohen. Camps were also set up, such as the Jewish Labour Settlement Werkdorp Nieuwesluis in the recentlydrained Wieringermeerpolder. Here, hundreds of predominantly young Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria were trained in agriculture, with the intention that this would allow them to settle in Palestine. Another camp was Westerbork, founded by the government in 1939 as a central reception camp for the many Jews who had fled Germany after the violent events of Reichskristallnacht. At the time of the German invasion, around 750 people were staying in Westerbork. The great majority of refugees – both legal and illegal – settled in cities in the West of the Netherlands, however, mainly in Amsterdam. They formed anything but a homogeneous group. There were great differences among them in terms of well-being, class, education, political preference, and religious orientation. Some were relatively quick to find their way in Dutch society – in the cultural sector, for example – whilst others lived in relative isolation, sometimes casting envious looks at Dutch Jews, who, in turn, found their Eastern neighbours arrogant and noisy. Certain neighbourhoods became well-known refugee enclaves, including the Rivierenbuurt in Amsterdam-Zuid, where Otto Frank settled with his family at the end of 1933. So the rise of Nazi Germany casted its shadows upon the Netherlands years before the beginning of the war. This applies particularly to the Jewish part of the population. The Jewish community’s rolling integration, so dominant in the preceding decades, seems to have come to a halt under the pressure of the events abroad and, in the country itself, ‘the Jewish question’ was put on the political agenda where it had been absent up to that point. The presence of Jews in Dutch society, however, was never publicly questioned.

3.

In the Shadow of Nazism Theatre and Culture on the Eve of Deportation by Esther Göbel

When the gong sounded in the evening to announce the start of the performance, the music began and we became utterly absorbed in the work, then there was no war, no Hitler and no persecution of the Jews! Then, everyone would perform with complete abandon, glad they were able to keep on working.

This is how Heintje Davids, an immensely popular revue artiste from Amsterdam and director of the Jewish Cabaret Ensemble, described the atmosphere in the Hollandsche Schouwburg in the early years of the German occupation. This mood would not change, not even when the building was officially renamed the Joodsche Schouwburg [Jewish Theatre]. The change of name was the result of an order issued by the Nazi authorities on 15 September 1941, whereby Jews were forbidden to visit theatres, concert halls, cafés, and restaurants. This order represented another step on the way to the total exclusion of Dutch Jews from social and cultural life. For the time being, though, the Nazis’ measures did not bring Jewish ­cultural life in Amsterdam to a standstill. On the contrary, cultural activities by and for Jews took place in numerous places – sometimes clandestinely, mostly legally – and included theatrical productions, lectures, dance, and musical performances. The Jewish Schouwburg was the most important cultural centre; it hosted music, cabaret, drama, light opera, ballet, art classes, and the visual arts; it was a place where people could momentarily forget the miseries of the day. From November 1941, the theatre was home to a kind of overarching cultural organization until the building was requisitioned as an assembly and deportation site in July 1942. The story of the Jewish Schouwburg is one that cannot be told in isolation. In both Nazi Germany after 1933 and in the countries that were occupied from 1939, Jewish cultural life continued – right up to the ghettos, the transit camps, the labour and concentration camps, and the SS sub-camps. As mentioned above, some of these cultural activities took place clandestinely, but most were held with the consent of the Nazi authorities, the Jewish councils, or camp SS officers.

72 

In retrospect, these energetic attempts to maintain a cultural life under the shadow of persecution might seem astonishing, but when one looks closely at people’s motives, it is less surprising. Not only were these activities a source of income for many, but they also offered others a fleeting escape from the often wretched reality of everyday life; every phase of the Nazi politics of persecution and annihilation was characterized by a strong determination to keep culture and traditions alive, and thereby maintain the prospect of a possible future. Some authors have characterized this striving as a form of spiritual resistance, because the cultural activities would have strengthened some people’s psychological resilience and given them hope.

Jewish Exile Theatre in the Netherlands There are various reasons why a history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg in the first years of the German occupation should begin with the arrival of Jewish artists and performers from Germany who had fled Nazism after Hitler came to power in 1933. First, because these artists and performers had a great impact on the Dutch theatrical world, and the Hollandsche Schouwburg in particular, in the years before the German invasion. Second, because they had a deep influence on the developments in and around the Hollandsche Schouwburg and Jewish Schouwburg in the early years of the occupation. Finally, because a number of influential figures from these exile circles attempted to organize Jewish cultural life in the Netherlands along lines that they themselves had developed in Germany, based on the model of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden [Cultural Federation of German Jews]. The first refugees to flee to the Netherlands under the pressure of events in Nazi Germany, including the anti-Semitic campaigns in the spring of 1933, understandably included many Jews. The welcome they received was anything but warm. In 1934, the Dutch government tightened its immigration policy. After the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria) on 12 March 1938 and the Reichskristallnacht on 10-11 November 1938, there was a rapid increase in the flow of refugees, but Dutch policy remained restrictive. Only a limited number of refugees were admitted and many were sent back as ‘undesirable aliens’. After some time, under the pressure of public opinion, the policy was eased somewhat. The Dutch government left financial support for the refugees up to private initiatives and, beginning in 1933, this was organized by two committees: Comité voor Bijzondere Joodsche Belangen (CBJB) [the Committee for Special Jewish Interests] and Comité voor Joodsche Vluchtelingen (CJV) [the Committee for Jewish Refugees].



73

Poster calling for support for the Committee for Jewish Refugees, 1937. Collection NIOD / Design by Jan Lavies.

A significant number of the estimated 34,000 Jewish immigrants and refugees who crossed the Dutch border between 1933 and 1940 traveled onwards. When German troops invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, the country was home to 15,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and 7,000 from other countries, including Austrians, Eastern European citizens, and stateless refugees. This last group mainly comprised so-called Ostjuden, who

74 

had lived in Germany and had lost their citizenship in 1933 as a consequence of an anti-Jewish order. All in all, the group of refugees was anything but homogeneous; Dutch Jews usually had little in common with most of them in terms of culture and language. Among the refugees were a considerable number of artists, intellectuals, and performers. Owing to the cultural climate, most of them decided to establish themselves in Amsterdam. They were enterprising; various theatres in the Netherlands put on revues, cabarets, and light operas by German and Austrian refugees. Allusions to the situation in Germany were not appreciated; in late 1935, foreigners were even forbidden from making political statements. The political cabaret Die Pfeffermühle by Erika Mann was hit by a performance ban, for example, after which the company left the Netherlands. With the rise in international tensions, especially from 1939, the pressure increased further, because the government was afraid that even the most innocent form of criticism would put Dutch neutrality in jeopardy. Moreover, the Dutch public tended to prefer entertainment to references to current affairs. Nevertheless, the developments in Nazi Germany, especially the persecution of the Jews, were addressed in Dutch theatres in the years prior to the occupation, albeit in the programmes of exile artists. This was because the refugees included a sizeable number of Jewish performers of international renown, such as the popular Berlin-based violinist Paul Godwin, who had performed in numerous revues, films, and theatrical and radio productions in his native country; his celebrated fellow-townsmen Kurt Gerron, Rudolf Nelson, Max Ehrlich, and Willy Rosen, as well as the Viennese artiste Cilly Wang. They encountered a range of difficulties after their forced emigration: a high degree of competition; envy from Dutch colleagues – who were certainly not unfamiliar with their generally high level; a lack of interest from the Dutch public; the temporary nature of their residence permits; and the ban on performing politically charged plays. From 1934, Rudolf Nelson performed with his Nelson-revue in La Gaîté, the cabaret in Amsterdam’s famous Tuschinski cinema. Although he was able to design the performances in accordance with his own tastes and insights, he avoided politics. This was something that he had always done and, moreover, as Nelson’s son Herbert later explained, émigré performers tended to strike a cautious note in their statements out of respect for the host country. The audience consisted of people who spoke fluent German, thus certainly not the masses. In order to fill the seats and keep the punters happy, the company put on a new programme every fourteen days, on



75

average, which put a great deal of pressure on the composers and the actors. Nonetheless, even this did not prevent audiences from having their fill of the Nelson-revue at a certain point. Moreover, from 1937, the Nelson-revue faced competition from the Kabarett der Prominenten led by the German-Jewish cabaret artist, composer, and lyricist Willy Rosen, who performed in the popular seaside resort of Scheveningen. This émigré company was predominantly comprised of famous Jewish actors, comedians, and film and operetta stars, such as the German actor Otto Wallburg, the Austrian actor and comedian Franz Engel, and the operetta star Otto Dürer, also Austrian, who had fled to the Netherlands after the Anschluss and the subsequent wave of antiSemitic violence. The reviews were laudatory – even those by the Dutch journalist and essayist Menno ter Braak, well known for his critical pen: ‘These Prominenten live up to their name; their work is perfect, their tempo astonishing and their versatility not inconsiderable.’ The company was given a new boost in the spring of 1939, when the well-known actor and playwright Max Ehrlich left Berlin and joined Rosen’s Prominenten. They had worked together previously in Germany. Above all else, Willy Rosen’s cabaret wanted to provide enjoyable and relaxing entertainment; people had to be able to forget the cares of the day. Just like the Nelson-revue, the Prominenten avoided mixing politics with theatre. Despite their problems and their limited opportunities, these émigré companies played a very significant role in Dutch theatre, not only before the war, but also afterwards.

Jewish Refugees in the Hollandsche Schouwburg On 23 December 1938, Kurt Gerron, together with the Austrian husband-andwife duo Otto Aurich and Liesl Frank, and surrounded by a variety of Amsterdam actors and actresses from the city’s light opera company (Hoofdstad Operette) performed at the Hollandsche Schouwburg for the first time. Their appearance on stage could be described as sensational, because Gerron was a celebrity. He had appeared in dozens of films, including Der Blaue Engel (1930) with Marlene Dietrich, and had also been a film director. After being banned from UFA studios, he fled Nazi Germany in 1933, a disillusioned man; up until the very last minute, he had been convinced that anti-Semitism would never come this far and that a professional such as he would be spared. He travelled via Paris to the Netherlands, where he started to make films on invitation. In these, he remained true to his preference for carefree entertainment, which

76 

received a warm reception from press and public alike. After Dutch colleagues complained of unfair competition and undesirable foreign influences, however, he withdrew from the film industry to focus once more on theatre. Thus, in December 1938, Gerron trod the boards of the Hollandsche Schouwburg in the production entitled Ik wil van jou een foto [I want a photo of you]. All of the proceeds of the premiere were to be donated to the Central Relief Committee for Refugee Children. The play was a success: Among all the jokes and merriment, Gerron was the only one to express a darker tone, very fleetingly, in a socially-loaded song: ‘Ik ben een product der moderne cultuur: mijn jeugdideaal is te koop of te huur [I am a product of modern culture: my youthful ideals are for sale or for hire].’ But immediately, as though people were afraid of the seriousness (which was unfounded, as shown by the enthusiastic applause), there was a switch back to light banter.

In response to the premiere of Dixie two months later, the communist daily Volksdagblad published an interview with the well-known actor and director. When Gerron was asked why he had left Germany, he replied, after a short pause: Look, […] first of all, I’m Jewish, and second, I never made any effort to hide the fact that I’m no friend of a regime that is squarely opposed to my greatest ideal, Peace. I’m a pacifist, you see; I can afford to be, because I spent four years at the front. What’s more, I was a well-known member of the Human Rights League, the association led by the great Carl von Ossietsky. None of the above was likely to make me very popular with the rulers of the ‘Third Reich’.

The fact that Gerron held pacifism very dear – he had served in the First World War, in the trenches of Ypres in Belgium – was also revealed, according to the journalist, by the wonderful way in which he sung his song in the last act of Dixie. ‘That was no comedy, but the deep conviction of a person who knows war […] and, for that reason, hates it,’ the journalist wrote.

A Façade of Normality It is not difficult to imagine the panic that must have gripped the Jewish and non-Jewish refugees alike when, in the early morning of 10 May 1940,



77

the population of the Netherlands was caught unawares by the invasion by German troops. In those first days, many tried to escape; they included Max Ehrlich, the Austrian-born actress Silvia Grohs, and the German writer Greta Weil, who, like many others, tried in vain to escape via the harbour in IJmuiden. There were few alternatives to escape by sea, because the German army had been swift to cut off the road to Belgium. In Scheveningen, too, many people – Jews and non-Jews – attempted to persuade fishermen to take them to England. At this time, only four hundred Jews managed to escape the Netherlands in this way. The rest returned home, dispirited. Many Jews committed suicide; 120 did so in Amsterdam alone. And these were just the ‘successful’ suicides; the number of ‘failed’ attempts must have been just as high. Like many other public venues, the theatres of Amsterdam remained closed after the German invasion. The Hollandsche Schouwburg was no exception; a performance by the Amsterdam Jewish Choir on 8 May 1940 was the last performance in peacetime. The doors would not stay closed for long, though, for just a few days after the shock of the capitulation, normal life seemed to resume. Indeed, more and more people sought out the theatres: in the period that followed, audience numbers rose sharply, not only in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, but also in other theatres in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands. The Hollandsche Schouwburg’s programme in this early period of the occupation deviated little from that of the past; the theatre was still a stage for all, and Jewish and non-Jewish artists performed for audiences of Jews and non-Jews. In short, little seemed to change in those first months. Nevertheless, behind the façade of normality, the f irst signs of the approaching calamity were emerging; initially in the form of orders that affected only small numbers of people, such as the order of 1 July 1940, which banned Jews from the air-raid protection service, followed by a ban on ritual slaughter on 5 August. In September, Jews were barred from Amsterdam’s markets. More far-reaching was the ‘Declaration of Aryan descent’ [ariërverklaring] for public officials that was decreed on 5 October 1940: a person with one or more Jewish grandparents was considered to be Jewish and had to submit form B (non-Aryan), whereas non-Jewish officials had to submit form A (Aryan). The declaration made it possible to distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish officials. These first anti-Jewish orders, directed against Jewish compatriots working in the public sector, proved to be only a prelude to a long series of orders, which would eventually isolate the entire Jewish population and force its disappearance from social and economic life.

78 

The orders were one thing, everyday reality was another. Even in the very first months of the occupation, there was aggression against Jewish citizens. Members of the Weerbaarheidsafdeling (WA), the black uniformed Defense Detachment of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (­Nederlandse Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, NSB) and other small groups of Dutch National Socialists committed acts of intimidation and destroyed Jewish property. Jewish performers were also faced with aggression, even during performances, as the abovementioned revue-artiste Henriëtte Davids recalled in her memoirs. She described how a performance in the provincial town of Lochem was interrupted by a large group of thugs from the WA. The atmosphere turned nasty when one of them made for Davids and asked her whether she was Dutch. ‘I don’t know,’ answered Davids, to which the man replied: ‘Then I’ll tell you. You’re a Jewess! You should have known: these days, Jews don’t go on stage any more! We don’t allow it!’ The man then climbed onto the stage and asked whether there were also Jews in the auditorium; if there were, they would have to leave. When this proved not to be the case, they left the auditorium empty-handed, according to Davids. The police, who later came to question Davids about the incident, said that there was nothing they could do; that very same day, a member of the National Socialist Movement had been made chief of the police in Lochem. Davids, who heard that a fellow actor had been beaten from the stage in the seaside resort of Zandvoort, decided to keep a low profile. ‘At that time, I did not know that in those days of war, a rewarding task was waiting for me after all,’ wrote Davids, alluding to her later role as one of the artistic directors of the Jewish Schouwburg. At the beginning of the second year of the war, the number of orders directed against the Jews multiplied rapidly. Not only were ‘Forbidden for Jews’ signs hung in the windows of public buildings from January 1941, but also the performance of songs and plays by Jewish or allied writers and composers was banned – with the exception of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. On 10 January 1941, Reich Commissioner Dr Arthur Seyss-Inquart announced that it would be compulsory for everyone ‘who was completely or partly of Jewish blood’ to register with the municipal authorities. Anyone who refused to do so or made a false declaration would be punished. In the same month, there was an increase in the violence committed by members of the WA in Amsterdam. Its members burst into homes and cafés where Jews were staying, and they sought confrontation with aggressive behaviour in cafés and entertainment venues, particularly in the Jewish quarter. The situation escalated on 11 February 1941. In fights between members of the WA and gangs of Jewish and non-Jewish men from



Café Cabaret ‘Alcazar’ at Thorbeckeplein in Amsterdam, 9 February 1941. That day, Dutch Nazis, accompanied by German soldiers, invaded Alcazar because its owner continued to offer Jewish artists a stage. This led to a massive fight, leaving 23 people injured. Collection NIOD / Photo by A.C. Ahlers.

79

80 

Photo of the Jewish Quarter, 1941-1942. Collection Foundation Jaap Kaas / Sculptuur Instituut, Scheveningen (FJK/SI) / Photo Jaap Kaas.

Amsterdam, a member of the WA was severely wounded and died a few days later. For the Germans, this was the signal to increase the pressure; they closed the Jewish quarter for a few days and ordered the foundation of a Jewish council. The situation nevertheless remained turbulent. Shortly afterwards, violence again erupted, whereby – coincidentally and unintentionally – German policemen also became involved. This incident led to heavy reprisals: on the orders of the occupying powers, large-scale raids were held in the heart of the old Jewish quarter on 22 and 23 February 1941. More than four hundred Jewish boys and men were taken from their homes or the streets and rounded up by the Grüne Polizei [Green Police], after which they were beaten by the police. The scenes gave rise to great commotion in Amsterdam, and led, two



81

Jewish men against the wall of the Tip-Top Theatre in the Amsterdam Jodenbreestraat. On Saturday 22 February 1941, a column of German trucks showed up near Waterlooplein in the heart of the Jewish Quarter. The area was completely closed down and young Jewish men were arrested. The next day, there was a second raid. A total of 427 Jews between 20 and 35 years old were taken prisoner and deported. Collection NIOD.

days later, to the February Strike; the only mass, open protest in Western Europe by the non-Jewish population against the persecution of the Jews. The boys and men who had been rounded up formed the first group to be deported from the Netherlands. They ended up in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen: the rapid succession of reports of their deaths gave rise to an abiding sense of fear among the Jewish population. The feeling of terror grew later that year when, as a reprisal for acts of sabotage, a few more raids on young Jewish men were carried out – and they, too, were deported to Mauthausen.

82 

Officers of the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD) checking identification cards of Amsterdam Jews at the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, summer 1942. Collection NIOD.

A Stage Exclusively for Jews It was not long before the occupying forces also enforced the separation of Jews and non-Jews in the cultural sector – a separation that would have been inconceivable before the war, and one that would also have major consequences for the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Although Reich Commissioner Seyss-Inquart had promised, in his first speech on 29 May 1940, that the Germans would not interfere with Dutch culture, shortly afterwards, bookshops were banned from selling French, English, and American publications, as well as work by émigrés and by Jews such as Heinrich Heine. And that was just the start: in November 1940, the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Science was split into two new ministries: Opvoeding, Wetenschap en Cultuurbescherming (OWC) [the Ministry of Education, Science, and Cultural Protection] and Volksvoorlichting en Kunsten (DVK) [the Ministry of Public Information and the Arts]. The latter was tasked with organizing and Nazifying the art world, from which Jews would presently be banned. In the spring of 1941, orchestras were ‘Aryanized’, meaning that most Jewish musicians lost their jobs. In June 1941, the Hollandsche Schouwburg was made an exclusively ‘Jewish premises’, where only Jewish performers were permitted to perform for exclusively Jewish audiences. The theatre

83



was not the only site in Amsterdam to be designated a ‘Jewish premises’, but it would eventually be the only remaining one. The first play to be performed for an exclusively Jewish audience, Spiel im Schloss, a comedy written by Franz Molnár and directed by Max Ehrlich, received a favourable review in Het Joodsche Weekblad: Camilla Spira played the only female role, something she did – with a touch of irony – in a way that made her acting a first-rate dramatic performance. Max Ehrlich, who was also the director, provoked gales of laughter with his portrayal of a famous actor who finds himself wandering down forbidden paths of love. And yet he managed, at the end, to move the audience deeply with a single moment of tragic seriousness. Kurt Gerron played the eternally pessimistic yet agreeable playwright, who is terrified on the eve of every premiere. He made a great impression with his natural acting.

The production, an initiative by Ehrlich and Werner Levie that was performed by a company comprised exclusively of German-Jewish performers, aimed to support the actors financially. Ehrlich had already staged Spiel im Schloss in Berlin in 1935, when he was still director of the cabaret department of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden [the Cultural Federation of German Jews], the umbrella organization of Jewish cultural institutions recognized by the Nazi regime. Just like Werner Levie, a Jewish journalist of Dutch origin, who had been secretary and director of the Kulturbund, after fleeing from Germany, Ehrlich continued to keep in touch with colleagues from that time, including the federation’s artistic director, Fritz Wisten, who attempted to subsume this Amsterdam-based company of exiled performers into the German theatre network. His attempts were to no avail. Ehrlich’s company would give no more than two performances in the Schouwburg: despite the positive reviews, the auditorium remained halfempty. For Ehrlich, this may have been the reason why he stopped putting on his own productions; moreover, he had fallen out with his partner, Levie. Thereafter, he rejoined Willy Rosen’s Prominenten at the Beatrix theatre, which was located in the same street as the Jewish Schouwburg.

‘Cultural ghettoization’ The fact that, in the summer of 1941, Ehrlich was still in contact with excolleagues from the German Kulturbund is less surprising than it would

84 

seem. The spirit of the Kulturbund had been blowing through Amsterdam for some time. Over the years, all kinds of ideas about the organization of Jewish cultural life had come to the Netherlands along with the exiles. Partly thanks to figures such as Werner Levie, these ideas gained in strength during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and would ultimately seem to be realized, around eight months prior to the mass deportations, in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The Kulturbund Deutscher Juden was founded shortly after Hitler came to power and functioned as an officially recognized umbrella organization for all cultural activities by and for Jews in Germany. In the short term, the foundation of the Kulturbund was prompted by the mass dismissals in the cultural sector during the first large-scale anti-Semitic campaigns in the spring of 1933. The initiative was taken by the neurologist and musicologist Kurt Singer, director of the Berlin municipal opera, who lost his own job as a consequence of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums law of 7 April 1933, despite having been awarded the Iron Cross for service as a military doctor during the First World War. In response to the many dismissals in the cultural sector, Singer proposed that a Jewish cultural federation be founded in response to the ‘cultural ghettoization’ (kulturelle Ghettoisierung) faced by the Jews. Together with Kurt Baumann, the former director of the Berlin municipal opera, who had reached a similar conclusion, he developed a plan and approached others, including the Berlin-based rabbi Leo Baeck, the drama critic Julius Bab, and Werner Levie. In the summer of 1933, Singer and Baumann put the plan to the official Reichskulturkammer, which passed the proposal on to the SS officer Hans Hinkel, Staatskommissar und ‘Reichskulturwalter’ of the Prussian Theatre Committee. Hinkel’s initial response was sceptical; he wondered whether such an enterprise could be kept in check. Singer emphasized that the proposed cultural organization would only be open to Jews and that it would give ‘completely closed performances’, to be attended by Jews alone. Finally, Hinkel gave his permission: after all, Singer’s proposal was perfectly in line with Nazi policy, which aimed at complete segregation. Singer and Baumann realized that the federation could be misused for Nazi propaganda purposes, but they thought that the mass unemployment justified its foundation. Thus, on 17 July 1933, with the permission of Goebbels’ Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the Berlin Kulturbund Deutscher Juden was founded, with the objective of keeping Jewish performers, musicians, and actors in work. Its secretary was Werner Levie. The scale of the need was revealed by the fact that, in Berlin alone in the following years, twenty thousand people joined the Kulturbund; another fifty thousand members



85

Werner Levie and Kurt Singer at the Third Sports Day (Sportfest) of Berlin Jewish Schools, Berlin, 25 August 1937. Collection Jüdisches Museum Berlin / Photo Herbert Sonnenfeld / Purchased from funds of the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin.

had joined the other 36 regional and local sections by 1935. Without the Kulturbund, there would have been no opportunities for Jewish artists, performers, writers, and musicians to perform, or for the Jewish public to attend performances, concerts, films, exhibitions, and lectures. In the same year, 1935, the year of the Nuremburg Race Laws, it was ruled that the word ‘German’ (Deutscher) had to be removed from the organization’s title; Jews could only be Jews, not German, French, or Polish Jews. From that time, the organization was known as the Jüdischer Kulturbund, and it continued to exist until 12 September 1941. With the rise in the number of anti-Semitic measures, the federation, as a self-help organization, not only provided a form of support and a safety net in difficult times, but it also functioned as a binding force, by strengthening mutual solidarity and Jewish cultural identity. It was not obvious that the latter would be the case. Especially at the beginning, when a number of different Jewish papers were still being published, there were fierce public debates between supporters of a ‘German theatre for Jews’ and advocates of a more ‘Jewish-based theatre’ to promote Jewish consciousness. In practice, the Kulturbund put on works of a general nature as well as productions with a distinctly Jewish character. The Zionists, in

86 

particular, played a leading role in the latter type; they were in touch with Jewish theatre companies and writers in Palestine, America, and Poland. On the other hand, the Nazi government, in the person of Hans Hinkel of the Reichskulturkammer, also attempted to influence the programming, with the aim that especially theatrical plays should be put on that featured specifically Jewish themes and characters. This pressure did indeed have an effect, although Singer, the directors, and the actors strove for quality and they continued to resist the attempts by the Nazis to populate the theatre with Jewish caricatures. Both the regime and the Kulturbund thus emphasized Jewish culture, albeit for very different reasons. Whilst the Nazis were aiming for a complete separation between ‘Jewish’ and ‘German’ culture, for the federation, it was all about rediscovering and preserving Jewish identity. The actors thus faced a dilemma: whilst the Nazis promoted caricatures of Jews, and liberal and Zionist groups wanted specific, positive cultural representations, they themselves wondered how they should depict Jewish roles. Some within the Jewish community saw this as a reason to oppose the Kulturbund as such; in their eyes, its members were allowing themselves to be exploited for Nazi purposes. After the war, these opponents even argued that the federation’s cultural activities had contributed to an overly optimistic view of reality, and had thereby hindered the emigration of German Jews, which, until the end of October 1941, had been official Nazi policy. Yet others saw the Kulturbund’s activities as a source of ‘spiritual resistance’ in the forming of a new Jewish self-image, on the part of the public as well as the artists.

A Jewish Cultural Federation in the Netherlands? With the German occupation and the first steps in the direction of isolating the Jews, a scenario developed in relation to Jewish cultural life in the Netherlands that, in many respects, resembled that which had developed seven years earlier in Germany. Indeed, in late 1940, it was the same initiative-takers from Berlin – Levie and Singer – who tried to set up an organization in the Netherlands similar to the Jüdischer Kulturbund. They were full of hope. ‘Dutch KuBu-organization in sight’, wrote Singer in December of that year to his contacts in Germany. Reality proved more intractable: the level of enthusiasm was disappointing and his attempts came to nothing. Nonetheless, Levie, who – as mentioned earlier – had Dutch nationality, was not prepared to give up yet. He explored a number of avenues to



87

promote his plans. He worked with the art committee of the Nederlandse Zionistenbond (NZB) [Dutch Zionist League] , for example, which, for some years, had been promoting ‘Jewish art’ – ‘art created by Jews, expressing their Jewish consciousness’ – to organize a Purim cabaret, a production that nevertheless failed to materialize, due to the dreadful events of February 1941. A few months later, in May 1941, shortly after most Jewish musicians had been dismissed from the orchestras, Levie took a significant step forward: he sought direct contact with the Ministry of Public Information and the Arts, which had just been formed by the Nazi regime, with the objective of discussing his plans for founding a Jewish cultural federation or art society. Levie, who drew upon his experience in Berlin, found a ready ear in the person of Dr Tobie Goedewaagen, the secretary-general of the Ministry. This Dutch National Socialist worked directly under Reich Commissioner SeyssInquart and was responsible, among other things, for media, propaganda, and censorship, as well as for the Kultuurkamer [Chamber of Culture], which all (non-Jewish) artists and journalists were obliged to join. On his request, Levie sent Goedewaagen a list of well-known actors who might be considered for a Jewish cultural federation, as well as a detailed piece on how the organization functioned in Germany. Furthermore, Levie mentioned that a number of Zionist leaders were prepared to meet Goedewaagen in order to discuss the matter further. With the foundation of a Jewish art society or federation, Levie hoped to bring together a number of separate initiatives and prevent mutual competition between artists and performers. Only in this way would Jewish artists and performers be able to protect themselves against a general ban, which he fully expected to come. A Jewish art society would also advance the development of the Jewish spirit through Jewish art. In order to achieve his objective, Levie needed both political and financial support, and, for this reason, he sought contact not only with Goedewaagen and his ministry, but also the Jewish Council. The latter responded very negatively to his plans, however, describing Levie as ‘Nazified’. Likewise, many German and Dutch actors could see no benefit in establishing a Jewish cultural federation; the actor Rob de Vries even viewed the whole idea as a form of capitulation. The plans for a Jewish cultural federation thereby appeared to have hit a wall; appeared, that is, because less than six months later, a form of unified organization would nevertheless be established, in which Levie would personally play an important role. Goedewaagen would also contribute to this development.

88 

A Centre of Jewish Culture Three closely interrelated developments ultimately led to the clustering of Jewish cultural activities: the actual takeover of the Hollandsche Schouwburg by the émigrés Rudolf and Herbert Nelson and Werner Levie around the middle of 1941, and their cooperation with Jewish-Dutch performers; the creation of a cultural fund by the industrialist Bernard van Leer; and, finally, the general ban on Jewish participation in public and cultural life, and the subsequent designation of the Hollandsche Schouwburg as the ‘Jewish Schouwburg’. It would be the Nelsons who, in the summer of 1941, gave an important boost to Jewish cultural entertainment in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. In August, Herbert, who, together with his father, had become the leaseholder of the theatre, drew up plans for a new revue. To take part in the new, bilingual revue, entitled Musik! Musik!/Muziek! Muziek!, they invited Heintje Davids, who had avoided the stage ever since the anti-Semitic incident in Lochem. Davids responded enthusiastically to the Nelsons’ invitation. She was keen to return to work, and the Jewish surroundings may have given her a feeling of security. Philip Pinkhof, Davids’ husband, paid for the revue to be adapted into Dutch and wrote a few new scenes for her. In addition to Davids, Paul Godwin, the famous German pianist Martin Roman, and Silvia Grohs also worked on the revue. Kurt Gerron was the director. The play premiered on 30 August to a public that mainly consisted of German émigrés. The reviews were positive. On 18 September 1941, one of the attendees wrote in her diary: ‘Yesterday we went to “Musik, Musik”, a German-Jewish play in the Hollandse Schouwburg. It was wonderful.’ Het Joodsche Weekblad followed with a review full of praise. Davids and her colleagues were satisfied: ‘We were overjoyed to be working again and to be able to achieve artistic success. […] Our audience had yet to get used to it. There were days when we performed for twenty paying visitors, but we stuck at it.’ Whilst the production was running and the preparations were under way for a new, larger programme, the situation changed dramatically. On 15 September 1941, an order was issued banning Jews from all forms of public life. The measure, which ranged from swimming pools and parks to libraries and museums, drove the Jewish population into total isolation. From then onwards, Jewish performers and musicians were only allowed to perform for exclusively Jewish audiences, whilst the audiences themselves would only be allowed to attend ‘Jewish premises’ such as the Hollandsche Schouwburg, which was subsequently, as mentioned above, renamed the ‘Jewish Schouwburg’ in October.



89

Henriëtte (Heintje) Davids and Kurt Gerron in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, 1941. Photo JHM / Collection Silvia Grohs-Martin.

These measures worked as a catalyst in the development of the exclusive, overarching Jewish cultural organization that Levie and a few others had desired, an organization that would finally have its home in the Jewish Schouwburg. One of the first plays to premiere was the revue Reislectuur, which had been planned earlier and was directed by Gerron. A special feature of this production was that the German émigré actors appeared on stage in their own language. They feared that their German accents would make their Dutch sound so ‘dreadful and hateful’ that they would evoke little sympathy from many a Dutch theatregoer. Once again, the review in Het Joodsche Weekblad was full of praise: ‘This succession of scenes, which transport us fleetingly across the whole world, brilliantly alternates between sobriety and mirth, presented with a degree of good taste that is only equal to its sense of proportion.’ The formation of a Jewish cultural umbrella organization was also promoted by another development: the availability of considerable financial resources from the Van Leer Foundation, a charitable fund that had been set up shortly beforehand, under the pressure of the wartime situation, by the well-known industrialist Bernard van Leer and his son. In the spring of 1940, their international enterprise had included a large number of profitable

90 

factories and businesses, which were located in both occupied and unoccupied territories. Immediately after the capitulation, German enterprises began registering their interest in the business, because they were aware that it was a ‘non-Aryan’ enterprise. After long negotiations, a contract of sale was signed in May 1941. Throughout the negotiations, Van Leer had stuck to one condition: after the sale, he wanted to be able to leave for America with his wife, his son, his horses, and his private travelling circus, Kavaljos. His free assets, almost two million guilders, had to be deposited in a German bank, and sixty per cent of his private assets were earmarked for various gifts. The negotiations were completed on 23 June and Van Leer was able to leave; in the meantime, the number of fellow travellers had grown to twelve. Two weeks before his departure, Van Leer had determined that a sum of 150,000 guilders be made available for the ‘promotion of the arts and sciences among the Jews in the Netherlands’. This decision was the direct result of a request for a contribution to the promotion of a ‘Jewish cultural community’ in the Netherlands – a demand that came not from the Jewish side, but from the secretary-general of the Ministry for Public Information and the Arts, Goedewaagen. He had already asked the wealthy businessman Van Leer for financial support in April, with an eye to the Nazis’ desire to dismiss all Jews working for cultural organizations; with money from Jewish circles, and Van Leer in particular, a large number of musicians, actors and cabaret artists could be provided for in a Jewish environment. Van Leer had agreed to make a gift, on condition that the Nazis did not exercise any influence on its financial management. The Reich Commissioner’s office agreed to this on 12 June, and the sum of 150,000 guilders was thus made available to a foundation that was set up at the end of August 1941: the Van Leer Foundation. This would later be joined by a sum of several hundred thousand guilders, financed by the forced liquidation of Van Leer’s businesses in Amsterdam that had not been covered by the agreement. The funding allowed for the creation of a buffer against the dramatic consequences of the Jews’ exclusion from public cultural life. That very same summer, the first steps were taken in the foundation of a Jewish symphony orchestra and a cabaret company, the Jewish Cabaret Ensemble, which would be based at the Jewish Schouwburg. Thus, a form of overarching organization for Jewish culture gradually emerged, one that bore a likeness to the Kulturbund in Germany. It was no coincidence that Werner Levie played a key role in this development. Ironically enough, however, its German predecessor had come to an end just beforehand: on 12 September 1941, eight years after its founding, the Gestapo had stormed the theatre in Berlin. At the end of October 1941, Heinrich Himmler banned the emigration of Jews

91



from Germany and occupied Europe. In the autumn, the first systematic large-scale deportations from the Reich to the East began.

New Companies and Activities At f irst, two-thirds of the funding from the Van Leer Foundation was earmarked for the Jewish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert van Raalte, and one-third for the Jewish Cabaret Ensemble. The latter company was led by commercial director Levie and artistic director Heintje Davids, an appointment with which Van Leer himself had been involved. Later, the Van Leer Foundation also funded drama, light music, and the purchase of paintings. The New Jewish Chamber Orchestra did not receive a subsidy, but it did receive a small amount of financial support every now and then. The foundation of the new companies came as a great relief to many performers. The actress Silvia Grohs, who had fled from Austria, later wrote in her memoirs: ‘Everywhere, people were getting out bottles of champagne and glasses. Corks were popped, glasses filled to the brim, and we toasted one other and the Schouwburg: l’chaim!’ The various companies and orchestras drew performers and musicians who no longer had any work as a result of the anti-Jewish measures. Lex van Weren, who later became the ‘trumpet-player of Auschwitz’, was one of the musicians to apply for a place in the Jewish Symphony Orchestra: […] if you wanted to be considered for that – it was primarily for the Jewish musicians who had been dismissed from the large famous orchestras – well, that was about 80 or 90 people. But the orchestra had 100 to 110 places, and there were twenty places open to so-called free musicians […] Now, I can remember, it was 1942 – or the end of 1941, beginning of 1942 – the persecution was well underway. But given my age […] I was 19 at that time, still obsessed with pursuing a career as a musician, because I hadn’t made it yet. And I simply did an audition […] with 15 other trumpet players.

Van Weren was not the only one. The young Siem Vos, for example, who had been a key figure in the Eerste Nederlandsche Soldaten Cabaret [First Dutch Soldiers’ Cabaret] as a conscript during the mobilization, had subsequently gone to drama school in Amsterdam, but, in September 1941, he had been barred from attending as a ‘non-Aryan’. He was now able to start work in the theatre department. For some, the Schouwburg offered unexpected opportunities, such as the young actress Hetty Bloemgarten, who had also

92 

The Jewish Symphony Orchestra performing in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, 1941-1942. The audience applauds director Albert van Raalte. Both photographs are part of Van Raalte’s scrapbook. Private collection B. van Raalte.

93



Scene from the revue Sensatie [Sensation], written by Herbert Nelson and directed by Max Ehrlich. From left to right: Siem Vos, Kurt Lilien, and Silvia Grohs. The decor was designed by Eduard Veterman and the music was written by Rudolf Nelson, May 1941. Collection JHM.

been dismissed from drama school, but suddenly found herself ‘in the role of a young, innocent ingénue’, surrounded by famous names such as Kurt Gerron. Later she would write: Kurt Gerron was a monument, you couldn’t imagine a larger, broader man. He was so kind. He called me ‘meine kleine Elisabeth’, because I reminded him so much of the famous German actress Elisabeth Bergner – she was also Jewish, but she had fled to England in time. […] Of his glory days, he said: ‘If only you knew how thrilling it is to be a film director! You’re in charge, not only of the actors, but also of the technicians. It’s so enthralling to be able to say to the cameraman: start filming now!

The Jewish Schouwburg quickly proved too small to house the many cultural activities and the large audiences that were flocking to it. There was little alternative, though, as there was just one other ‘Jewish premises’ in addition to the Schouwburg, the Tip-Top Theatre. In view of the situation, the chair of the Jewish Council approached the authorities. In a meeting with SS-Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand aus der Fünten, who played a central

94 

role in organizing the persecution of the Jews in Amsterdam, the chairmen voiced their concerns about the shortage of Jewish premises. They asked whether other Jewish institutions could be used for cultural purposes. The intervention was successful, and various theatres and association buildings were opened for cultural activities. The situation did not last for long, however; barely six months later, in June 1942, they were all closed again. One by one, they were ordered to close their doors – including the comedy house Theater van de Lach [Theatre of Laughter], which as the Beatrix Theatre had for many years been the only ‘mixed’ theatre and had housed Willy Rosen’s Die Prominenten cabaret. The director, Johan Sellmeijer, a non-Jewish citizen of Amsterdam, had long resisted pressure to ‘Aryanize’ his theatre or turn it into an exclusively Jewish venue, because he did not recognize the ‘need for racial segregation’. In September 1941, he eventually had to choose: from now onwards, the theatre, which was renamed Sellmeyer’s Theater van de Lach, was exclusively for Jewish actors and theatregoers, until the final curtain fell there, too, in April 1942. Thus, the Jewish Schouwburg was ultimately the only cultural stage left standing. By that time, Willy Rosen’s group had already left for the Jewish Schouwburg.

High-quality Entertainment The first show that the Jewish Cabaret Ensemble brought to the Schouwburg on 23 November 1941 bore the telling, not to say symbolic title, Hand in Hand. The revue, a cheerful mix of opera, comedy, tragedy, circus, and light opera, wholly in the spirit of earlier Nelson revues, was performed by an ensemble composed of earlier companies, with established names such as Heintje Davids, Kurt Gerron, Willy Rosen, Silvia Grohs, Kurt Lilien, and Nelsons senior and junior. The piece was a great success, just like the following revues, Iets Anders [Something Different] and Fortissimo, although the performance series had to be interrupted in February 1942 owing to the extreme cold. There was a shortage of coal, forcing the theatre to close; there were no performances for the whole of March. The programme at the Jewish Schouwburg was varied and of a high standard. New artists crowded into the office of director Werner Levie, which was located on the second floor of the theatre. ‘Thanks to the Germans, we gradually acquired half a symphony orchestra of solo players and a conductor, ballerinas, choreographers and the best set and costume designers’, Silvia Grohs wrote after the war. The audiences were enthusiastic. ‘There were



95

Scene from the Nelson show Hand in Hand with Henriëtte Davids, Otto Wallburg, Werner Levie, and Silvia Grohs, 1941. Photo JHM / Collection Silvia Grohs-Martin.

concerts, plays and operettas’, the German-Jewish childcare worker Ines Cohn, who worked in the crèche opposite the theatre, later explained. ‘The standard was high. […] it was so wonderful. But I also went with my parents to concerts by the Jewish Symphony Orchestra and to chamber music concerts.’ There are no traces of any discussions about ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ versus ‘assimilated theatre’, like those that had dominated the early days of the KuBu. Most plays lacked an obviously Jewish character and belonged to a lighter genre. Plays and sketches, or a mix of the two, were often performed that had been successful in the Netherlands or Germany before the war. But the theatre also put on new plays by Jewish writers whose work had not previously been performed in Amsterdam. And in the rare case of a play that contained direct references to a Jewish religious theme, the biblical drama Jacobs Droom [Jacob’s Dream] by the Viennese playwright and poet Richard Beer-Hofmann, the performance was eventually cancelled – possibly due to a conflict about the rights, or possibly because the play was ultimately considered to be too serious. The programme was subject to German censorship, of course: for every new revue, the complete manuscript had to be submitted to the Sicherheitsdienst in Euterpestraat beforehand. The censors took their time, and it was often only after the dress rehearsal that a play would be returned,

96 

Members of the Joodsche Kleinkunst Ensemble, late 1941. From left to right: Otto Aurich, Max Erhlich, Sylvain Poons, Heintje Davids, Bert van Dongen, Silvia Grohs, and Kurt Lilien. Collection JHM / Copyright Mrs. E. Bos-Veterman.

full of comments and remarks. The performances themselves were also monitored: night after night, a German Nazi official would come to watch. Although many of the songs and texts were in Dutch, he would sit there, according to the actress Grohs, ‘stiff as a plank and without moving a muscle’. The performers worked hard. Once a new revue had premiered on a Sunday, an immediate start would be made on the meetings about the next one on the following Monday. Heintje Davids wrote in her memoirs: When you stepped into the blacked-out streets afterwards, however, you were weighed down by the mood of war; then you remembered that you were living under the jackboot of the occupiers […] In the euphoria of work, you were able to put aside all your cares for a moment.

Herbert Nelson later wrote: ‘You lived in two worlds: in the world of the theatre and in the real world of fear and menace.’ At a time of increasing uncertainty, tension, and terror, the theatre became a place where the performers, musicians, and artists could feel safe; according to Herbert Nelson, people would sometimes even sleep at the theatre, fearful of confrontations

97



Scene from Fortissimo in the Jewish Schouwburg, 1942. Collection JHM / Fotostudio M. Drukker.

and raids. The Schouwburg became, as it were, a refuge in the heart of the raids and anti-Jewish measures. The performances and concerts were extremely popular, and the 800 seats were usually fully booked. Sera Anstadt, who had emigrated from Poland to the Netherlands in the 1930s with her parents and brother Milo, regularly went to the theatre. She tended to go to performances with her friends from the Eastern European Jewish cultural association, Sch. Anski. It was all that we had. […] If your life is wretched, it is important to have something like that. We hoped that the war would be over very soon. If we were able to cheer ourselves with something, then we did it, so we would be able to draw on it later. We were stockpiling good cheer, as it were.

The notes that the theatregoers added to the bouquets for Silvia Grohs also show that the performances were a meaningful form of support for many. Looking back, this is something that the then 21-year-old Max Raber would endorse. He had fled from Germany to the Netherlands with his PolishGerman parents in 1933, and, in 1941, was living close to the Schouwburg.

98 

He knew all of the songs and loved to go to the theatre. It was always full, and one of them would always say: ‘Text und Musik – von mir!’ Those people had come from Germany and must have needed to earn their keep. And they were good in Germany, and here, you could say, they gave an enormous psychological boost to all the Jews who were here. Because you would go [to the theatre] fearing that something might happen, but you still went.

There was also a social aspect to visiting the theatre; it was a good opportunity to see one’s friends and acquaintances again. Not everyone felt safe at the Schouwburg, though. Bernard Drukker, the musical director of the Groot Joodsch Amusements-Orkest [Grand Jewish Entertainment Orchestra] thought that it was risky for them to be crowded together, as he later explained: You were sitting there in a theatre with around 1,200 Jews. The doors were shut. […] You went in, but you didn’t know whether you would ever come out. If they’d raided it, they would have picked up a thousand people at once?! For that reason, my wife always came too. Then at least we would be together.

The actor Abraham van der Linden said that he had gone to the Schouwburg just once: ‘I had a wonderful time, but I felt uneasy. […] I was scared that if there was a raid, we would be sitting ducks. I didn’t trust it.’ And then there were the people who eschewed the Jewish Schouwburg on principle: they saw the performances and concerts as part of Nazi politics and did not want to join in the humiliation. After the war, it was precisely this view that became the subject of fierce debates, as noted above, also with respect to the KuBu in Germany. Decades later, for example, Dick Houwaart, a Dutch journalist and, for many years, the chair of the Anne Frank Foundation, asked the rhetorical question of whether the whole ‘masquerade’ of Jewish entertainment did not, in fact, serve the persecutors’ purposes: did it not give the impression of a ‘normal’ nightlife at a time which, to be sure, was ghastly and unpleasant, but nevertheless bearable, when people actually needed to be vigilant? Houwaart was not the only one to believe that the whole entourage enticed people into blissful ignorance, because many clung to anything that would give them hope, living from day to day without realizing how rapidly their lives would change. In the Schouwburg, plays were performed under the most difficult



99

of circumstances, within a political system that was undermining the Jews’ existence step by step. The management’s policy appeared to reinforce this, by deliberately keeping the programme light. Thus, Silvia Grohs, to her sorrow, was not allowed to sing any serious or melancholy songs. Levie believed that life outside the Schouwburg was already wretched enough. Inside the theatre, the performers had to make the people happy – politics had no place there. The spectators evidently went along with this, as shown by the presents and other tokens of thanks with which they rewarded the company.

A Sociocultural Centre Theatre and amusement were not the only ways in which the societal exclusion of the Jews became manifest in the Jewish Schouwburg. The building also functioned as a location for weddings, for instance, and it housed an increasing number of other organizations. In early November 1941, a secondary school of arts and crafts for Jews, the Middelbare Joodsche Kunstnijverheidsschool ‘W.A. van Leer’, was started, under the auspices of the Jewish Council. The school was set up after Jews were excluded from regular education, on the initiative of the graphic industrialist and patron

Group portrait at the wedding of nurse Deborah de Lange and her colleague Alexander Romijn, both working at the Netherlands-Israelite Hospital, in front of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, July 1942. Collection JHM / Photo A. Stein.

100 

Group portrait of pupils of the arts and crafts school W.A. van Leer, with director and teacher Jaap Kaas during drawing lesson in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, December 1941. The photo was also published by the weekly Het Joodsche Weekblad. Collection FJK/SI / Photo André Garf.

of the arts Willem Alexander van Leer (no relation to Bernard van Leer), and was developed with a number of prominent artists. Their objective was twofold: to offer a thorough education and to take as many pupils as possible; the latter aim in relation to the fact that the unemployed were the first to have to register for relief work in Jewish labour camps in the Netherlands. In the same month of November, a Jewish café was opened on the first floor of the neighbouring building, which had formed part of the Hollandsche Schouwburg before the war. It opened at 10 a.m. and became as popular as the then well-known Café de Paris in Beethovenstraat. In her memoirs, Silvia Grohs described the queues of people standing outside waiting, dressed in their Sunday best. The café also features in Etty Hillesum’s diary entries: ‘I sat in the coffee room of the Yiddish Schouwburg, looking around at the faces and thinking my thoughts […]’ The Jewish Schouwburg was thus home to a range of activities. It hosted an exhibition, for example, partly on the initiative of the Van Leer Foundation, which sought to support excluded visual artists by buying their works. Once the exhibition was over, the works were loaned to public Jewish institutions. 26 artists were invited; having previously



101

The café on the first floor of the neighbouring building, which belonged to the Hollandsche Schouwburg before 1940, but was separately leased, 1941-1942. Collection FJK/SI / Photo Jaap Kaas.

been a member of an artists’ organization formed the criterion for being a recognized artist. The Van Leer Foundation itself contributed 5,000 guilders, with which it bought, among other works, a drawing by the sculptor and draughtsman Jaap Kaas. The painter Martin Monnickendam was commissioned to paint a portrait of the conductor of the Jewish Symphony Orchestra, Albert van Raalte. Many of the works were not sold, although these were, by no means, unknown artists. Among the few works that were sold was Symbolen van het Joodsche Geloof [Symbols of the Jewish Faith] by Hendrika van Gelder, which was bought by Isaac Busnach, the manager of the schouwburgcafé, and now belongs to the collection of the Jewish Historical Museum. The paintings that failed to sell were given on loan to official Jewish institutions, but it is unclear

102 

Symbols of the Jewish Faith, Hendrika van Gelder, April 1942. This piece was acquired by the Van Leer Foundation to be exhibited at the Hollandsche Schouwburg; it was bought by Isaac Busnach, the tenant of the café. Collection JHM.

what happened to them subsequently. We can assume that much of the work was lost when these institutions and buildings were stripped. Given the fact that the Van Leer Foundation had paid for the artworks, no one made a claim after the war; furthermore, most of the artists had been killed. The idea of the Jewish Schouwburg as a centre for Jewish culture was also manifest, in a certain sense, in the Jewish press – at least, in what remained of it: Het Joodsche Weekblad. This newspaper, mentioned a number of times already, was the official organ of the Jewish Council from April 1941 onwards, and became the most important means of communication for the Jewish community – certainly after 26 October 1941, when all other Jewish papers were banned. The Weekblad not only contained the anti-Jewish orders and contemplative articles about Jewish history and religion, but also advertisements, announcements, and reviews relating to all kinds of social and cultural activities and productions.



103

The Jewish Schouwburg as a Life Raft The world beyond the walls of the Jewish Schouwburg was becoming increasingly terrifying. From January 1942, more than forty Jewish labour camps were set up in the Northern and Eastern Netherlands, as part of what was called ‘job creation’. At first, only the unemployed were called up, but, from March, employed men also began to receive summons. This led to a great deal of anxiety; people did everything they could to avoid being summonsed. And rightly so: the ‘job creation camps’, where thousands for Jews undertook forced labour, would prove to be the gateway to the deportations to the East. The staff of the Jewish Cabaret Ensemble were among those called up, initially for an inspection. Nevertheless, they were not sent to the Jewish labour camps, because, as part of the Van Leer Foundation, like the staff of the Jewish Council, they were automatically exempt. For the management of the theatre, this was a reason – in consultation with the board of the Van Leer Foundation – to try to employ as many people as possible. Men in suits were employed as stagehands and the number of actors expanded considerably. At the same time, there were limited opportunities for stretching the rules:

Jewish men in the Jewish Labour Camp Geesbrug (Drenthe) in the Netherlands, 1942. In the middle is Aaron Boeken, who later escaped from Camp Westerbork and survived the war. His parents, brother, and sister were all killed in Auschwitz. Collection JHM.

104 

the staff of the Regional Employment Agency (Gewestelijk Arbeidsbureau), which also arranged the dispatch of Jews to the labour camps, would come to check whether someone was actually working for the Schouwburg. In any case, things in Amsterdam would never go as far as they had done in Germany, where the KuBu had taken on people as orchestral violinists who had never even held an instrument before, according to the German contralto Paula Salomon-Lindberg, who had fled to the Netherlands in 1939 and had herself performed in the Jewish Schouwburg. Nevertheless, the number of people employed by the Schouwburg grew. According to the actress Hetty Bloemgarten, it was the threat of being summonsed to the labour camps that led to the foundation of the theatre department at the Schouwburg: At that point, the serious Jewish actors set up their own group; mainly so as to evade the terrifying prospect of being sent, as an unemployed person, to a labour camp in the Netherlands. […] After all, we were all living at the margins of normal life. No one had permanent work; some had family who had been sent to a labour camp.

Members of the drama section of the Jewish Cabaret Ensemble playing Doktersgeheim [Doctor’s Secret], written and directed by Eduard Veterman, spring 1942. From left to right: Elza Melchers, Adolphe Hamburger, Enny Mols-de Leeuwe, and Sophie de Vries-de Boer. Collection JHM / Photo H.M. De Lange.



105

The Jewish Cabaret Ensemble, during the break of the operetta De Czardasvorstin [The Csardas Princess], with a.o. Madeleine Gaby, Henriëtte Davids (front), Silvia Grohs, Sylvain Poons, Adolphe Hamburger, and Robert de Vries, May 1942. Collection JHM / Photo H.M. De Lange.

Acting now meant a reprieve; the Schouwburg was functioning as a life raft, for as long as it could. Plays were heavily cast, so as to shield as many artists and employees as possible from forced labour. The cast of the light opera De Czardasvorstin [The Csardas Princess], for example, which was put on the programme in the spring, with the Hungarian-born opera singer Lotte Medák in a starring role, included no fewer than 65 actors – ‘a large-scale production’, as the advertisements put it. This play was the last great crowd-puller in the history of the Jewish Schouwburg. On 29 April 1942, less than two weeks after the premiere, a decree was announced obliging all Dutch Jews to wear a Star of David from the following Sunday onwards. The measure was extended to the theatre, including the actors on stage – although the authorities were unhappy about the fact that the star would adorn the costume of an Austrian operettaoff icer. The order caused panic, especially among the German Jewish performers. A few decades later, the Dutch actor Sylvain Poons looked back on the first evening that the operetta was performed with the yellow stars: The f irst day that the stars came, we performed Csardasfürstin, in which I had a small role, because I was also directing. It was a wonderful

106 

production, which was not surprising, because it brought together the greatest performers in Europe. […] The evening that the stars came into vogue, we were playing to a full house […] and in the final act, I had to say to the singer: ‘Silvia, my only star’. And I hadn’t seen her for a while. I said: ‘Silvia, my only star’; and then I looked into the auditorium, and I said, ‘Well yes, my only star…’

Until that time, many non-Jews had also attended the productions at the Schouwburg. They had borrowed Jewish identity cards in order to do so, but, after the star was introduced, this was no longer possible, according to Heintje Davids. Despite this, De Czardasvorstin ran to the largest number of performances of any play that was put on in the Schouwburg during the occupation; 13 May was the date of the 30th and final performance. The set of De Czardasvorstin was designed by Eduard Veterman, an exceptionally driven, inspiring, and above all multi-talented man: he wrote, directed, devised the sets, and designed costumes. One month beforehand, as the director, he had taken the theatre group in the Jewish Schouwburg under his wing. In the opinion of Werner Levie, Veterman proved that it

Scene from the operetta De Czardasvorstin [The Csardas Princess] with Silvia Grohs (3rd from right) and Rob de Vries (2nd from right), April-May 1942. Photo JHM / Collection Silvia Grohs-Martin.



107

Scene from Veterman’s play Het loopt toch anders dan je denkt [It turns out differently from how you expect], performed by a mixed cast of famous and young actors, 1942. From left to right: Sophie de Vries-de Boer, promising young actress Hetty Bloemgarten, Kurt Gerron, and Jules Weyl. Collection Verzetsmuseum (VMA) / Dutch Resistance Museum, Amsterdam.

was also possible ‘to create an atmosphere of true dramatic culture’ in the Netherlands. A little later, Veterman would direct a play that he had written himself: Het loopt toch anders dan je denkt [It turns out differently from how you expect], with Gerron and the promising young actress, Hetty Bloemgarten. When Wiegelied [Cradle song], a play by the Hungarian writer Ladislaus Fodor, was premiered shortly afterwards, the growing repression also cast its shadow over the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the actors. The day after the premiere, the critic from Het Joodsche Weekblad wrote that he lacked enthusiasm about the actors: they had missed ‘good comedy timing’, something that was perhaps unsurprising, given that the auditorium that Sunday was ‘only partly occupied’. ‘Or perhaps [this was] for other reasons’, suggested the reviewer. It is not difficult to guess what these ‘other reasons’ were: in the weeks beforehand, a whole series of anti-Jewish measures had been announced, including a complete travel ban (5 June), an order to surrender bicycles and other means of transport (12 June), a sports ban (12 June), a curfew after 8 p.m. (30 June), and a ban on using the telephone (6 July) – culminating in the dissemination of the first thousand summonses of the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung for ‘Polizeilicher Arbeitseinsatz in Germany’, by Dutch policemen on Sunday 5 July 1942. Among the recipients

108 

was Margot Frank, the elder sister of Anne, and this summons provided the reason for Otto Frank to go into hiding. In the following days, another three thousand summonses were sent out – with moderate success, because far from all of those summonsed actually came forward. In order to put pressure on the population, the German occupying forces subsequently held raids in Amsterdam-Zuid and in the city centre on 14 July 1942, randomly rounding up around 700 Jews and threatening to send them to ‘a German concentration camp’ unless those who had been summonsed presented themselves. After this, considerably more people who had been summonsed came forward. While the Jews who had been picked up in the raids – aside from those whom the occupiers regarded as criminals, Straffällige Juden – were released, on that same night of 14 July, the first transport left for the transit camp (Polizeiliche Judendurchgangslager) Westerbork. This was followed on 15 and 16 July by the first deportations of more than two thousand Jews to Auschwitz. ‘The Germans are in the process of committing the worst crime they have committed since the occupation of our country’, wrote the illegal resistance paper, Het Parool. Some drew their own conclusions; such as Veterman, who sought refuge in the resis­t ance. He went into hiding at Keizersgracht 763, a building that gradually developed into the centre of the resistance group known as Luctor et Emergo. Veterman, who operated under the assumed name ‘Prof. Eduard Jacques Necker’, would be betrayed in October 1943 and sent to Germany via the infamous Oranjehotel prison in Scheveningen. He nevertheless survived the war. Others reacted differently, such as the half-Jewish conductor and cellist Frieda Belinfante, who lived close to the Schouwburg. Shortly after the raid of 14 July 1942, she organized a clandestine concert in the synagogue on Plantage Parklaan, given by an orchestra composed of Jewish music students. Bach was played and a girl sang an aria by Mozart. It was a special evening: one of those present would later say that ‘It was both moving and impressive.’

From Cultural Centre to Site of Deportation The summonses and raids proved to be a prelude to the definitive mass deportation of Jews from Amsterdam and other places. In order to be able to carry out their plans, the Nazis needed a site where they could temporarily hold the summonsed and arrested Jews as they awaited deportation. With this objective in mind, SS-Hauptsturmführer Aus der Fünten and



109

Dr Edwin Slusker, the liaison between the Jewish Council and the Germans, inspected the Portuguese Synagogue on Tuesday 14 July. The synagogue was requisitioned two days later. The Council of Parnassim, the religious leaders, opposed the order and asked the Jewish Council to mediate. This intervention prompted another visit by Aus der Fünten, now accompanied by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Wörlein, and the whole synagogue was inspected for a second time. Five days later, on 19 July, during a meeting of the Jewish Council, there was talk – probably by the secretary of the Jewish Council, Mr J. Brandon – of proposing to the Germans that the Jewish Schouwburg be made the assembly and deportation site, rather than the synagogue. The proposal was immediately accepted. Also playing a role in this decision was the fact that it was difficult to black out the synagogue and the building had no electricity. The Nazis were in a hurry and immediately took action: on the very same afternoon, during the matinee performance of Wiegelied, ‘men from the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung, led by the miscreant Aus der Fünten, noisily entered the auditorium,’ Heintje Davids would later write in her memoirs. On the following day, Monday 20 July, the Schouwburg was put into use as an assembly and deportation site. Henriëtte Davids described the sense of disillusionment: And so ended the Jewish theatre’s wartime campaign, which had begun with so much courage. All our hard work, which we had begun with so much enthusiasm, had come to nothing. The theatre, to which we had brought a little cheer and relaxation for as long as we could, was condemned to become a place of tears and suffering […].

The performers were now assigned a very different role. The Nazis had tasked the Jewish Council with providing staff for the new deportation place, and – according to Davids in her autobiography – it was co-director Dr Werner Levie who came up with the idea of putting forward the members of the ensemble for this purpose. As such, they automatically became part of the Jewish Council, and, as Gesperrten, would be granted a postponement (‘bis auf weiteres’) of deportation. According to Davids, Levie said: ‘We shall go on the last train […] and who knows what might happen before it comes to that!’ Thus, instead of a rehearsal or a new revue, the members of the theatre company were given a long explanation of the task that awaited them: helping to haul luggage, sending letters, providing travel essentials, giving parcels to the people imprisoned in the Jewish Schouwburg, and communicating

110 

telephone messages to family members left behind. Willy Rosen did his very best to help. He hauled rucksacks and helped mothers to give their children milk. As he lifted a heavy rucksack, he would mutter – under his breath, but just loudly enough so that everyone could hear him: ‘Und so geh’n wir allen!’ – and so we all go …. He could not have imagined how true his words would prove to be. *** My thanks to Gerrie Polak-Busnach, Salvador Bloemgarten, Julie-Marthe Cohen, and Henk Meulenbeld.

4. ‘Building of Tears’ Sixteen Months as a Site of Assembly and Deportation by Annemiek Gringold At the end of July 1942, Lydia Riezouw, then eighteen years old, looked out of the window of her upper-storey apartment on Plantage Kerklaan and took a photo of her friend from secondary school, Gretha (Greetje) Velleman, in the courtyard behind the Hollandsche Schouwburg. I took the photo because Greetje was standing there, otherwise I wouldn’t have thought of it […]. Her cousin was there too, he’s also in the photo, so she had someone to support her; he was a little older than she […]. I took the photos in case she were to return, or for me, so that I would have a souvenir of her. […] And at a certain point, the courtyard was empty and Greetje was gone.

Greetje Velleman, waving to her friend from secondary school, Lydia Riezouw, from the courtyard behind the Hollandsche Schouwburg, July 1942. Collection NIOD / Copyright M. van Nobelen / Photo Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw.

112 

Riezouw, who was not Jewish, took a total of five photographs from her upper-floor home and from her downstairs neighbours’ garden. As well as a photo of the high side-wall of the theatre, showing people in the narrow alleyway, reaching over the fences to the neighbouring gardens, the other four photos are of the courtyard where Gretha was standing. In one photograph, Gretha Velleman, a somewhat old-looking girl, is waving at the photographer. Her name, along with those of 648 others, appears in a transport list for Westerbork dated 29 July 1942. Two days later, Gretha Velleman was put on a transport bound for the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in occupied Poland. After the war, the Dutch Red Cross recorded Gretha Velleman’s date of death as 30 September 1942. It is not known exactly when she was killed. In addition to the photos of Lydia Riezouw, we know of an additional three photographs of the Hollandsche Schouwburg dating from this period of deportation: two are of the façade, and also show a guard, and one is of the room where the staff of the Jewish Council registered new arrivals. Although more than 46,000 people stayed there in the sixteen months that the theatre functioned as a site of deportation, we nevertheless know of just eight photos of the place.

Registration of newly arrived Jews in the former cloakroom of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, 1943. Collection NIOD.



113

Whilst there are few pictures, there are many stories: the testimonies of survivors, bystanders, escaped detainees, and members of the resistance. There are also documents: registration forms, transport lists, German orders, diaries, witness statements, and reports by the Jewish Council. Together, these stories and documents allow us to build up an impression of what it was like between 20 July 1942 and 19 November 1943 in this ‘building of tears’, as one of the detainees, the Amersfoort-based journalist Willem Willing (b. 1891), called it in a farewell letter on 26 August 1943, the day on which he was put on a transport to Westerbork. These inform us who the people were that stayed there, how the Germans and the guards behaved, stories of collaboration and betrayal, stories of the days and nights spent awaiting deportation.

The Hollandsche Schouwburg as place of internment, with guards, 1942. Collection VMA / Dutch Resistance Museum.

114 

The blind side wall of the Schouwburg, obstructing light and views, July 1942. Collection NIOD / Copyright M. van Nobelen / Photo Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw.

This chapter describes how a building that had been designed as a theatre to chase away the cares of the day was transformed into a gateway to death. Imprisoned within the theatre’s walls, tens of thousands of Jews were forced to await deportation, sometimes hundreds at a time and for days on end. The Hollandsche Schouwburg thereby formed a key link in the process that



115

began in 1940, when the Dutch Jews were subjected to exclusion, discrimination, and looting, and that ended with the deportation of 107,000 of them from the Netherlands to the concentration and extermination camps.

20 July 1942 As explained in the previous chapter, it can be established without doubt that the date on which the Hollandsche Schouwburg was put into use as an assembly place was 20 July 1942; a day that would forever mark the history of the theatre. The building was requisitioned for use as a temporary assembly site, a measure that was taken after there had been an inadequate response to calls for the first 4,000 Jews to present themselves at Amsterdam’s Central Station from 14 July 1942 for ‘Employment in Germany’; that is, deportation to an extermination camp. The fact that the occupying forces made special trams available for the Jews who had been summonsed had little effect. The German occupying forces put pressure on the Jewish Council to conclude a lease agreement with the Hollandsche Schouwburg plc for a rental sum of 300 guilders a month. The building was considered particularly suitable for use as an assembly and deportation site, not only due to its closed character – the Hollandsche Schouwburg was a ‘black box’, as there were no windows in the large auditorium and noise from the street hardly penetrated – but also due to the immediate proximity of the neighbourhoods where many Jews lived. Moreover, the building’s location was advantageous as far as transport links were concerned. The celebrated revue star Heintje Davids (b. 1888) described how the building was requisitioned on 20 July 1942 in her memoirs: ‘On the Sunday afternoon, the men from the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung, led by the miscreant A.D. Fünten, noisily entered the building.’ The Amsterdam Zentralstelle mentioned by Davids had been established at the end of March 1941, modelled on the arrangements in Vienna and Prague, to regulate the emigration of Jews from the Netherlands. This objective changed in 1942, with the new policy decided upon by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference. They wanted a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’, whereby the Zentralstellen would prepare and undertake the deportation of the Jews on behalf of the occupying forces. Although Amsterdam’s Zentralstelle was officially led by Wilhelm Zöpf, Judenreferent [‘Jewish adviser’] to the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst headquarters in The Hague, in practice, it was led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Ferdinand aus der Fünten.

116 

Summons for Rachel Citroen (Amsterdam 1895-Sobibór 1943) to register at the Hollandsche Schouwburg on 3 August 1942. Collection NIOD.

As Ian Kershaw argues in his biography of Hitler, the role of the charismatic Führer stimulated initiatives at every level of the National Socialist administrative apparatus. Nazis vied with one another to transform the Führer’s ideology into action and policy wherever and as effectively as they could, even if they had not received specific orders to this effect. They made policy, enforced it, and constantly adapted it for reasons of efficiency. The same was true of the deportations from the Netherlands, in this case, the requisitioning and use of the Hollandsche Schouwburg as an assembly place on 20 July. Such initiatives ‘in the field’ were almost always taken in the absence of orders from above. At the same time, the developments in the Netherlands differed from those in other occupied countries in a number of key respects, namely in relation to the way in which internment for transport to the extermination site was organized. As explained in the Introduction, the fact that the persecution took a different course was partly due to the dominance of the SS in the Nazi rule of the occupied Netherlands, and partly a result of local circumstances. Whereas, in Eastern European countries, but also in Greece, closed ghettos were usually established to detain Jews temporarily before they were deported directly and definitively to forced labour camps



117

or extermination camps, in the end, this did not happen in the Netherlands. Indeed, the Netherlands was the only country in Western Europe where Jews were assembled in specific parts of the city of Amsterdam – quasi-ghettos, in other words, although they were not strictly closed – but, due to fears of local resistance, the occupiers created forms of central assembly sites as intermediary stations before the actual deportation. The occupying forces in the Netherlands thus used a combined strategy of persecution, in which the Hollandsche Schouwburg – in addition to the labour camps for Jews, which came into use at the beginning of 1942 – played a key role in the logistical process of the deportations.

How it Began Once the theatre had been requisitioned, its business director, Werner Levie, came up with the idea of having the staff of the Jewish Schouwburg assist the detainees during their stay. The actors thereby became de facto employees of the Jewish Council, making them eligible for a temporary exemption of deportation. A German-Jewish refugee, Walter Süskind, became the director of the staff of the theatre. That very same evening, on Monday 20 July, at a quarter to twelve, the first group of summonsed Jews arrived; 1200 people, according to Henriëtte Davids. The diamond polisher Jacob de Hond (b. 1914), who was in this first group and remembered staying there for two days, estimated that the number of people was lower, around 500-600 people: ‘it was full’. The auditorium had the capacity to seat almost 800 spectators. According to Davids, these people were not registered at the Hollandsche Schouwburg until the following morning. She saw elderly people and young ones, families and individuals. She also saw youths with a match in their jacket buttonholes, their heads held high – ‘chin up!’ – to give each other courage. In her memoirs, the actress described how the luggage, mainly rucksacks, was stored in the cloakrooms and on the stage, how the new arrivals were guided by staff members to their seats, which soon proved to be in short supply, how refreshments and the meals provided by the Jewish Council were distributed, and how, towards midnight, after a stay of exactly 24 hours, the German guards on duty bustled the people to the waiting trams, and that they even hurled children into the vehicles. Also among the first to be interned in the Hollandsche Schouwburg was Julius Egger, aged seventeen, who had registered voluntarily because he wanted to be with his eldest brother Daniël. That same Monday night

r de bezetting / eriode als laats

118 

kelderverdiePing

5

1

8 3 2

2 2

7

7

Basement

7

6

nruimte onder stopplek voor

r installaties / r installaties innenplaats / vluchtroutes Opslag bagage ts / Luchtplaats n / Een van de s rblijven / dsche Raad (jr) g iletten / en bewaking gistratie en ge truimte voor

begane grond

1

4

Function before WWII / 9 Function during WWII 1. Props area under stage / Hiding place for escapees 2. Facilities room / Facilities room 3. Staircase to inner courtyard / An escape route 4. Orchestra pit / Luggage 10 storage area 6

6

11

Registratie Voorhal met

s / Trappen-

gang met

ddenlaan 22 ddenlaan 26 ngebouw

16

6

13 14

12

14

13

6

14

Plantag

1



kelderverdiePing

119

begane grond 5

17

8 3 2

2

7

7

Ground 2 floor

7 6

Function1before WWII / Function during WWII 5. Inner courtyard / Recreational area for 4internees 6. Narrow alley / An escape route 7. Artistes’ quarters / Rooms for Jewish Council and guards 8. Backstage toilets / Toilets for Jewish Council and guards 9. Stage / Registration and luggage storage 10. Auditorium / Area for awaiting deportation 11. Cloakroom / Registration 12. Vestibule / Guarded entrance hall 13. Staircase / Staircase 14. Entrance / Guarded entrance 15. Plantage Middenlaan 22 16. Plantage Middenlaan 26 17. Building props

9

10 6

6

11

16

6

13 14

12

14

13

6

15

14

Plantage

120 

erverdiePing

eerste etage begane grond

tweede etage

5 17

8 3

2

7

2

First floor 7

7

7

8

7

7

6 1

9

Function before WWII / Function during WWII

10

7. Artistes’ quarters / Rooms for Jewish Council and guards 13. Staircase / Staircase 15. Plantage Middenlaan 22 18. Balcony / Area for awaiting deportation (from 1943, mainly for Vught) 6 19. Cloakroom / Hall and luggage storage 20. Refreshment room / Hall 21. Passageway to number 22 / Passageway to sick18 bay 22. Toilets / Toilets

4

6 18

19

22

13

11 13

1620 6

13 14

22 21 12 15

14

13

22 6

1513

23

24 13

14

m i dP dl ae n lt a ag ne

m



eerste etage

tweede etage

8

Functie voor de bezetting / tijdens de periode als 7 deportatieplaats 7

Second floor

Artiestenverblijven / Kamers jr en bewaking Function before WWII / 8 Artiestentoiletten / Toiletten jr en bewaking Function during WWII 13 Trappenhuis / Trappenhuis 7. Artistes’ quarters / Rooms 18 Balkon / Wachtruimte for Jewish Council and deportatie (vanaf 1943 guards vnl. voor Vught) 8. Artistes’ toilets / Toilets 19 Vestiaire / Hal en opslag for Jewish Council and bagage guards 20 Koffiekamer / Voorhal 13. Staircase / Staircase 21 Doorgang naar 15. Plantage Middenlaan 22 nummer 22 / Doorgang 18. Balcony / Area for naar ziekenkamer 22 Toiletten / Toiletten awaiting deportation 18 23 Koffiekamer / Kantine (from 1943, mainly for in beheer Mw. Leger- Vught) de Vries & jr 22. Toilets / Toilets 24 Doorgang naar koffie23. Refreshment room / 19 kamer in Plantage Canteen under private Middenlaan 22 / management Doorgang naar 24. Passageway to 13 Plantage Midden- 13 refreshment room in laan 22

121

Functie voo tijdens de p deportatiep

7

7

2

4 15

Plantage Middenlaan 22 / Passageway to 20 21 Plantage 15 Middenlaan 22

7

Artiestenve Kamers jr e 8 Artiestento Toiletten jr 13 Trappenhu 18 Balkon / Wa deportatie vnl. voor Vu 19 Vestiaire / H bagage 20 Koffiekame 21 Doorgang n nummer 22 naar zieken 22 Toiletten / T 23 Koffiekame in beheer M de Vries & j 24 Doorgang n kamer in Pl Middenlaan Doorgang n Plantage M laan 22

18

22 13

middenlaan

23

24 13

15

122 

and on Tuesday, he wrote three postcards to his grandparents and his younger sister Hélène. It had been possible to repair the broken strap on his rucksack, there were mattresses for the women and children, and a young couple had gotten married that day at the Hollandsche Schouwburg; Egger ended each card in good spirits, with his ‘chin up!’, as he wrote. His would be a short stay. Julius arrived in Westerbork during the night of Tuesday 21 July to Wednesday 22 July, and joined his brother Daniël. The two of them were deported to Auschwitz on 24 July 1942. Due to the lack of precise information, the Netherlands Red Cross also recorded their date of death as 30 September 1942. At first, there were yet more locations in Amsterdam, besides the Hollandsche Schouwburg, where Jews were assembled or had to register for ‘employment’. Jews were also detained for transport at the office of the Sicherheitsdienst on Euterpestraat, for example, and the abovementioned Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung, based in a school building on Adema van Scheltemaplein. Later, this latter location also remained in use as an assembly place for deportation, alongside the Hollandsche ­Schouwburg. The Zentralstelle served in particular as an internment location for Jews whom the persecutors considered to be so-called strafgevallen [criminal cases]. The recollections of the survivors reveal, however, that one could also be transferred to the Hollandsche Schouwburg after a short stay in the Zentralstelle. Various places in the immediate vicinity of the Hollandsche Schouwburg were also involved in the deportations, such as the building of the ‘Vereeniging Zuigelingen-Inrichting’ on the opposite side of the street, on Plantage Middenlaan 31, better known as ‘the crèche’. From an unspecified date in October 1942, children under twelve were separated from their parents – the latter were interned in the Hollandsche Schouwburg – and had to await deportation there. Until that time, the building had functioned as a crèche [daycare]; before the war, for the children of local residents and parents who worked at the market, and, from 1941, exclusively for Jewish children and with Jewish personnel. The director, Henriëtte Pimentel, provided a group of young Jewish girls, who were not permitted to finish their training elsewhere owing to the order banning Jews from attending regular education, with training in the crèche as childcare workers. In 1942 and 1943, these caregivers boarded at the crèche and assisted with the daily care of the many children who stayed there. They also helped to reunite the families when transports were assembled for deportation from the two buildings.



123

Days and Nights To this day, the question of how long the Jews who had been summonsed stayed in the Hollandsche Schouwburg has barely been answered. Most historians have skirted the issue. The historian Jacques Presser, for example, who wrote the first major work on the fate of the Dutch Jews in 1965, maintained that the length of stay was ‘for many just a few hours, for some, days, and for a few, weeks’. We know that the duration of stay varied, but the suggestion that some stayed ‘a few hours’ would seem an underestimate. From the recollections of Lydia Riezouw, we can establish that her friend was imprisoned in the Hollandsche Schouwburg for some days; Lydia recalled having conversations with Gretha Velleman in the garden, over the fence. Julius Egger was there for 24 hours, according to Henriëtte Davids’ recollections and his own correspondence. Judith Mendes da Costa (b. 1895), a Jew who had converted to Catholicism and become a nun, was in the theatre for almost 48 hours. Along with other Jews who had converted to Catholicism, she was arrested as punishment for a protest by Catholic clergy against the deportation of the Jews. In order to gain a clearer understanding of the conditions and people’s experiences during their enforced stay in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, it is important that we try to discover how long such a stay could last; for a stay lasting just part of a day would have been a very different experience from a stay lasting some days and nights, as the detainees and their partners in misfortune waited around on chairs in a closed-off space. Witnesses’ testimonies and the letters that have been kept do indeed provide an impression, but other sources can give us a more precise indication of the average duration of imprisonment in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. For example, there is a list containing the names of 2,915 Jews who had been rounded up by the Kolonne Henneicke – a group of Dutch Nazi collaborators who were active as bounty hunters in the period between March and October 1943 – and brought to the Hollandsche Schouwburg in return for a financial reward. This list is based on a collection of Wache Zettel: notes containing the names of the Jews that had been brought in, signed by the guard on duty. By comparing the date of arrival at the Schouwburg with the registration data in the Jewish Council’s so-called Cartotheek [card index], which kept a record of when detainees arrived at Camp Vught or Camp Westerbork, it can be ascertained that 2,425 people from this group stayed at the Hollandsche Schouwburg for an average of five to six days.1 1 NIOD DOC II 317, map C, Registers I & II compiled by PRA researcher Prasing and post-war NRK Archive on the Jewish Council’s card-index system. The calculation is based on the data

124 

An average over a particular period cannot give a definitive answer to the question of the duration of stay for all those persecuted over the full sixteen months of deportations, of course, but this calculation does offer some insight into the ordeal that people must have endured; an ordeal that could last for days on end, in a building that had not been designed for overnight accommodation, that was stuffy and that stank, and where the sanitary facilities were totally inadequate to cope with such great numbers. There were also some detainees who, for various reasons, were there for considerably longer, as revealed by survivors’ statements, including that of the nineteen-year-old Ina Soep: so when a transport for Westerbork was planned one day, we were sitting upstairs with the people for Vught, that’s how they arranged it, and when they knew that Vught was going, to the camp, they put us downstairs with the people for Westerbork, who wouldn’t go until the next day. That way, we were incarcerated for five weeks.

The same sources show that some people stayed at the Hollandsche ­Schouwburg for longer than they stayed at Westerbork. This was true, in any case, for some of those in the abovementioned group of 2,425 Jews who stayed at the Hollandsche Schouwburg for an average of over five days. They were deported between 2 March and 20 July 1943, during the period when nineteen trains ran from Westerbork to the extermination camp in Sobibór, the final destination for most of these detainees. A random sample of the group that arrived in Westerbork from the Hollandsche Schouwburg on 25 May 1943 reveals that 204 of them did not even stay at the camp at all, but were sent to Sobibór the very same day. Another, smaller part of the group

recorded in Registers I & II and individual Jewish Council card-index cards. The calculation does not include stays lasting more than three weeks. Although it is known that people were sometimes interned at the Schouwburg for longer than three weeks, it was also often the case that people were temporarily released during this time. The transports that left from the Hollandsche Schouwburg tended to be scheduled in the evening or at night, meaning that the deportees would arrive in Westerbork or Vught during the night or early in the morning. On the Jewish Council’s cards from Vught, the presence of two dates often indicates that a transport arrived at night. The length of stay has been based on dates, not days. The length of Abraham Polak’s stay, for example, is based on five different dates. He was brought in on 16 April 1943, and his arrival at Westerbork was registered on 20 April 1943. He spent part of 16 April in the Schouwburg, as well as the following days and nights, and was probably put on a transport during the night of 19-20 April, early in the morning. For the calculation, his length of stay has been determined as five days.

125



was transferred on twelve different dates from the Hollandsche Schouwburg to the concentration camp Vught in the south of the Netherlands.2

Impressions Keeping in mind an average stay of over five days, the detainees’ descriptions of their time at the Hollandsche Schouwburg make even more of an impression. Simon Peereboom, for example, who was not yet 20, wrote that he did not know whether it was day or night, because the auditorium, closed off from sunlight, was always lit by artificial lighting – an arrangement that proved far from cheap, according to a report by the Jewish Council in August 1943. One unusual experience was that of Sophie Nopol (b. 1921), who married Leo Benninga (b. 1916) in the Hollandsche Schouwburg on 9 September 1943. She assumed that she and her new husband would be able to stay together. On 23 September, they were indeed transported together to Westerbork as man and wife: We had 900 guests at our wedding, because the whole Schouwburg was full. There were people everywhere, on straw or on the wooden floors, and we were given horse blankets, those grey blankets with red stripes. And when we got up the next day, we counted 24 fleas on me. That was my wedding night.

Nopol recalled that the marriage ceremony was held in the summer house of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. This was probably the small building that lay in the garden of land lot 22, which was replaced by a shed and a bower after the war. Benedictus Koopman, who was 20 years old at the time, also mentioned vermin, mainly lice, in his diary. David Cohen, one of the chairmen of the Jewish Council, wrote in his memoirs that ‘Süskind and his staff were unable to provide an adequate level of cleanliness. There was much vermin and like anywhere else, it proved impossible to get rid of it due to the everchanging population.’ Nevertheless, there were some attempts to deal with the nuisance, as revealed by a statement by Mirjam Bolle (b. 1917), who did administrative work at the head office of the Jewish Council. In her diary from Amsterdam, she wrote: ‘things were peaceful after Tuesday 2 On 8/9, 16, 20 and 27 April 1943; 6/7, 13/14, 26 and 29 May 1943; 10 June 1943; and 3, 21 and 24 July 1943, prisoners from the Hollandsche Schouwburg list were transported to Camp Vught.

126 

evening. For the Schouwburg had to be deloused and now, luckily, there are no arrests.’ That was on Tuesday 2 March 1943. The theatre was dirty, it stank, and the air was stale. Owing to the inadequate sanitary facilities, some were forced to empty their bowels in dark corners, such as the props department and the orchestra pit under the stage. It stank even worse there as a result; so much so, in fact, that the German guards avoided such areas. John Blom, then twelve years old, recalled how he had to wait for ages for the toilet, and that once he finally got his turn, people were constantly banging on the door. The fact that two shower cubicles were installed in the course of time can have brought little relief. It would not have been easy, under such conditions, to maintain one’s dignity as a human being, although people did the best they could, as shown by a receipt for a barber who cut people’s hair and shaved their beards during their internment in the theatre. In addition, the mood among the detainees was dominated by fear and uncertainty about the future. Loek Groenteman, who was not yet ten years old, later recalled how his mother, when they arrived, ran around screaming in panic and fear, ‘They are going to kill us all!’ His mother was not the only one to panic. Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch (b. 1911), who kept a diary during her time at the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the concentration camps of Vught and Westerbork, wrote: I saw elderly people crying in fear of what the future held […] many were unable to cope with the situation and began talking nonsense and doing crazy things. […] I saw a woman standing against the wall with such fear-ridden eyes that my stomach turned and I had to look away.

The fact that the theatre drove people to despair is also evident from the suicide of the German philosopher and bibliophile Victor Manheimer (b. 1877), who had fled to the Netherlands, on 10 December 1942. The Amsterdam police archives explain his suicide on the grounds that he had been informed that he would have to go on a transport. Willy Kweksilber, an employee of the Jewish Council, later wrote that following weeks of attempts to get him freed, Manheimer had jumped from a flat roof. After his suicide, the windows at the back of the building and above the narrow alleyways were barred. Despite the deplorable conditions, there was still space for spiritual and mutual care. Chief rabbi Schuster described how he was appointed rabbi of the Jewish Community of Amsterdam in 1941,

127



a post that brought me into contact with those who had been taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, to give them as much help as I could. At that time, the Jewish Council gave me a white band, so that I could enter and leave freely. I was the only rabbi who did that task at that time who survived.

After the war, Schuster also recalled the words of chief rabbi Lodewijk Hartog Sarlouis, who had been murdered in Auschwitz: No one who heard it would forget it: his last great speech, impressive and imposing, given in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, [he] himself a prisoner and speaking for fellow prisoners, which gave the poor souls the strength to bear their fate.

The abovementioned nun Judith Mendes Da Costa likewise bore witness to the care that she gave to the dozens of Jews who had converted to Catholicism, who, like her, had been imprisoned – and most of whom would be set free on the grounds that they had non-Jewish spouses. We shared everything that we had. We were one large community […] now you represent the Church for us, someone had said to me, and I suddenly sensed the responsibility that I bore.

The help and care were not limited, though, to these forms of spiritual, religious assistance. People helped each other in all kinds of ways. Sometimes the detainees performed for each other, to provide some diversion. They included Sonja Kopuit, then 20 years old, who would later marry the painter Leo Schatz: ‘I performed, for example; we had a kind of cabaret. I sang songs on the stage, it happened in the evenings.’

Arrival and Registration It is not easy to get a precise visual impression of what it would have been like in the Hollandsche Schouwburg during these sixteen months of detention and deportation. As explained above, there are hardly any photographs, and there are no drawings or maps from that time; moreover, the routines and arrangements seem to have changed several times during this period. In order to reconstruct the conditions, we must therefore turn to maps prior to 1940 and after 1945 and, in particular, witness statements in the form of

128 

diaries, letters, and oral statements. All in all, this material offers a basis for a reliable plan of the building. From statements, for example, we have a relatively precise idea of how the newly arrived Jews entered the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Such as that by the journalist Willem Willing: We were set down in the hall by members of the Jewish Council. Immediately, we were hit by a great buzz of crowds and noise that seemed to come from the building itself. Then we had to go to a table and provide the necessary details about our names, birthplace, place of residence, old address, and a term that’s become popular here, ­Duikadres [safehouse]. After that, we entered the auditorium. The chairs were indeed set out, but not facing the stage, they were at right angles to each other. It was a dreadful introduction; it was a real ants’ nest, full of men and women who were sitting and walking, and above all, talking and gesticulating. The curtain was up and there were members of the Jewish council on stage with microphones, which would prove to be a constant annoyance.

Willing’s first impressions, taken from his diary that begins with his arrest on 21 August 1943, are moving: the arrival overwhelmed him, the feeling of disquiet and, above all, the noise. He was not the only one to be struck by the clamour and bustle on arrival. According to various witnesses, including Willing, the newly arrived Jews were registered in a hall, the former cloakroom of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Evidently, though, this was not always the case; others recalled that registration sometimes took place in the auditorium, with the employees of the Jewish Council, who were responsible for registering arrivals, sitting on the stage. The only known photo of the registration of arrivals was probably taken in the cloakroom, but this cannot be established for certain. Clearly, the location was adapted to circumstances over the sixteen months. As registration was not limited to a simple list of names, it undoubtedly took some time. Two different versions of some transport lists, with the designation ‘Jewish Schouwburg’, have been kept: one version on which individuals were registered, each with their own serial number, and a second version on which the same people were listed with their families, and their serial numbers were linked to their home addresses. Moreover, written at the top of the second list is the word Schlüsselliste [key list]. Once they had entered the Hollandsche Schouwburg and had been registered,



129

people’s house keys were confiscated, so that their houses could be sealed and looted at a later date. This was the purpose of the key list. Internment in the Hollandsche Schouwburg thus meant the definitive loss of both one’s freedom and all of one’s possessions. After the registration was complete, the possessions that people had brought with them were labelled with their names. An employee of the Jewish Council paint these labels in white paint on the suitcases and rucksacks. Then, as Sonja Kopuit described, one would be led into the auditorium: ‘you had your own chair, with your bag underneath, all your stuff, that was your little house.’ Being imprisoned in the Hollandsche Schouwburg did not always mean that one lost all contact with the outside world, especially when someone was detained there for somewhat longer. After his internment, for example, Willing received a visit from Willy, his daughter from his first marriage to a non-Jewish woman. Willing wrote about how the visit from his daughter had cheered him. Years later, Willy remembered how she had entered the theatre by a side door and had talked with her father for around half an hour in a broom cupboard under the stairs in a small hallway, and had said goodbye to him. The memory is still an emotional one for her; her father was murdered in Auschwitz on 11 February 1944.

Plantage Middenlaan, April 1943. Parents bringing clothes to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, where their son is imprisoned. Collection VMA / Dutch Resistance Museum / Photo K.F.H. Bönnekamp.

130 

The Number of Detainees It is not possible to establish precisely how many people were interned in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, because the sources are not complete. For example, there is no general registration list. For many years, it was estimated that there were around 60,000-80,000 detainees, solely based on the number of Jewish residents in the capital, on the mistaken assumption that only Amsterdam’s Jews were deported via the theatre. Other studies have come up with considerably lower numbers. One study published in 1995, for example, mentioned (at least) 18,000 detainees, but this research was based on incomplete sources, whereby it was also wrongly assumed that all of the deportees were taken by tram from the Hollandsche Schouwburg to the trains, and that the invoices for tram transport thus formed a good basis for the calculation. There are additional complicating factors when it comes to determining the number of prisoners, such as the fact that many detainees had to await deportation in more than one place; some people were transferred, for example, from the Zentralstelle to the theatre, but also from there to the marshalling yards on the quays. Although no all-encompassing administrative records from the Hollandsche Schouwburg have survived, it is possible to reconstruct the number of people who were detained and then put onto transports more accurately than has been done in the past. This calculation is based on the 189 transport lists kept in the wartime collection of the archive of the Netherlands Red Cross. These lists relate to the transports from Amsterdam to Westerbork in the period between 19 July 1942 and 28 August 1944; a considerable collection, but, as mentioned above, an incomplete one. For the period between 20 July 1942 and 19 November 1943, 141 of these lists record a total number of 47,780 Jews being deported from Amsterdam to Westerbork. More than 30 of these lists are marked ‘Schouwburg’ or ‘Jewish Schouwburg’, sometimes in combination with ‘Panamakade’ or ‘Borneokade’ (quays in the eastern harbour area of Amsterdam). These lists record a total number of 11,243 people. These are, therefore, the people of whom it can be said with certainty that they were deported from the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The other transport lists mostly lack more detailed specif ications, however, with the exception of three lists that mention Central Station or the name of a quay. For example, it is recorded on the list for 29 July 1942 that the transport left Amsterdam Central Station at 2:16 a.m. This list also includes the name ‘Gretha Velleman’, the girl who was photographed at



131

the Hollandsche Schouwburg by her friend. There are more of these lists, which, though they do not record the original place of departure, feature the names of people whom we know with certainty were detained in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, because we know of a letter or statement by them, or a photo of them. This is unlikely to have been the case for a number of other lists, which are marked ‘Zentralstelle’, ‘Adema van Scheltemaplein’, or ‘Straftransport’ (S-transport, or criminal transport): the people on these lists were probably not deported via the Hollandsche Schouwburg, meaning that they have not been taken into consideration here. The same is true of the transport lists containing the names of people who were deported following the large-scale raids in May, June, and September 1943 and in transports of the sick, for we know that only small groups of detainees from the theatre were added to these transports. We can assume that the other lists concern the Jews who were detained in the Hollandsche Schouwburg and deported to Westerbork; this brings the total to 39,310 people. To this, we can add the number of people who were transferred from Amsterdam to Vught. This calculation is based on the 38 lists kept in the archive of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, relating to the deportations to Vught during the period between 16 January and 20 August 1943. 33 of these lists were made in Amsterdam, of which 23 certainly have the Hollandsche Schouwburg as the point of departure. These concern a total of 6,794 people. Finally, when we add the number of people who were deported to Vught to the lists for Westerbork, we can conclude that at least 46,104 people were detained in the Hollandsche Schouwburg.

The Whole of the Netherlands The abovementioned lists marked ‘Jewish Schouwburg’ frequently mention the names of people who had previously lived in other cities and who were thus first transferred to Amsterdam before being deported to Westerbork. They also include the names of Jews who had gone into hiding and who were brought in by the Kolonne Henneicke, from almost the whole of the Netherlands, of whom it was already known that they had been deported via the Hollandsche Schouwburg. As mentioned above, however, by no means were all of the deportees first transported to Amsterdam. Buildings in other cities were also designated to hold Jews for short periods before they were put on transports. For example, the chairman of the Jewish Council, David Cohen, wrote briefly of Loods [warehouse] 24 in Rotterdam,

132 

which was located next to the railway, so that those to be put on a transport could enter the train immediately […]. The conditions in this large warehouse were dreadful; our staff could only bear to work there for two days.

Furthermore, there was the Jewish Hostel on Paviljoensgracht in The Hague, described by Cohen as ‘a small building that served the same purpose as the Jewish Schouwburg in Amsterdam’, where people spent several hours, sometimes also a night, until they were taken by tram to Staatsspoor, today’s Central Station in The Hague. The fact that the Hollandsche Schouwburg was the most important of all these locations is evident from the calculations above.

The Elderly and the Sick Among the sources that give a more detailed insight into the conditions in the Hollandsche Schouwburg are the reports that were regularly produced by the Jewish Council’s Internal Information department. These, for example, contain reports about the transportation of the sick, but also about the care of the elderly and the sick in the theatre. The department of Internal Information reported on 27 January 1943, for example, under the heading ‘Employment’: Yesterday a number of sick people were taken to the Borneokade from the Jewish Schouwburg and will probably depart for Westerbork today, along with the people called up for employment today.

It was neither the first nor the last time that sick prisoners from the Hollandsche Schouwburg would be added to a transport of the sick; almost every preserved list of transports of the sick and elderly from Amsterdam to Westerbork and Vught contains the names of detainees from the theatre. The transports of the sick took place mainly in January and February 1943. The victims were collected from rest homes, care institutes, and hospitals. On 25 January 1943, the rest homes in the immediate vicinity of the Hollandsche Schouwburg were cleared one after another: the Beth Shalom rest home on Plantage Middenlaan 48; the Groente and Kleerekoper rest homes at numbers 18 and 16, respectively; and the Halverstad and Frank rest homes on the opposite side of the street, at Plantage Middenlaan 17 and 29. Many of the Hollandsche Schouwburg’s neighbours were elderly. After



133

the clearing of the Frank rest home, which was situated next to the créche at number 29, the building was used as accommodation for the childcare workers who worked in the créche, including Virrie Cohen. Her room looked out over the street, onto the transports. She kept the curtains closed, to shield herself from everything that was taking place outside. How such transports of the sick took place as part of the ‘Employment’ summons is revealed by the testimony of Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch. In her diary, she described the sick bay during such a transport at the end of March 1943: Trucks drove back and forth and the old people were loaded in like cattle and taken to the Panamakade […] what a desperate situation. Old people who could barely walk anymore. Someone with a wooden leg fell flat in the corridor […] In the corridor by the door of the sick bay sat a little old lady, crying. She had no coat on and she was wearing her slippers. The heroes who had collected her had not given her any time to bring some clothes with her. I couldn’t bear to watch any longer and returned to the sick bay, where things were just as tragic as they had been outside. The sick were being laid on stretchers and put into the trucks that way. The nurses were going with them to the Panamakade, to help the sick into the trains […] In the sick bay, someone became hysterical and it took six or seven people to restrain him. The attack recurred several times a day and lasted three or so days. Then he was given some strong injections, tied to a stretcher and put on the next transport to Westerbork. He won’t have been aware of the train journey.

Although the sick were thus put on transports, being ill in the Hollandsche Schouwburg could also have an advantage: postponement of deportation. Care for the sick in the theatre was already arranged at an early stage. In one of his letters, Julius Egger, who arrived on the day following the requisitioning of the theatre, mentioned a room where people who had fainted were cared for; a few days later, on 24 July 1942, Sal Cohen mentioned people being washed in the doctor’s room. It is not clear whether this is the same room as the sick bay that is described by later witnesses. This is because the Hollandsche Schouwburg did not only consist of the building on Plantage Middenlaan 24, but the neighbouring building, number 22, also formed part of the complex. The two buildings were linked by a corridor on the first floor. The sick bay that is mentioned in later witness statements was located on the first floor of the neighbouring building, with a view onto the street.

134 

There were around 20 beds in the sick bay, a room that was more pleasant than the packed auditorium. Sonja Kopuit remembered how Dr Karel Roos (b. 1906) would allow her to go there to get some fresh air: as an exception, the windows of the sick bay were not barred or covered with a grating, and could thus be opened. The room’s equipment was expanded in 1943 with (hired) apparatus for ‘dental care for the persons detained there’. De Zwarte-Walvisch described how, having been assigned, along with her husband, to a transport to Westerbork, she first wanted to talk to a doctor about her health problems. When she finally managed to do so, she was granted an exemption. However, because she had already been registered at the Zentralstelle before she came to the theatre, the exemption was retracted and she was eventually taken to Vught after all. The Polish-born merchant Abraham Dancygier (b. 1903) and his Dutch wife Rebecca Dancygier-Pakter (b. 1905), who, on 5 February 1943, were taken on a transport of the sick from the Hollandsche Schouwburg to the Panamakade, had more luck. They were allowed to return to the Schouwburg from the Panamakade, because ‘die Frau jeden Augenblick bevallen kann [that woman could give birth any minute]’. More than one and a half months later, their son was born, the only member of the family who would survive the war. His parents were nevertheless deported after his birth and murdered in Sobibór on 23 July 1943. One of the Jewish doctors who worked in the sick bay in the Hollandsche Schouwburg was Jozef van der Hal (b. 1911). It is thanks to him that we have a description of the doctor’s room and the equipment and medicines there, as well as of the minor treatments that the doctors could perform. According to him, it was difficult to refer people with more serious disorders to the hospital. Van der Hal emphasized how being admitted to the sick bay allowed people to avoid one or two transports and thereby have their deportation postponed: Then we would say to the Germans: Die ist nicht transportfähig. But you were dependent on such a guy’s mood. If he was in a filthy mood, they all had to go on the transport.

In view of the size of the sick bay, the medical staff was quite extensive. In addition to Van der Hal and Roos, among the others working there were the doctor Bernard de Vries-Robles (b. 1906), who was in charge of care for the sick; the assistant physician Maurice Hirschel (b. 1920), who worked in both the crèche and the sick bay; together with the nursing staff, including the male nurse Vieyra and the female nurse Speyer. They were all involved



135

in the rescue and escape of prisoners from the Hollandsche Schouwburg that were organized under the responsibility of Walter Süskind. Medical staff from the disbanded Jewish hospitals, including the surgeon Jozef de Jong van Coevorden (b. 1914) and the nurse Janny Bolle (b. 1921) helped detainees to escape by diagnosing so-called ‘medical emergencies’, which necessitated the detainee being brought to a hospital, thereby creating an opportunity to escape.

Resistance and Rescue The medical personnel were not alone in their attempts to help prisoners to escape. The Hollandsche Schouwburg was not only a site of deportation, but also a place where the Jewish Council’s staff identified opportunities to resist and save people’s lives. In this clandestine and dangerous enterprise, a number of people, such as Walter Süskind and Henriëtte Pimentel, played a crucial role. Walter Süskind was born in 1906 in Ludenscheid, Germany, the eldest child of the Jewish couple Heymann and Frieda Süskind. His paternal grandfather had been Dutch, meaning that all of the children also had Dutch nationality. The family had insufficient financial means to allow Walter to attend secondary school. After primary school, he became the apprentice of a Jewish grain merchant, who gave him the opportunity to attend commercial school alongside his work. In 1928, he began to work for Bölck, a subsidiary of Unilever, where he rose from the position of clerk to that of director. His job involved travel throughout Germany. After the Nazis came to power, he was able to retain his position for a relatively long time due to his Dutch nationality. In 1938, he followed in his brothers’ footsteps in fleeing Germany. With his wife, Hanna, he settled in Bergen op Zoom in the south of the Netherlands, where his employer had arranged a job for him. In 1939, his only child Yvonne was born there. During the occupation, in 1941, the family moved to Amsterdam. On 19 July 1942, one day before the Hollandsche Schouwburg was put into use as a deportation site, Süskind entered the service of the Jewish Council. He was assigned to the Expositur, a department of the Jewish Council that had been founded in 1941 to assist with the completion of emigration forms. During the deportations, the Expositur was in direct contact with the Germans and provided Jewish employees to work at the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The Expositur was led by Edwin Sluzker (b. 1907), a Jewish lawyer who had fled Austria. Just like the chairmen of the Jewish Council, Sluzker was

136 

Walter Süskind, 1936. Collection Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre.

able to mediate directly to get exemptions – and this was something he constantly did, as a specialist in the area of exemption regulations. When his legal efforts hit a dead end, his subordinate, Süskind, took up the baton by helping people to escape. Working for the Expositur, Süskind became responsible for registration and administration, as well as the provision of food and clothing and the



137

Jewish personnel in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. In this capacity, Süskind had a lot of contact with the German authorities, which gave him room to manoeuvre. He gathered a group of reliable employees around him, among whom Raphael (Felix) Halverstad (b. 1904) would prove to be indispensable. The testimony of the active social democrat Joseph Spier (b. 1916) shows that the Expositur recruited people in a targeted way, for Spier had himself attempted, via a contact, to get a young girl out of the Schouwburg. Shortly afterwards, he was invited to apply to the Expositur to work at the Schouw­ burg. He recalled: In April, I was invited to go to the office of the Expositur; that’s the part of the Jewish Council that had contact with the Germans. It was above the rooms where those children were. Three gentlemen were there. There was Heilbut, whom I knew, because one of his daughters, a child aged around seven, was in my group [in the after-school childcare]. There was Halverstad, also the father of a child in my group, and there was Süskind, whom I did not know. And they asked me if I wanted to come and work for the Expositur in the Schouwburg. And I refused. The Expositur were the gaolers of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. What I did not know then was that a small group of these people were actually used to free the prisoners […] When they asked me why not, I said that I did not want to be des Henkershilfer. The gentlemen left it at that and let me go. A few days later, Dr Epstein, also from the Expositur, came to me and said, ‘I know what happened upstairs, but I would like to ask you to go there, and if it’s as you think, you can always leave.’ I went there; it was transport day, and it was hell.

From that first working day, Joseph Spier became intensively involved in rescuing children from the crèche, something that will be addressed further below. In order to allow people to escape successfully from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, various steps had to be taken. The registration of newly arrived Jews was the first opportunity for people to evade the system. The staff of the Jewish Council deliberately allowed people to enter the building without registering, or failed to register families completely. Bloeme Evers-Emden (b. 1926) remembered her mother’s instructions not to register, which she managed to follow. An acquaintance who worked at the Schouwburg eventually helped her to get out. Registration upon arrival was not the only moment when an escape from imprisonment could be organized. A card index was made, based on

138 

Armband used by employees of the Jewish Council, required to enter and to leave the building, 1942-1943. Collection JHM.

the details registered on arrival, and kept in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, guarded by the Germans. Süskind, De Vries-Robles, and Halverstad were the only ones to have access to this card index, and this also created opportunities. Halverstad in particular focused on changing or altering details on the cards, with the objective of allowing prisoners from the theatre and later also from the crèche to disappear from the administrative records. Once that had been done, no one would be missed, and there would also be no punitive measures. In the organized escapes, a key role was played by the young men who were involved in the daily affairs of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. As employees of the Jewish Council, they distributed food, laid out the mattresses, stacked up the luggage, and helped to lug people’s things to the train; moreover, they took care of the postal traffic between the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the Jewish Council, the Zentralstelle, and the Expositur. In many of the postwar statements and books, the same names crop up time and again: Jac. van de Kar (b. 1917), Rob de Vries (b. 1918), Sam de Hond (b. 1914), Flip Grootkerk (b. 1902), Max Rubinstein (b. 1921), Ralph Polak (b. 1923), and others helped to smuggle people out of the Schouwburg. The fruit trader Sam de Hond described in his memoirs how he had hidden someone in the Hollandsche Schouwburg ‘in a deep cupboard containing old chairs, the door locked with a padlock’. Only after the transport had left the Hollandsche Schouwburg could the person be smuggled out of the building and go into hiding. Ted (Musaph)-Andriesse (b. 1927), a teenager at the time, described in turn how the employees of the Jewish Council took her under the stage into a props room and hid her there, together with a few others. The guards did not go there. At night, they were smuggled into the crèche opposite to the Schouwburg. De Hond also reported that keys were handed out, which could be used to open train doors from the inside. These keys were obtained by members



139

of the Jewish Council from the public baths on Uilenburgerstraat. They were used by a number of people, including Sonja (Schatz)-Kopuit, who used her key from the Hollandsche Schouwburg when the train started to run more slowly by Amersfoort Station. She opened the door and leapt out of the train. She then made her way back to Amsterdam, where she sought help at the home of Dr Karel Roos, the doctor who worked in the sick bay and played a crucial role in various escapes. He had a non-Jewish spouse and was thus relatively safe; various detainees who fled were first cared for in the house of the Roos family on Weteringsschans 125. From there, they left for another safehouse, armed with a false identity card. There were also other ways and means to escape the Hollandsche Schouwburg. One of these was via the courtyard and the adjacent gardens. A nonJewish girl, Gerrie Brosius-Hageboud, who lived at Plantage Middenlaan 20a from November 1942, recalled how people used to escape through their house: There was a ground floor with a garden at the back. Another family lived on the first floor. We lived on the second floor and I used to sleep on the third floor. Above that was another attic. The garden below was adjacent to the garden of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, and the garden door wasn’t locked. We didn’t double-lock the front door at night, and we discovered that whereas there hadn’t been any footprints in the corridor in the evening, in the morning, there were. The footprints came from the garden. We concluded that people were passing through. In that way, Jewish people could get out. The first one to come down in the morning mopped the corridor – not every morning, but often.

The detainees Jaap van Velzen (b. 1931), Abraham Perlmutter (b. 1927), and John Blom, who were still young boys, took advantage of the guards’ inattention. According to the testimony of the people involved, such moments could also be created deliberately: the staff of the Jewish Council plied the guards with drink so that people could leave the building safely. Many witnesses emphasized that, in the end, escaping from the theatre was no more than the first, but certainly not the biggest, obstacle; finding a safe refuge was a much greater problem. Kopuit had a first address to try; the fifteen-year-old Andriesse did not. Having waited in the crèche for a few days, she voluntarily joined a transport in the hopes of meeting her parents again in Westerbork. Indeed, this lack of prospects often played a role. During the final raid in Amsterdam on 29 September 1943, when the chairmen of the Jewish Council were also picked up and the occupying forces subsequently declared the Netherlands to be Judenrein (Jew-free), Jac. van de Kar, an employee of

140 

the Jewish Council who was active in the Jewish resistance, unlocked all of the exits of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and told the prisoners that they could leave. Few made use of the opportunity. Looking back, Lydia Riezouw described the courtyard behind the Hollandsche Schouwburg: Below there was a fence that belonged to the downstairs neighbour, and because the boys sat on it, it collapsed, as if in slow motion. Then they went over the fence to buy a 5-cent gherkin, and they took every care to put the fence back. If they’d wanted to, they could have got away, but where were they to go?

Süskind had the fence repaired, probably to avoid arousing suspicion. After the war, a number of witnesses declared that Süskind had maintained good relations with the German guards and the head of the Zentralstelle, Aus der Fünten, in order to conceal his activities. His excellent social skills and fluent German came in handy for this, and, if all else failed, there was always the option of serving strong drink or suchlike.

Rescuing Children: the Crèche From 1926, the crèche was located in the building on Plantage Middenlaan 31, opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg. As explained above, the crèche was led by Henriëtte Henriquez Pimentel. In 1924, she had been made director of the Vereeniging Zuigelingen-Inrichting en Kindertehuis, as the crèche was officially called. Pimentel, born in Amsterdam in 1876, not only had a teacher-training diploma, but was also a trained nurse. She herself lived at the front of the building, together with her little dog, Brunie. Because the crèche was originally built as a Jewish school for boys, on the first storey at the front, there was a room that served as a synagogue; the striking windows in the facade were a reminder of this. This room functioned as an activity room for the children. The crèche had a large, deep garden where the children could play. A separate part of the garden was reserved for the very youngest children, who could play there undisturbed. The many prewar photos of the garden also show the property boundaries with the neighbouring lots. The garden of the crèche was bordered with fencing, low walls, and hedges. Before the war, both Jewish and non-Jewish children came there for daycare, although the crèche had originally been founded with the intention that Jewish mothers who wanted their children to be cared for in accordance



141

with ritual could bring their children directly to or nearby the centre for the Jewish poor. Many parents worked long days at the market and brought their children at an early hour. Indeed, it paid to be early, because the crèche had a limited number of places. The crèche was an unusually modern institution and was the only such facility in the Netherlands to offer a recognized, two-year course as a childcare worker. It provided daily care for around 60 children. Care workers recalled how after the crèche opened its doors and the children would be brought inside and checked for ‘pietjes’ (lice). They would then be given a play apron, which they wore over their clothes. Following the measures that excluded Jews from regular education, from the summer of 1941, the crèche became an exclusively Jewish institution, to be attended only by Jewish children and staffed exclusively by Jewish personnel. It was Süskind who suggested that the crèche be used to care for children from the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The Germans were enthusiastic, because this would make conditions in the theatre less chaotic and noisy. Once the crèche had become a dependency of the Hollandsche Schouwburg deportation site in October 1942 – a change that was made within a couple of days – it became clear that the supervision of the children was not complete: the guards kept an eye on the building from the other side of the street, and would pay a visit every now and then to check things. In other words, there were no permanent guards. This may have played a role in Süskind’s decision, in January 1943, to transfer his office to the emptied Frank rest home, next door to the crèche. Pimentel knew that Süskind and his staff were responsible for registering Jews at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, and that he used this position to adapt the registrations illegally. Such adaptations could also be made to allow detained children to disappear from the crèche’s administrative records. Pimentel then instructed a number of childcare workers who had access to the Schouwburg – Sieny Kattenburg, Fanny Philips, and Betty Oudkerk – to find the parents of children there. These young childcare workers, all three of whom were aged eighteen, had the job of convincing these parents to allow their children to be taken into hiding from the crèche and subsequently being transported to Westerbork as an ‘incomplete’ family – an unimaginably hellish dilemma. The recollections of one childcare worker, Sieny (Cohen-) Kattenburg, show that this was no easy decision: most people didn’t do it, they wanted to keep their children with them […] and if they did decide to do it, they would say, ‘Make sure that he ends up somewhere where he’s cared for.’

142 

Betty Oudkerk described how Felix Halverstad did not always manage to finish adjusting the registrations on time, meaning that another solution would have to be found for families that had agreed to leave children behind, so that they could leave as a so-called ‘complete’ family. Betty: We gave those parents dolls or teddy bears, any toy I could find that could be wrapped in a little blanket.

It was also decided that children who had come alone to the crèche from a place of hiding should be seen as children whose parents had, in principle, already given their permission for them to be re-hidden elsewhere. Pimentel, who, like Süskind, was informed of the planned transports, worked with the care workers to ensure that children who were destined to go into hiding were hidden in the crèche, so that they would not have to go at the last moment after all. After it had been decided that a particular child would go into a hiding, the child had sneaked out of the crèche unseen. A group of Pimentel’s confidants was involved in smuggling these children outside. In the autumn of 1942, they did so by smuggling individual children outside with the dirty washing, in a basket or jute sack, and passing them on to trusted people. Ineke Pach, who was born on 27 November 1942, was hidden in an egg basket as a baby: ‘In that way, I was smuggled out in a large wickerwork basket, on the front of a bicycle.’ As the children were allowed to take walks during the day, this was also a good opportunity for smuggling children. The abovementioned Joseph Spier, who worked on Plantage Middenlaan from April 1943, recalled: I had to go for walks with the children, and often I was even given a particular route. The first time, I remember, I had to go and walk in the neighbourhood of the St Nicolaaskerk. We were approached by a few girls, who looked like childcare workers, they walked with us, and I came back with five children fewer than I’d started with. The children were counted beforehand. I still came back with the same number of children, though, because other children were smuggled onto the Plantage Middenlaan via the teacher training college in order to join up with mine.

‘Reserve children’, Spier called them. In the end, in addition to all the private rescuers – such as the person who rescued Ineke Pach – there were four resistance groups that received children from the crèche in an organized fashion and took them to safehouses. The resistance group NV, which transferred both Jewish children



143

and adults, was the first to do so. From January 1943, Süskind was in touch with Joop Woortman, the liaison for the NV group. Woortman (b. 1905) was a taxi driver and waiter who was deeply involved in the resistance from the summer of 1942, and had an extensive network among Amsterdam’s Jews. Just like the other female couriers, his wife, Semmy Glasoog (b. 1916), brought children from the crèche to safehouses. Woortman also established contact with the Amsterdam students’ group led by the young law student Piet Meerburg (b. 1919) and Wouter van Zeytveld (b. 1923), and he also established contact with Rut Matthijsen (b. 1921) and other members of the Utrechts Kindercomité (Utrecht children’s committee), with the objective of bringing children from the crèche to safehouses throughout the Netherlands. Süskind met these members of the resistance in his office in the former Frank rest home. The groups themselves found the safehouses. The fourth group that was involved in the organized rescue of children from the crèche was the resistance group that had developed around the illegal Christian newspaper, Trouw. This group became involved in smuggling work more or less accidentally, after one of the resistance paper’s founders, Dr Gezina van der Molen (b. 1892), who was a state examiner, came to hold exams at the Reformed Teacher Training College. By then, this college had become part of the network, thanks to its director, Johan van Hulst (b. 1911), with whom Pimentel – and later her successor, Virrie Cohen (b. 1916), the daughter of the chair of the Jewish Council, David Cohen – maintained close contact from January 1943. Van Hulst clandestinely made a classroom available where the very smallest children could sleep during the day. When, in April 1943, the examiner Van der Molen learned that Jewish children were being given sanctuary in the Teacher Training College, she used her underground network from the Trouw group to smuggle children. Before the week was over, Van der Molen had already gotten twelve babies out. In particular, Hester van Lennep (b. 1916), a beautician and courier in the resistance, and her colleague and friend, Paulien van Waasdijk (b. 1917), were able to smuggle many children via the Training College route. For the other groups, too, the college building was by now functioning as a key route for getting children out – and for getting them in: as described above, the so-called ‘reserve children’ were smuggled into Plantage Middenlaan via the teacher training college so that they could join with the groups of walkers to take the place of children who had been transferred to the resistance while out walking. The concierge, Van Wijngaarden, who was also involved in the illegal activities, would often keep an eye on the street. On 23 July 1943, the Germans cleared the crèche without any warning. The building was emptied and all of the children, around 70 at the time, as well

144 

as 36 care workers and the director, Pimentel, were transferred to a waiting train at Muiderpoort Station. Shortly before its departure, German guards walked along the train calling for ‘Frau Cohen’. Virrie Cohen stepped forward, but it turned out that they were looking for the care worker Sieny Kattenburg: she had married her colleague, Harry Cohen, a few weeks earlier. She was taken from the transport and brought back to the crèche by the German guards. After the mediation of her father, David Cohen, Virrie Cohen was also taken from the train. Pimentel, though, was deported; after staying at Westerbork for over seven weeks, the director of the crèche was transported to Auschwitz on 14 September 1943, where she was killed immediately after arrival. She was succeeded as director by Virrie Cohen, who, together with the other remaining childcare workers, intensified the rescue attempts from the crèche. The 29th of September 1943, the day of the last large raid, in which all of the staff of the Jewish Council were rounded up or had to present themselves, also marked the end of the crèche. The director of the training college, Van Hulst, later recalled how, one day beforehand, ‘a very senior German’ had come to check the lay of the land: The SS officer saw all those children – the crèche was full to bursting. He started to swear there and then: ‘Those goddamn Jewish children!’ Then he said to the commander: ‘Tomorrow, every child goes on the transport, no exceptions.’

The leaders of the crèche faced an impossible task, according to Van Hulst: Virrie Cohen came to me and said: ‘Mr van Hulst, all of the children have to go tomorrow. We still have eighty children. What should we do?’ Anyone could understand that it is impossible to hide eighty children in a single day. It simply couldn’t be done. How many, then? Then you walk to the crèche in the afternoon and you have to pick out a few children. Who? Which? There were babies who weren’t even six months old. It was one of the worst days of my life.

Together, Cohen and Van Hulst chose around twelve children aged from five to twelve years; that is, children who were able to walk independently. From the directors’ room, which was adjacent to the side entrance of the training college, they let them go one by one. Those who were not picked up in the raids had to present themselves for transport. The resistance member Piet Meerburg urged Virrie Cohen



145

not to do so; according to him, Cohen would be urgently needed after the war to help identify the children who had gone into hiding. With his help, she went into hiding in Limburg, where she also joined the resistance. Sieny Cohen-Kattenburg and her husband Harry Cohen went into hiding in Haarlemmermeer. With the deportation from Amsterdam, on the morning following the raids, both chairmen of the Jewish Council were also transported to Westerbork. Walter Süskind and his family also found themselves among the deportees. After a few days, Süskind was sent back to Amsterdam to resume his role at the Hollandsche Schouwburg. After the Schouwburg was closed, for some time he was assigned to guard food at the Portuguese synagogue. He kept in touch with resistance groups all that time, but refused offers to go into hiding himself; he feared for the fate of his wife Hanna and their daughter Yvonne, who remained in Westerbork. The Süskind family was eventually deported to Theresienstadt on 4 September 1944, and from there, on 23 October 1944, to Auschwitz. Immediately after their arrival, Hanna and Yvonne were killed in the gas chamber. Süskind succumbed after the evacuation of Auschwitz, during the death marches. He is recorded as having died on 28 February 1945, somewhere in Central Europe. For almost a year, the building on Plantage Middenlaan 31 – which was demolished in 1976 – served as a site of deportation of Jewish children under age twelve. We do not know how many children were deported from the crèche; but we do know that, in the end, more than 600 children were saved.

Betrayal and Collaboration Now that more research on Dutch collaborators is available, the question arises as to the role that they played in the persecution of the Jews and, more specifically, the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Particularly telling, for instance, is the list of 2915 Jews who were taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg in 1943 by the abovementioned Kolonne Henneicke. This list mentions the names of no fewer than 34 Dutch citizens who delivered captured Jews in return for a receipt, signed by the guard on duty – a Wache Zettel. These Wache Zettel also feature the names of another twelve Dutchmen who, along with thirteen German colleagues, worked as guards at the Hollandsche Schouwburg and signed the Zettel. The ‘Jew-hunters’ needed a receipt in order to be paid the bounty that was awarded for each Jew that was brought in.

146 

The Kolonne was named after the group’s leader, 34-year-old Wim Henneicke. As a member of the Hausraterfassung, he was initially responsible for compiling inventories of looted Jewish household effects, but from the spring of 1943, he became actively involved in rounding up Jews. The Kolonne was responsible for a third of the victims who are known to have been picked up by Dutch citizens and handed over to the German occupying forces. According to the historian and journalist Ad van Liempt, who has done extensive research into this specific group of collaborators, as far as we know […] it was only in the Netherlands that a bounty […] was set for the arrest of Jews. It worked, because it led to at least 10,000 and probably 15,000 arrests that were linked to a bounty. This was a low-point in our history, of course, because if one reflects on who did this, no German was involved.

In addition to members of the Kolonne Henneicke and German SS officers, agents of Amsterdam’s municipal police force were frequently present as guards in the theatre. These Dutch guards were aged between 24 and 58 years old, usually came from modest backgrounds and tended to have a low level of education. Another common factor was that their political preferences, almost without exception, were for the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist movement. In terms of age, the German guards were more homogeneous – almost all of them were in their mid-twenties – and they lived together in an army building on Marnixstraat. Three of them – A. Glatzeder, W. Klingebiel, and Alfons Zündler – worked as duty officers as head of the guards, a role that gave them more space than the rest. This was shown, for example, by the actions of Zündler, a German non-commissioned officer who had been heavily wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941 and, having recovered, was assigned to the Zentralstelle fur Judischer Auswanderung in the Netherlands in 1942. We know that he played a role in the escapes as duty officer – a fact that provoked significant controversy at the beginning of the 1990s. The immediate cause of this controversy – which simultaneously shines a unique light on the relations within the theatre – was a request by a group of survivors that Zündler be awarded the prestigious Israeli Yad Vashem medal. This was because, on 3 May 1943, Zündler had been sacked as duty officer by his boss, Willy Lages, and, according to various witnesses – not only female detainees, but also families and male prisoners – Zündler had played a role in their escape from the Hollandsche Schouwburg. This could have



147

A Wache Zettel, a receipt, signed by the guard on duty, featuring the names of five Jews brought in by the Kolonne Henneicke, the group of Dutch Nazi collaborators who were active as bounty hunters. The receipts were needed in order to be paid the bounty that was awarded for each Jew that was collected, April 1943. Collection NIOD.

148 

been a reason for his dismissal. The Israeli institute’s intention to honour him gave rise to great uproar in the Netherlands. More detailed research revealed that, in the same period, two other SS guards had been dismissed in addition to Zündler, and other survivors and witnesses claimed that immoral acts between the guards and female Jewish prisoners, under the influence of strong liquor and coercion, had played a role in this. A number of witnesses confirmed that, when it came to releasing Jews, it was possible to do ‘business’ with Zündler by putting him in a good mood. In the end, the decision to award Zündler the medal was retracted, a turn of events in which the argument that an exchange of ‘favours’ did not relieve him of his partial responsibility for the deportation of thousands of detainees undoubtedly played a role. A relatively large number of Jewish survivors have memories of the guards in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Esther Keijl-Coronel (b. 1923), then a young woman, later bore witness to how intimidating they were: krauts were constantly coming in, drinking coffee at a little bar upstairs. They had their drink, we had nothing, they looked at us with an expression that said: how are you doing, eh? There was deathly silence until they had gone.

It is known that violence was used by the Kolonne Henneicke and the Dutch police agents who were involved in rounding up Jews in hiding. This was often done in order to get information about other Jews in hiding. After the married couple David and Clara Sanders (both born in 1902) were arrested on 26 August 1943, they were so badly brutalized to get information about where their children were hiding that they eventually gave in. Their daughter Elly (aged ten) was picked up from her hiding place in Barchem. The two other children, Marleentje (aged eight) and Bertje (aged four), who had been hidden in the home of the resistance member and surveyor Joop Hollebrands in Sliedrecht, were picked up on 27 August by members of the Kolonne and taken to the crèche on Plantage Middenlaan. This so enraged Hollenbrands that he travelled to Amsterdam on 28 August, and even managed to get access to the Hollandsche Schouwburg. On 13 September 1943, he wrote about the mistreatment that David Sanders had evidently suffered: ‘Almost all of his front teeth and molars had been knocked out of his mouth.’ Hollebrands also succeeded in entering the crèche, to find that Bertje’s luggage had disappeared and the boy himself was in bed with a high fever. After a failed attempt to escape, the members of the Sanders family were deported and murdered in Auschwitz on 10 September 1943.



149

Despite the official guidelines not to use excessive violence – after all, it might provoke resistance – it was often used all the same. Survivors recalled certain guards, including A. Velthuijs, who showed himself to be a brute and he frequently kicked and hit the detainees. The Dutchman Schuezler and the Germans Klingebiel and Gruneberg were also identified as guards who did not shrink from using violence. Bystanders also recalled the guards. Lydia Riezouw, for example, described a guard who stood at the entrance with a knuckleduster and chased away anyone who stopped to look. Johan van Hulst, the director of the teacher training college, who played a role in the rescue of children from the crèche, later described how he would yell at his students not to look and that they should immediately go into the training college, so as not to arouse any suspicion – with the evident approval of the German guards. Most people kept their distance from what was going on at the Hollandsche Schouwburg. This was not always the case, though. At the beginning of August 1942, for example, the nun Mendes da Costa deliberately went to the top floor of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and stood by the window, clearly visible in her habit and star, to draw the attention of the residents of the Catholic St Hubertus, a relief centre for unmarried mothers, on the other side of the street. All of the windows were closed, aside from a single window. Waving, she attracted the attention of a child and the other residents, who then asked – and received – the Nazis’ permission to invite Mendes da Costa for a midday meal. This was, as far as we know, the only time that the residents of St Hubertus, which looked onto the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the deportations for sixteen months on end, took action. After a short stay in Westerbork, Mendes da Costa was temporarily released, but was then deported to Auschwitz nevertheless, where she was murdered on 7 July 1944.

Propaganda The great majority of the prisoners in the Hollandsche Schouwburg were deported to Westerbork, and, from 16 January 1943, a large number were also sent to the concentration camp in Vught. Only once were they sent to another destination: on 15 April 1943, SS-Sturmbahnführer Wilhelm Zöpf made an urgent request to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Third Reich’s overarching security organization in Berlin, to make a passenger train available for the deportation to Theresienstadt of German Jews with so-called

150 

Kriegsverdiensten and Jews with a separate exemption status. The request had been preceded by a long correspondence between the office in The Hague and Berlin. The decision to transport this special group at a normal speed and in a passenger train was taken by Reichkommissar Seyss-Inquart, after consultations with SS-Obersturmbahnführer Eichmann. According to Zöpf, Seyss-Inquart had made this decision, because this transport could be expected to have a certain propaganda value; and as it concerned a ‘migration to a place of residence’, it was important that the transport should leave from Amsterdam, a city, and not from a camp.

The fact that the correspondence about this transport made explicit reference to a list indicates that it had already been decided who would go to Theresienstadt. Indeed, on 21 April 1943, a group of 296 Jews with what the Nazis described as ‘special merits’ left the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Shortly beforehand, some of these people had been transferred to the Amsterdam assembly place from various addresses in Amsterdam, as well as from outside the city, including Villa Bouchina in Doetinchem. Nevertheless, the great majority of them – 201 people – came from Westerbork and Vught, and the fact that they were transferred from these camps back to the Hollandsche Schouwburg is striking. The occupying forces were resolute: on 21 April, a passenger train was indeed standing ready to deport them to Theresienstadt, the ‘model camp’ with which the Nazis tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the outside world. It was the first transport from the Netherlands to this camp. Six days later, a second transport left for Theresienstadt, but this time from Westerbork; more would follow. Of the 296 people who were put on the transport from the Hollandsche Schouwburg to Theresienstadt, only 76 survived the war. Their special status was of little help to the deportees, or only temporarily; neither were the relatively more favourable conditions in the Czech camp. Most of them were murdered in 1944, after they had been deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. The cartoonist Joseph Spier (b. 1900) and his family were among the survivors. He had the NSB leader Anton Mussert, who was a great fan of his work, to thank for his place on the list for this ‘privileged transport’. Spier described in his memoirs how, early in the morning, with just a few suitcases, he and his family had made their way to the Hollandsche Schouwburg.

151



Deportation The prisoners who were deported directly from the Hollandsche Schouwburg to Theresienstadt were usually forced to walk to Muiderpoort Station, a journey on foot of almost 2 kilometres. The deportees included Jona Oberski, then five years old, who would later achieve international fame as the author of the autobiographical work Kinderjaren [Childhood], in which he describes this journey. Departing from Muiderpoort Station was relatively uncommon, because people were usually taken from the theatre on Plantage Middenlaan to Central Station, in particular to the neighbouring marshall­ing yard on the Borneokade and the Panamakade, an area also known as De Rietlanden. The walk that Oberski described was unique in the sense that the prisoners were on foot; normally, the detainees were taken to the station or the marshalling yard by tram or police van. A girl living in a neighbouring building, Gerrie Brosius-Hageboud, later described the transports from the Hollandsche Schouwburg: We didn’t look because it was dreadful, those little children on the other side of the street. It mainly happened in the evenings. The people were loaded into cars, huge great things. I also saw a tram filled with people; the tram was less common.

And Julie (Sprecher)-Kattenburg (b. 1922), one of the childcare workers at the crèche: We would see the trams arriving and then the people being loaded into the trams. Through the window of the crèche, we saw my parents and my little brother. That was the last time I ever saw them.

In his childhood memoir, the writer and poet Heere Heeresma (b. 1932) described how the deportees arrived at De Rietlanden: I’m standing still in front of a heavy wire-mesh fence, and can see a yard behind it. A little further on, there are some coupled freight cars. And then I see them. They are stepping out of two trucks, while a small group of krauts, holding rifles, are talking to one another. And no one shows the people wearing stars the way. They know where to go. Without any fuss, they pass through a gate. Two women carrying children. An old lady, an elderly couple clutching one another, arm in arm. A dozen

152 

Transport by tram from the Hollandsche Schouwburg to Muiderpoort Railway Station, 1943. Collection VMA / Dutch Resistance Museum / Photo K.F.H. Bönnekamp.

youths. And no one has any luggage with them. The older people take to the rails with diff iculty, looking for sleepers or trudging through the thick gravel. This means that it takes them some time to get to the short row of freight cars. The youths are helping them now. Two girls take a child and carry him further, and the couple who are arm-in-arm stumble, but manage to keep from falling. A member of the Wehrmacht has gone ahead and jumps a metre up onto the footboard of a freight car. With the steel guard under the butt of his rifle, he bashes against the locked handle of the large door, jumps back down, seizes a handle, pulls and slides the heavy door open. The wagon is already full of people, some crouching between the legs of the others and some sitting on the floor. And as the soldiers look on, the loading begins. The children are pulled inside by an arm, and with some jostling, the elderly couple follow, but the old lady causes problems. She doesn’t dare, and yet she must. In the end, she lies with her upper body on the floor of the freight cars and is pushed in that way. Rain is splashing on the hood of my poncho and I want to shout out, ‘Now’s your chance! Jump out and disperse!’ There is no crying. No complaining, no screaming. They are all in the wagon now and are standing tightly packed together, facing the door. The krauts take a step back and watch, holding their rifles in both hands.



153

In early 1943, many Jews were deported to Westerbork from the marshalling yard of the Dutch Railways at Panamakade, close to Amsterdam Central Station. Dutch policemen helped Nazis to maintain order. The men with the white armbands are employees of the Jewish Council. Collection NIOD / Photo German Stapf Bilderdienst.

And then something incomprehensible happens. The people inside close the sliding door themselves, until it catches in the lock with an audible ding. ‘You’re crazy’, I suddenly call out. Luckily my voice is lost in the space. The cars that are standing there, full of life, are lifeless in a well of silence.

The staff of the Jewish Council often helped with the transports. They carried luggage and sometimes gave people something to drink; in the notes of the Jewish Council’s records, one sometimes comes across the entry ‘tip Panamakade’. And sometimes, even at this point, in that marshalling yard, there was a chance to escape. Flip Grootkerk, for example, managed to get people out of the train – including two little brothers, Maurice (b. 1937) and Joseph Meijer (b. 1934) – and hide them in the barrow with which he was transporting luggage to the train. After 29 September 1943, there were still a few hundred people in mixed marriages and a handful of employees of the Expositur in Amsterdam, including Edwin Sluzker and – for a time – Walter Süskind. By then, all of the Jews in the Netherlands had been transferred to Westerbork or Vught,

154 

deported to the concentration and extermination camps, and murdered – or were hiding out of sight. It was for this last group that the Hollandsche Schouwburg would function as a deportation place for another seven weeks, until 19 November 1943. After that date, Jews who were picked up from their hiding places were deported via police stations. The Hollandsche Schouwburg was closed as a site of deportation. The building that had served as the gateway to ­Auschwitz and Sobibór, to Bergen Belsen and Theresienstadt, was transformed forever into a place of guilt. *** I am grateful to Anaïs van der Braak, Sander Haccou, Vera Illés, and Lilli Lindner for their help with determining the length of stay.

5.

Site of Memory, Site of Mourning by David Duindam

The memory of the Holocaust has become an indelible part of Western culture, now functioning as an important moral compass for both European countries and, in particular, Israel and the United States. In the first decades after the Second World War, there was little space in the public culture of remembrance for the persecution of the Jews, nor for the other victims of the racist mass murder. Both in Israel and the Netherlands, the main emphasis was on the resistance to the persecution. The Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto thereby provided an important source of inspiration for the founders of Israel, and this quickly became part of the young state’s memory discourse. In the Netherlands, by contrast, it was the non-Jewish resistance that was commemorated, the central event being the February Strike of 1941, which constituted the largest public general protest against the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. In the United States, the war was mainly celebrated as a victory for democracy; little attention was paid to the actual impact and meaning of the catastrophe. Only in the 1960s would this change, partly as a result of the Eichmann trial in Israel; the success of the diary of Anne Frank as a publication, play, and film; and the first major historical studies. The victims of the persecution slowly acquired a face and the barbarous scale of the genocide became clear to the general public. The influence of popular media cannot be underestimated; although the term ‘Holocaust’ had been used in the English-speaking world for some time, it only became a truly global term with the popular NBC miniseries of 1978. In the 1990s, memorial museums were built or renovated in various places, including in Washington, Berlin, and Jerusalem; likewise in Amsterdam, where, in 1993, a small exhibition opened at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the former site of deportation where more than 46,000 Jews had been registered and detained during the German occupation. That this building in particular would become a memorial museum was by no means obvious. Shortly after the liberation, the building’s owners wanted to reopen it as a theatre, but this plan met fierce opposition in local and national newspapers: no entertainment in this place of suffering. An action committee was subsequently successful in raising funds to buy the building, despite the economic hardships of the time. The aim was not to create a site at which to present the persecution of the Jews as a unique event, but to emphasize that showing reverence for this site was a matter

156 

of national honour; an approach that was fully in line with the dominant culture of remembrance, which emphasized national unity. When the City of Amsterdam had to devise a fitting use for the vacant theatre, it encountered division within the Jewish community. Many Jewish institutions argued for demolition, on the grounds that this building was no suitable place in which to remember families and loved ones. As a result, the former theatre remained empty for many years, until the city council decided to transform it into the first national site of commemoration in memory of the Jewish victims of the war in the Netherlands. After it was opened in 1962, the Jewish community slowly but surely appropriated the site. From 1966 onwards, for example, Yom Hashoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day] would be held there every year. The original design for the memorial site was relatively abstract and left much to the imagination. For this reason, 30 years on, an educational exhibition was established at the site with the aim of telling the story of the persecution of the Jews to a new generation. Today, the museum is seeking new ways to tell its story. The dynamics of the memorial site is following international developments, although it simultaneously remains strongly anchored in local circumstances.

The Postwar Situation Many European capitals suffered heavy damage from the destructive violence of the Second World War. Bombardment, battles, and raids left deep scars in the postwar landscape. In the Netherlands, large parts of cities such as Middelburg, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, and Arnhem were destroyed by military campaigns. The same was true of the ports and several industrial sites in and around Amsterdam. Aside from some bombing, however, the centre of the capital escaped large-scale military destruction. Here, it was mainly the persecution of the Jews that left a trail of devastation. Officially, there were no longer any Jews living in Amsterdam from the autumn of 1943. Some of the looted homes were taken over by other residents. The old Jewish quarter, however, was utterly destroyed and disrupted by vacancy, plunder, and vandalism. Around a quarter of all houses were destroyed, and the neighbourhood would never return to its prewar situation. Whilst the liberation was being celebrated in the Netherlands, around 5,200 of the 107,000 deported Jews came back from the concentration and extermination camps. According to estimates, the Jewish community in the Netherlands, which had had around 140,000 members before the war,



157

had shrunk by 1947 to around 28,000 people. The decimated Jewish community had to reorganize and reorient itself within Dutch society, a society that had failed to protect the Jews against mass persecution. Most of the survivors had no friends or family to whom they could return, and waited in great uncertainty to see whether their loved ones would reappear. Shelter was lacking and many of them had lost everything: their houses had been demolished and their possessions had disappeared – often because the so-called ‘bewariërs’,3 the people who looked after the Jews’ possessions after they had been deported, refused to return them. Moreover, there was a widespread feeling of being unwelcome; the period immediately after the liberation saw a wave of anti-Semitism. There was little awareness of what the Jewish camp survivors had been through, with the result that they were treated the same as other repatriates. This was also a consequence of the principled decision that the Dutch government in exile had taken during the occupation: Jews and non-Jews would be treated equally, and not differently as they had been by the Nazis. This resulted in precarious situations during the repatriation, whereby German Jews who had sought safety in the Netherlands before the war and had returned from the concentration camps were subsequently imprisoned in reception camps along with National Socialists, on the grounds that they had German nationality. The desire to treat Jews and non-Jews alike had major implications for the national policy on war memorials, which did not leave any space for a special monument to the victims of the persecution of the Jews as a separate group. The dominant discourse of remembrance was one of a small nation that had suffered collectively. The great majority of national memorials were thus to fallen soldiers, political prisoners, and resistance fighters. Beyond those ‘who had fallen for the country’, there was no monument dedicated to a single, specific group of victims in those early years. For many years, the city council delayed its response to the 1946 request by the Jewish Community of Amsterdam to erect a Jewish memorial on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, in the heart of the old Jewish quarter. Two important monuments in Amsterdam dating from this period do not commemorate the victims of the persecution of the Jews, but instead emphasize the resistance to it. The Monument of Jewish Gratitude, founded by a committee of Jewish survivors in 1950, was an expression of gratitude for the protection given by the people of Amsterdam against the occupying forces. Two years later, De Dokwerker was unveiled in the heart

3 Translator’s note: the word ‘bewariër’ is a composite of the Dutch words ‘bewaren [to keep]’ and ‘ariër [Aryan, non-Jew]’.

158 

of the old Jewish quarter. The statue of the dockworker commemorates the February Strike of 1941 and is still seen as an important monument. In order to avoid conflicts, in the first years after the war, commemorations were kept as apolitical as possible; this included a ban on speeches and the carrying of particular flags. The National Commemoration Day on 4 May was celebrated in every municipality in various kinds of places, but always in

Memorial wreaths in front of the doorway of the closed Hollandsche Schouwburg, 1948. Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum (NFM) / Photo Boris Kowadlo.



159

accordance with national protocol. In this way, the organizing committees could highlight the local context in commemorations, for example, by selecting a former execution site as the location, whilst simultaneously following the same overall pattern as the national ceremony, with the most important moment being the two-minute silence at 8 p.m. Here, too, it was the case that all of the victims were remembered, and not one group of victims in particular. It was possible to emphasize particular aspects, for example, as happened on 4 May 1948 when a small group of people on their way to the commemoration on the central square in Amsterdam laid a wreath in front of the closed doors of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. In this way, the Jewish victims were specifically remembered within the context of general remembrance. At the same time, the laying of the wreath was recognition of the importance of this site, even before a national memorial to the Jewish victims had been established and the persecution of the Jews had become a distinct part of remembrance of the Second World War. How did this happen, and why did this theatre in particular develop into a site of memory?

Contested Heritage On 12 June 1943, Omnia Treuhand took over the Hollandsche Schouwburg plc with the objective of liquidating the building. The company had previously been ordered by Reich Commissioner Seyss-Inquart to carry out some of the forced liquidations of Jewish businesses in the Netherlands. A few months later, on 19 November 1943, after the last transportation of Jews had left the theatre for Westerbork, the building was left decrepit and abandoned; the former theatre had not been designed to accommodate the sheer numbers of people who had had to await deportation there. After the the Jews had been deported, the occupying forces no longer needed the building; the final phase of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands was focused on tracking down Jews in hiding and the transportation of the Jews who found themselves in the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught and in the prisons. On 5 June 1944, all of the public limited company’s property – the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the café next door, and a few neighbouring lots of land, in total around 3300 m2 – were auctioned. The legatees of the former director and owner, Louis de Vries, were unable to prevent the auction: after all, the Hollandsche Schouwburg plc was now in the hands of the looting firm, Omnia Treuhand. The buildings were sold for 258,310 guilders to the Linthorst brothers, cold-store manufacturers from Deventer. The proceeds were used to pay the overdue mortgages, as well as tax arrears that had been run up

160 

before the war. The remaining sum, 52,085.90 guilders, went to the VermogensVerwaltung und Rente Anstalt, another German looting organization. In the months following the liberation, the Schouwburg’s owners refurbished the building with the intention of once more using it as a theatre. Opposition was immediately voiced in the newspapers. The communist daily De Waarheid, a former resistance paper, which enjoyed the largest circulation of all Dutch papers at that time, published a critical piece on the singer Paul Ostra, who was due to perform in the Schouwburg: ‘There are folks who act as though no harm was ever done. They include Paul Ostra […], the sycophantic servant of the German directors of the Jewish drama.’ He had ‘the nerve to work with one or another Deventer-based meat manufacturer [Linthorst – ed.] in this place of horrors, this monument to human suffering, so he could croon his ghastly songs’. A day later, this was followed by an article written by the journalist and later rabbi Jaap Soetendorp, in the most important Dutch-Jewish paper, the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad (NIW): Quietly, the theatre is going back into business. After all, it is a theatre and ‘business is business’. So quietly, a variety show will be put on – in an auditorium where every chair is a memory, where every step follows the spectre of the most dreadful suffering. A place where parents and children began their journey to their doom, where people sobbed and begged for their lives and freedom, where people died of fear and dread, where those who had been in hiding were brought in and where illusions evaporated; plays will be shown there. He who has the paucity of heart and soul to be able to bear such suffering must have no understanding of what it means to be human.

Less than four months after the liberation, the theatre had already become contested heritage; a public matter that would attract much attention in the press in the course of time. The city council could not let this pass and decided, on 1 September 1945, that the performance of public plays in the Hollandsche Schouwburg would henceforth be banned. The response from the NIW was positive: ‘The “Schouwburg” to be closed after all. Commendable intervention by the mayor’, ran the headline. By making this decision, the mayor had ‘upheld the tradition of decency and civilization’, Soetendorp argued. He referred to an otherwise unknown plan to transform the Hollandsche Schouwburg into a museum, ‘to make future generations aware of the consequences of Nazi tyranny and arbitrariness; something we will not forget, but it should never be forgotten by following generations’. This was the first time that anyone had suggested that the



161

‘Private show’. Newspaper cartoon depicting the cash register of the reopened theatre of the Piccadilly. Cartoon Opland in Het Parool, 3 October 1946. Collection Opland, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2017.

Schouwburg should be made into a site of memory, but not everyone was in agreement with this. A week later, the NIW published a letter making the case for demolishing the theatre, as it was where the tragedy of Amsterdam’s Jews had played out. This was hardly an immediate prospect, however. The building was in private hands and a few weeks later, the social-democratic paper Het Vrije Volk published a small advertisement in which the former theatre, under the new name of the Piccadilly, was offered for hire as a private venue. This was in keeping with the mayor’s decision, which had banned only public events. It soon became evident that the owners would push the boundaries of ‘private’ and ‘public’, whereby the atmosphere and presentation of events alternated between solemn and celebratory – a development that provoked critical speculation in the press. The new name, borrowed from London’s entertainment neighbourhood, also gave rise to distrust. ‘It is said that “lectures” will be held, and so forth. But there is a stage manager, there are

162 

props and there is scenery. A bar has been installed; in short, everything has been done maximize the chance of making it into “a theatre”.’ The Piccadilly was doing a brisk trade; from company celebrations and wedding parties to musical and theatrical performances, the applications streamed in. Many of them were turned down on the grounds that their character was overly festive or possibly too public. When, in the spring of 1946, the Antuna opera society announced its plan to perform the dramatic opera Lucia di Lammermoor in the building, the NIW called on the city council to prevent this. The opera society’s application was indeed rejected. When Amsterdam’s school and youth activities committee planned a number of performances for young people in the Piccadilly during the Christmas holidays of 1946, the former resistance paper Het Parool ran the headline, ‘Why there, of all places?’ It turned out that the parents had paid for the performances up front, only to find out later that they would be held in the former Hollandsche Schouwburg. Many parents were put out by this and found themselves facing a tricky dilemma; ‘they had wanted to treat their children, but for them it is an unpleasant thought that their children should enjoy themselves in a building that is so full of memories of the most dreadful suffering.’ Jewish parents in particular felt deeply offended. Despite the constant objections, at the beginning of September 1946, the owners of the Piccadilly were granted permission to use the building as a theatre, for a trial period. From 1 November, the Zuid-Hollandsch Toneel theatrical company took up residence in the building, which was then known by the more serious name of the Artis Theatre. In consultation with the city council, it was decided that the theatre company would perform only ‘solemn plays’. The first play to be staged would be Oranje Hotel, written by Eduard Veterman, who had played an important role in the Jewish Schouwburg in the first year of the war as a director and scenic carpenter. Veterman had an impeccable background: as a result of his resistance activities, he had been imprisoned in the notorious prison in Scheveningen, popularly known as the ‘Oranje hotel’. Nonetheless, the play would not be performed. That summer, Veterman was killed in a traffic accident, and, before his death, he had been fiercely critical of the reopening of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, let alone the plan to perform his play there. He had confided to a good friend that he would resist it tooth and nail: he had ostentatiously drawn a skull on a poster for Oranje Hotel, and was intending to stick it on the wall of the Schouwburg in person if it reopened as a theatre. A reopening with Veterman’s play, of all plays, would constitute ‘a stain on the history of the Dutch theatre of our time,’ argued Auguste Defresne, an actor and a close friend of Veterman’s.

163



Although the mayor had granted permission to use the building as a theatre, in the end, the performance did not take place. Both the management of the theatre and the Zuid-Hollandsch Toneel decided, possibly under pressure from the many protests, not to use the licence for public performance.

A National Fundraising Campaign The refusal of the conductor Hans Krieg to perform at the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the responses surrounding the staging of Oranje Hotel provoked a storm of media attention that did not die down for some time. The proprietors appeared to be losing the battle for public support. In order to turn the tide, the manager, in September 1946, invited a group of leading figures from Jewish and Christian circles and the former resistance to discuss a plan to place a memorial stone in the building of the former Hollandsche Schouwburg, ‘in memory of deported Jewish fellow citizens’. Shortly before the meeting, however, Johan Winkler, a well-known Christian-socialist journalist, wrote a devastating column in the former resistance paper Het Parool, with the telling headline: ‘No “entertainment” in the hell on Middenlaan!’ Winkler argued that using the theatre would slowly but surely suppress the memory of the war. It would start with a private event, then a solemn play, then a less solemn play, followed by a party and eventually a wedding. ‘Yes, what of it? We are celebrating and we are holding weddings in the Golgotha of the Jews; we are making a graveyard into a fairground.’ The owners could not redeem themselves by placing […] a small memorial tablet that might shortly be covered unintentionally by a poster […]. If we need to, why shouldn’t we all buy back the building from its owner, at three times the price if necessary – before it is too late – in order to put it to a different, truly fitting use?

One day later, the meeting convened by the manager proved to be a failure: the invitees did not want to assist with the placing of a plaque so long as the theatre remained in use. Winkler was true to his word and joined an action committee, led by the nationally celebrated socialist-Zionist Sam de Wolff, which aimed to acquire the building and give it a fitting purpose. Nevertheless, this would not prove easy. The owners refused to enter into contact with the committee, because they thought its members had been unjustly critical of the theatre in the press. ‘This Schouwburg is no place of vulgar entertainment, as claimed in the Handelsblad, and everything else

164 

that has been reported about the building has been twisted and unfairly represented.’ The tone was set: the new committee was squarely opposed to the wishes of the Linthorst brothers. The newspapers played an important role in the conflict between the two parties, neither of which had much sympathy for the other. The owners had poured money into the purchase and renovation of the Schouwburg and wanted to earn back their investment. The committee argued, however, that it was not a practical matter of supply and demand, but of decency and reverence: there should be no fairground in a graveyard. The committee led by Sam de Wolff presented itself as acting on behalf of all Dutch citizens, not only the Jewish population. De Wolff’s approach was thereby in keeping with the dominant commemorative culture of equality and national unity. He had the building valued in order to estimate the cost of purchasing the Schouwburg. This was followed in December by an official appeal in the Dutch press: ‘The Hollandsche Schouwburg – a site of torture for tens of thousands of Jews, the final station on their journey to Westerbork, Auschwitz, etc. – should not become a public entertainment venue.’ The committee wanted to purchase the theatre in consultation with the city council and needed 300,000 guilders for this purpose. It was their intention to transform the Schouwburg into a historical centre that would explain the role played by the Jews in Dutch history and into a memorial. The form that this would take remained unclear. Various newspapers published the appeal. Het Parool published an accompanying text that made it clear that ‘the entire people’ should contribute, whilst the Dutch Reformed minister Buskes wrote a personal piece in the social-democratic daily Het Vrije Volk in which he emphasized the national character of the historical centre. The Jews are not the ones who should transform the Hollandsche ­Schouwburg […] into a monument of remembrance. This is a call to the entire people, and we are sure that the modern workers’ movement, not least, will understand its duty. […] Significant sums will be essential, but if the Hollandsche Schouwburg is indeed to become a national memorial, then small amounts will have to be contributed in large numbers.

It was precisely due to this emphasis on the duty of the Dutch people that the attempt to mobilize a broad movement succeeded. In his article, Johan Winkler wrote about the responsibility that ‘we’, the survivors, bore to ‘those, who found themselves in hell here’. The committee was made up of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant heavyweights, such as Chief Rabbi Justus Tal, prominent Jewish leaders such as Dr



165

Sam de Wolff, Amsterdam c. 1950. Collection JHM / Photo J. Vaz Dias.

Elazar Aäron Rodrigues Pereira and Jaap Parsser, the Reformed clergyman and socialist Jan Buskes and the Catholic historian and pastor Willem Nolet. They succeeded in founding an honorary committee that included Prince Bernhard, the husband of Crown Princess Juliana, an important symbol of the Dutch resistance, and leading national and local administrators. An article published by the independent weekly De Groene Amsterdammer praised the composition of these committees for the solidarity that was expressed.

166 

The Jewish press, however, wondered whether Jews should contribute to the campaign. A few months before emigrating to Israel, Ies Spangenthal, a committee member of the Dutch Zionist League, wrote in the union’s paper, De Joodsche Wachter: If there were enough reverence in the Netherlands regarding what happened to the Jews here, then this building would no longer be a place of amusement. And if that reverence does not exist, then people should do what they want. But we Jews should stay out of it, because if we campaign for the theatre to be closed down, we are asking for pity.

To the objection that Jews were Dutch citizens, too, he responded: ‘We are indeed Dutch citizens, too, but when we were persecuted, we were Jews and Jews alone, and as people who used to be persecuted, we also remained Jews alone when the Germans left’ – a comment that expressed direct criticism of the government’s professed principle of equality. In an editorial comment in the NIW, a magazine that had a wider circulation within the Dutch Jewish community than De Joodsche Wachter, Jaap Soetendorp argued that the committee was not asking for pity – because it was impossible to imagine what the Jewish victims had been through – but that it was about a debt of honour that should be paid by non-Jews. From this perspective, he wrote, he was regretful that so many Jewish names were to be found in the committee. More faith could have been shown in the Dutch people’s sense of honour, and, we say with great emphasis to the Jewish committee members and to the donors, greater attention should have been paid to the meaning of the words of the Book of Proverbs: ‘Let another praise you, and not your own mouth.’

Despite these critical voices, in practice, as many Jews as non-Jews wanted to donate money. The records show that various benefit evenings, lectures, plays, and film screenings were held in Amsterdam on behalf of the committee. People living beyond Amsterdam also collected money; for example, an otherwise unknown Mrs Duyf from the municipality of Zaandam, not far from Amsterdam, raised 205 guilders and 13 cents by selling a poem from door to door that she had written herself. A letter to the committee, sent from Dinteloord in the province of North Brabant, contained the names of all the donors, including their religion and profession: twelve Reformed, four Calvinists, and six Catholics, including the mayor, the clergyman, and a few farmers, all of whom had given 10 guilders. There was evidently



167

a wish to show that all people, regardless of their background, wanted to repay this debt of honour. Queen Wilhelmina showed her support during a visit to Amsterdam on 17 January 1947, by pausing in her car for one minute in front of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. On the same day, she donated 500 guilders to the committee. With the help of smaller and larger donations, a sum of 200,000 guilders was eventually raised; remarkable for a time when there were insufficient donations even for the national monument on the central Dam Square in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, it was not enough: the committee needed another 100,000 guilders, a sum that was subsequently donated by an anonymous benefactor. Only after his death was it revealed that this gift had come from the wealthy Bernard van Leer, who had previously played a role in the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, as described in chapter two. The owners of the theatre had not been inactive in the meantime. In December 1946, the manager applied for a licence to sell tobacco and paid the operating licence for the coming year. He sent an angry letter to Winkler in which he wondered why the Hollandsche Schouwburg should have to close, arguing that the Tuschinsky Theatre and the Spiegelschool, where Christians were maltreated, should also be closed. Suggestively, he also asked if this was not the case ‘because Jewish capital is invested there’? He followed his letter with the suggestion that the committee had better abandon its activities now that it had failed to raise enough funds. ‘If the people are not interested in this, you should stop compelling the people; it is undemocratic and reeks of dictatorship.’ The business, however, was playing a losing hand. In February 1947 the city council refused to grant a performance licence. According to the city council, virtually all of the newspapers had declared themselves against the use of the theatre, and the committee’s work enjoyed broad support. The committee had assembled 300,000 guilders, the sum at which the theatre had been valued. Owing to the bad relations, though, the negotiations were difficult, and only in November 1947 were the parties able to agree on a sale. It would subsequently be another two years before the transfer was complete, mainly due to the conflict between the Linthorst brothers and the legatees of the prewar owner, Louis de Vries, who claimed restitution on the grounds of asserted ownership rights. Once this final hurdle had been cleared, there was no longer anything to prevent the building from being transferred to the city as a gift.

168 

A Fitting Purpose The campaign to purchase the building and thereby avoid its being put to an unworthy use had succeeded, partly because it was in keeping with the dominant discourse of remembrance. The question of what this ‘fitting purpose’ should be was much harder to answer. On 9 March 1950, the city officially accepted the gift of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Among the conditions of this gift were the provisions that no entertainment should take place in the old theatre and that the Hollandsche Schouwburg Foundation should establish a chapelle ardente with an eternal flame. There were no specifications, however, relating to the use of the rest of the large building. The fact that the Schouwburg did not have a clear purpose appeared a minor issue at the time, but it was precisely this that led in the following years to an acrimonious conflict. It would be another twelve years before the doors of the first national memorial in remembrance of the Jewish victims would open. The most important reason why the decision-making process was so slow was that the city did not want to offend the Jewish community and, for a long time, no single plan could count on broad support. Once the gift had been accepted, the committee led by De Wolff – which would make recommendations on a suitable purpose – and the city council spent a long time waiting for each other before taking action. In the meantime, the municipal buildings department took temporary measures to prevent the theatre from collapsing, but it could not prevent the deterioration of the building. In 1952, various newspapers published reports on the bad condition of the building, partly caused by vandals, who had stolen everything of value and destroyed all that was left. The city council was forced to remove the old statues that had stood on the façade since the nineteenth century, to prevent the theatre from falling in. One year later, the buildings department carried out an investigation to ascertain the structural state of the individual buildings. Shortly afterwards, progress finally appeared to be made. As the advisory committee led by Sam de Wolff included a few prominent representatives from the Jewish community, the city council hoped that it would make collective recommendations that could count on widespread support within the Jewish community. This was a vain hope, however: various institutions disputed the representative character of the committee, because its members were there in a private capacity, not on behalf of a Jewish organization. In addition, various Jewish leaders argued for demolition of the theatre on the grounds that many Jews would never, in their view, enter the building. Demolition,



169

The statues on top of the theatre roof were removed in 1952 because they were in danger of falling. Collection NFM / Photo Dolf Kruger.

however, was not an option for Sam de Wolff, for whom the Schouwburg was not only a memorial to Jewish suffering, but also a symbol of Jewish recovery. One year later, no decision had yet been taken. The idea of using the Hollandsche Schouwburg as a church – a suggestion made by the city council

170 

– was dismissed with outrage. A plan to house the famous Jewish Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana there failed to gain the support of the academic community, which was unwilling to separate the library from the university collection of which it formed a part, on the grounds that this would hamper research. On 29 June 1953, the advisory committee met once again and Sam de Wolff complained that the city council had taken too little action. There was, however, a new initiative that had been set in motion outside the committee, and one that could initially count on much support: the establishment of an Israel centre. Months before this meeting, the Israeli ambassador, Dr Michael Amir, together with the Jewish alderman J.J. van de Velde and the Jewish businessman Bram van Santen, had come up with the idea of founding a Beth Israel, or House of Israel, where the focus would be not only on the past, but also on the future of Judaism. It would be used to host cultural events and to promote the economic and cultural successes of the newly founded Jewish State. The aim was to disseminate a positive image of Israel and to forge contacts between Israeli and Dutch businesses. For Amir, it was obvious that this former site of deportation should be used to promote Israel: the country’s success was living proof that the Jews had survived the persecution, and this building would thus be a particularly suitable site for such a centre. The mayor of Amsterdam supported this plan and offered to refurbish and transfer the building, as he thought that Amir could count on sufficient support from the Dutch-Jewish community. In turn, Amir went to seek support in Israel, whereby various ministries and captains of industry became associated with his campaign. The plan was developed in more detail: as the building was so large, the centre should play an important role within Western Europe. In the meantime, however, the Israeli embassy and the city council had left the Dutch-Jewish community, in all its variety, out of the discussions altogether. For Amir, there was nothing unusual about this: Israel represented Jews and the victims of the persecution worldwide, thus also in the Netherlands. In his view, the diaspora community was doomed to disappear and to be swallowed up by the State of Israel. Only once the plan was complete was it presented to De Wolff’s advisory committee, which, after two meetings, subsequently gave its unanimous approval. The committee made a positive recommendation to the city council, but, even before a vote was held, the Jewish community in Amsterdam was rocked by a revelation. Two days before the crucial council meeting, Het Vrije Volk published a detailed article reporting that many Jewish institutions and prominent figures did not support the plan for an Israel centre. It now proved that both the Dutch Zionist Union and the



171

orthodox Jewish Community of Amsterdam (also referred to by its Dutch acronym, NIHS), the largest Jewish community in the Netherlands, did not support the plan. The Jewish papers, the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad and the Zionist Joodse Wachter, were also critical. Amir, in turn, refused to take the criticisms seriously, arguing that only 20 per cent of the Jewish community opposed the plan. The problem was more fundamental than he could have realized, however: he had neglected to seek the support of the Dutch Jewish community – for he, as the representative of Israel, did not see the need to do so – and the community in all its variety consequently felt roundly snubbed. In addition, there was a fear that the newly founded state, which regularly received money from the Netherlands, would be unable to bear the f inancial burden, meaning that the Dutch-Jewish community would ultimately have to foot the bill themselves. The plan,

The interior of the Hollandsche Schouwburg was in a bad state, 1958. Collection Maria Austria Instituut (MAI) / Photo Henk Jonker.

172 

which had seemed so promising, was brought to a standstill by all the criticism. Although the city council voted for the plan, it would not go ahead.

A National Memorial After the plans for the Israel centre were withdrawn, the committee was left empty-handed. If anything had been shown by the affair, it was that the advisory committee could not speak on behalf of the entire Jewish community. In the years that followed, the decision-making process largely ground to a halt. A municipal commission considered the future of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Ashkenazy synagogue complex on Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, provoking a mixed response. Whereas the former religious centre of Amsterdam’s Jewry could be considered an important Jewish heritage, the Hollandsche Schouwburg was not a Jewish place. The suggestion was made that every cent that was put into the Schouwburg was one that would not go to the restoration of the synagogue. The council failed to take a decision and little interest was shown in the former theatre, which had already lain vacant for some years and was falling into ever-greater disrepair. Only in 1958 would the debate flare up again, when the president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, was in the Netherlands for a state visit and emphatically put the Hollandsche Schouwburg on the visit agenda. In great haste, the façade was painted white, as though the building’s rotten state could be hidden behind a lick of paint. After he laid a wreath at the National Monument on Dam Square in the early morning of 16 July, he then visited the Jewish Historical Museum in the old weigh house, De Waag, and, around midday, to much interest, he held a short speech on the pavement in front of the closed doors of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The president recalled the Jewish victims of the war, after which Chief Rabbi Schuster recited the Yizkor, the memorial prayer for the survivors. Upon leaving, Ben-Zvi spoke the following words: Few Jews in the Netherlands survived the cruelties and the reign of terror of the Nazi occupation. This period has left deep scars in the lives and thoughts of these Jews, but I have fortunately been able to observe that they once more have faith in life and in the future.

A few months after this visit, a decision was finally taken: the Hollandsche Schouwburg would be made into a memorial in remembrance of the Jewish



173

The Israeli President Yitshak Ben-Zvi visits the Hollandsche Schouwburg; a commemoration is held before a closed theatre, 1958. Collection Spaarnestad / ANP / Nationaal Archief (NA).

victims, centred on the front part of the building, where a chapelle ardente would be created. The rest of the building was in such a bad state that it would have to be demolished. The architect Jan Leupen, head of the Amsterdam department for the building of public works, had drafted an outline plan in 1957, but was only given permission to develop and implement it after Ben-Zvi’s visit. The work began in 1960. In the years that followed, there was increasing interest in the Western world, including the Netherlands, in the persecution of the Jews. One important catalyst was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, held in 1961 and broadcast

174 

Partial demolition of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, 19 June 1960. Collection Spaarnestad / Anefo / Nationaal Archief (NA) / Photo J. van Bilsen.

on television in various countries. In this trial, there was a focus on the victims of the Holocaust for the first time. In the same year, the Yad Vashem remembrance centre was opened in Jerusalem, and, a year later, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris. The building of the memorial in Amsterdam was thus, by no means, an isolated event. The façade of the theatre, which dated from 1892, was preserved. Following Leupen’s plan, the visitor entered the building into a central hall. To the left was a chapelle ardente, designed by the Jewish architect Léon Waterman. The latter was advised by Rabbi Jaap Soetendorp, who had addressed the issue of the Hollandsche Schouwburg a number of times as a journalist in the 1940s. The chapelle ardente was relatively small. At its centre were three tombstones – for a man, woman, and child – to symbolize the victims, and a bronze wall lamp with an eternal flame. On the wall was a psalm, written in Hebrew and Dutch: ‘My soul is weary with sorrow; strengthen me according to Your word’ (psalm 119: 28). There was a strip of earth in which were planted a few succulents; both earth and plants were from Israel. Beyond the front part of the building, where the auditorium had been, was the memorial site. Its layout was based on the original layout of the auditorium. In the middle of the site, where audiences had once sat



175

Architect Jan Leupen replaced the central entrance doors with open fencing, c. 1962. Collection SAA / Photo Dienst Publieke Werken.

and where the Jews had awaited deportation during the war, was a stretch of grass on which visitors were not allowed to walk, but which they had to walk around. In this way, they came to the former stage, where there was now a large memorial obelisk, resting on a base in the form of a Star of David. The idea behind this route was that the visitors would not be able to stand in the place of the victims, but that they would be able to remember them. Beyond the monument was a low grey wall, with the following text in Dutch and Hebrew: ‘In remembrance of those who were deported from here, 1940-1945.’ The old stage walls rose up in decrepit style, and it was Leupen’s intention that ivy should grow on them. Six poplars were planted behind the wall, which would grow quickly and add natural greenery to the site. The memorial was officially opened on 4 May 1962, the National Day of Remembrance of the Dead. Dozens of dignitaries, the Israeli consul general, spiritual leaders from the Jewish and Christian world, and former members of the resistance gathered in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Outside, hundreds of people waited for the barriers to be opened in front of the first important, national monument in memory of the Jewish victims. At midday, Mayor Gijs van Hall made a short speech about the horrors that had occurred there: ‘In the war, Amsterdam lost a part of its population that had brought glory and colour to the city.’ He expressed his hope that, despite the murder of tens of

176 

Construction work at the memorial, c. 1960-1961. An obelisk is placed on a base in the form of a Star of David. Jan Leupen maintained the original passages between the theatre hall and the stage. Collection Spaarnestad / NA.

The memorial in 1962. The modernist architecture of the galleries contrasts with the crumbling theatre walls. Collection SAA / Photo Dienst Publieke Werken.



177

Amsterdam Mayor Van Hall lights the eternal flame during the opening of the memorial, 4 May 1962. Collection NFM / Photo Boris Kowadlo.

thousands of Jews, his city would continue to bear the Jewish name of endearment ‘Mokum’ with honour: ‘For us, it was an intolerable thought that the occupiers distinguished between Jewish and other citizens of Amsterdam.’ Chief Rabbi Aron Schuster recited Psalm 23 in Hebrew and Dutch, followed by a silent procession to the chapelle ardente, where Van Hall lit the eternal

178 

flame. The barriers were subsequently raised and the waiting crowd passed through the monument’s entrance to lay flowers in memory of the Jewish victims who had gone to their deaths via the Hollandsche Schouwburg. This short, solemn ceremony brought a definitive end to a long period of delay and disunity, both within the City of Amsterdam and within the Jewish community, regarding the question of what should be done with the building. For some years, the Schouwburg had been an open wound in a city that had failed to create a fitting public memorial to the persecution of the Jews. This did not mean that it had not been used in the meantime: as the vacant building fell into a ruin in the 1950s, on every Remembrance Day, a small group of Jewish citizens of Amsterdam laid flowers in front of the closed doors. Nonetheless, at that time, it was far from obvious that the Jewish community as a whole would embrace the Schouwburg as a communal site of memory. Various leading members of the Netherlands-Israelite Religious Community (NIK), the umbrella organization of the Jewish communities, were still arguing in the 1950s for the demolition of the building, because it was too painful a site for a fitting memorial. All of the important Jewish organizations were represented at the opening in 1962, however, including the NIK. It seems that there was no desire to ignore the memorial actively. In the years that followed, the Schouwburg quickly developed into a ceremonial stage for official events, although this process of acceptance did not occur without resistance. Although the site immediately attracted many individual visitors in its first year, many had their reservations and there was also criticism. A petition was established in protest at the plaque on the façade, for instance, which described the victims in quasi-nationalist terms as ‘Jewish compatriots who fell in 1940-1945’. In response to this, the term ‘fell’ was replaced by Jewish compatriots who were ‘deported and never returned’, which one columnist described as miserly. The incident revealed that part of the Jewish community was slowly actively appropriating the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Another decisive step in this process of appropriation was taken in 1966 with the introduction of Yom Hashoah, originally an Israeli commemoration, which developed a very Dutch character of its own.

Yom Hashoah: a Dutch-Jewish Commemoration As mentioned above, from as early as 1948, short ceremonies of remembrance were held in front of the closed doors of the Hollandsche Schouwburg: initially during the ritual silent procession towards Dam Square, and later by a small group that gathered each year by the Schouwburg during the two-minute



179

silence at 8 p.m. on national Commemoration Day. At that time, the dominant culture of remembrance was focused on national, collective remembrance, leaving no space for specific groups of victims; by reflecting on the National Commemoration Day, it was still possible to remember the Jewish victims in particular. The meetings had a provisional character, however, and, in 1960, when major internal renovations were already underway, the building’s façade was in such a poor state that the municipal buildings inspectorate had to intervene with urgent repairs to ensure that the commemoration could be held. This changed when the memorial was opened in 1962. From then onwards, it was no longer necessary to hold the ceremony on the pavement, and, on 4 May, a residents’ association would organize the commemoration. According to Chief Rabbi Schuster, the Schouwburg remained an emotionally charged place for many Jews. Although he attended the inauguration, he stuck to the old view that it was impossible for the Schouwburg to be a memorial for all of Amsterdam’s Jews. At the time of the inauguration, he expressed this in an interview: some say: it is so full of dreadful memories that I never want to set foot in there, the place where all our family members spent their final hours in Holland. Others think: oh well, it is alright. We have our cemeteries with monuments, to which we can retreat in silence.

This statement expressed a pragmatic approach that stood out sharply from the heated debates of the 1950s. Now that the memorial had been created, people were loath to turn away. Four years later, the first Yom Hashoah commemoration was held at the Schouwburg. Both the NIK and the Dutch Zionist League (NZB) were closely involved with the ceremony, which has been held every year since, without interruption, in the inner courtyard of the memorial. Although Yom Hashoah originated in Israel, strictly speaking, the ceremony developed in the Hollandsche Schouwburg in keeping with typically Dutch traditions. Initially, the ceremony built on the meetings to commemorate the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, which had been held in Amsterdam since 1946. These commemorations had been associated with a long series of conflicts around the appropriation of the uprising by Eastern-European Jewish organizations, which had made it impossible to create a suitable joint commemoration for the whole Jewish community. The organizers gave the meetings an exclusively Eastern-European cachet by focusing the attention entirely on the ghetto and by holding the ceremony in Yiddish, which only a small part of the Jewish community in the Netherlands could

180 

Youths light the candles of a small copy of the famous Yad Vashem candelabrum during the combined commemoration of Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, 1966. Collection JHM / Photographer Mark Ejlenberg.

understand. Nor was the Jewish religious calendar taken into account when choosing (fairly logically) 19 April as the day of remembrance, even when this coincided with Passover or fell on the Sabbath, and religious Jews were thus unable to take part. Only in 1962 did the NIK and the NZB, in an attempt to hold a ‘truly communal’ ceremony of remembrance, take part in the organization of the commemoration of the ghetto uprising for the first time. The organizations were also able to cooperate the following year. The report in the NIW revealed a certain degree of amazement at the positive outcome: ‘All of the Jewish organizations were – wonder of wonders – prepared to cooperate for the evening and sent their representatives.’ The ambassador praised Jewish solidarity with the foundation of the State of Israel and suggested: ‘Perhaps from this evening onwards, cohesion will also be possible in the Netherlands.’ Despite this, the original organizers continued to put their



181

In 1975, Yom Hashoah and the National Commemoration Day coincided. Collection JHM.

stamp on the anniversary in the following years by speaking Yiddish and presenting Poland as the centre of Judaism. In order to put this behind them, at the suggestion of the NIK and the NZB, nine Jewish, mainly Zionist, but also orthodox youth associations, held the f irst joint Yom Hashoah commemoration at the Hollandsche ­Schouwburg in 1966. Primacy was no longer enjoyed by the EasternEuropean associations, but by the youth associations, although this did not mean that only young people were present. The structure and content were closely in keeping with previous years’ ceremonies to remember the ghetto uprising; for example, in addition to the lighting of six candles or torches, the Yizkor was recited, the Chant des Partisans and the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah were sung, and speeches were given by leaders, including Chief Rabbi Aron Schuster and the writer and Zionist Abel Herzberg, who had previously spoken at commemorations of the ghetto uprising, as well as the Israeli ambassador. The Yiddish songs, however, disappeared from the programme, as did the addresses by the chairs of the Eastern-European associations. Until 1980, the ceremony of remembrance in the Hollandsche Schouwburg was officially a combination of Yom Hashoah, the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, and Yom Hazikaron, in memory of the

182 

Israeli soldiers who had died in the various wars and the civilian victims of terrorist attacks. From the start, however, more attention was paid to the victims of the Holocaust, and Israel largely played a symbolic role in the commemorative addresses. These were discussed at length in the Jewish press and frequently provoked angry responses. When Chief Rabbi Schuster suggested that the six million dead had fallen ‘to sanctify the name of God’, a reader of the NIW stated in an open letter that, according to this logic, Hitler had been an ‘instrument of God’, a remark that he could not stomach. Over the years, increasing numbers of Jewish organizations would become involved in the commemorations. In 1978, Yizkor was recited for the first time by a cantor from the liberal tradition, whereupon various orthodox rabbis refused to say Kaddish. Afterwards, Chief Rabbi Just defended his refusal by making an appeal to the many victims who had remained devout even in the extermination camps: ‘Many of those who were murdered would not want a man such as Gorin, who is married to a non-Jew and who lives as he does, to say Yizkor for them.’ If this were done by a devout Jew, however, no one would take offence, Just claimed, so ‘why force us into taking such a position?’ A week later, the NIW published no fewer than seven letters that it had received on the issue. The Liberal Jewish Community also sent a statement: We consider it repugnant, at a commemoration of our six million dead and in the face of the living ‘victims of the persecution’ in our midst, to make statements that bear witness to discrimination between one type of murder relative to another. Our murderers did not discriminate in this way!

Despite these internal conflicts, great importance was attached to the communal, Dutch character of the commemoration. When, in 1989, there was a request from Israel that the names of the victims also be recited during the ceremony, an initiative that had emerged a year earlier in the United States and that had been adopted for the first time in Israel and fourteen other countries in 1989, no action was taken. The request had come from Irgoen Olei Holland, the organization for Dutch expats in Israel, inspired by protest at the release of the last two remaining German war criminals from prison in the Netherlands in the same year. The NIK’s secretary, Joop Sanders, wrote regarding the refusal: We understand from the letter that there is a desire in Israel that the names be read out. […] In the Netherlands, we have a ceremony of remembrance in the Hollandsche Schouwburg. It is a good and valuable ceremony, and I personally consider it wrong to select a number of names

183



and read them out. In my personal view, this is not a meaningful form of remembrance. Our commemoration is much more fitting.

The chair of the NZB, Jitschak Moëd, agreed: ‘We have a fixed programme for Yom Hashoah and we do not wish to change it. […] After extensive discussions within the committee, we have decided not to do so for fear of the emotional impact.’ The Dutch tradition took precedence over the Israeli request. Even when, two years later, the recitation of names in many countries had become a permanent custom, there continued to be a categorical rejection of the ritual in the Netherlands. The argument was that reciting all of the names would be unclear, and that making a selection would not be a good alternative. The director of the Tarboet Foundation, Mrs Noga Avrahami, defended the refusal on the grounds that the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands was more sensitive than in Israel: There are still family members alive of those who perished. In Israel, the names are read out by those who do not have any family members who perished. There, it is a symbolic ceremony.

This was followed by two incensed letters from Israel, one of which ended with the following: For us, it all shows a lack of courage. Evidently, there is a desire to avoid rocking the boat, a desire to avoid awakening a dormant anti-Semitism – a shtetl mentality from which we in Israel have since freed ourselves.

It was all to no avail: the Dutch organizers refused to start reciting the names of the victims. Just as with the controversy surrounding the Israel centre in 1965, the Jewish community in the Netherlands refused to be lectured to by Israel when it came to commemorating the persecution of the Jews.

The Memorial Museum Shortly after the war, the memory of the suffering was still so recent that spontaneous commemorations were held on the pavement in front of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The year 1962 saw the opening of the memorial, which mainly used an abstract idiom. The limited texts that did provide context were indirect and referred only in very general terms to what had happened there. With the arrival of a new generation in the 1990s, this

184 

was no longer adequate. In keeping with international developments, the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and fundamental renovations at Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin in the early 1990s, an educational exhibition was created with the aim of informing young Dutch people about the history of the persecution of the Jews. New generations had to learn from the past in order to prevent history from being repeated. Whereas, in the 1950s, a handful of people had stood before the closed doors of the theatre, and, from the 1960s, dozens to hundreds of people – most of them Jews – had attended the commemorations, in the 1990s, the Hollandsche Schouwburg developed into an ‘educational monument’ run by the Jewish Historical Museum. The story of the persecuted Jews would be told to a wide and growing audience, in an in situ memorial museum. In the years after the opening in 1962, the Hollandsche Schouwburg mainly drew individual visitors. The Anne Frank House had been opened to the public two years earlier and would become enormously popular, particularly with Americans. In ten years’ time, the worldwide fame of Anne Frank and her diary drove up the number of visitors from 9,000 in 1960 to 180,000 in 1970, 10 per cent of whom were Dutch and more than half of whom were American. The Hollandsche Schouwburg – open to visitors during the day and run by the council’s public cemeteries and crematoria department – was less well-known to a wider audience. Despite this, from the very beginning there was much interest from the Netherlands and abroad: in the first year, there were more than 50,000 visitors. Five months after the opening, the doorman G. Nijmeijer explained that these included many visitors from Israel: ‘Other tourists as well, of course, but then mostly Jews. And older people from Amsterdam, mostly on Saturdays and Sundays.’ One of the American visitors explained: ‘I’m travelling through Europe and am visiting all of the war monuments that I come across. This is not the most beautiful, but it is certainly the most imposing.’ As not everyone understood that it was a public monument, the doorman often beckoned to people to come inside. Then you see them looking around somewhat fearfully in the chapelle ardente and then, under the balconies and the flapping laundry of the surrounding homes, they make a round of the old walls of the Schouwburg.

Aside from a few texts on the wall, no information about the history of the building was available, which sometimes led to confusion among tourists who had come there by chance. Nijmeijer:



185

[they] only understand that it is a half-demolished theatre that has a strangely sacred atmosphere. They try in vain to find the name of the monument on their maps and in their guidebooks.

In order to meet the visitors’ needs, a folder of photographs was produced with a short accompanying text in five languages: Dutch, Hebrew, French, German, and English. This was not done without some hesitation. The folder was intentionally not sold on a stand, but via a vending machine for less than the production price. The Schouwburg thus had little to offer visitors who were unfamiliar with the history of the persecution of the Jews. This would change only when the Jewish Historical Museum took over the administration of the monument in the 1990s, and added a number of important elements: a modest exhibition, a supplementary educational programme, and a wall monument listing the 6,700 surnames of the Jewish victims from the Netherlands. One of the initiators of the expansion of the museum was Norbert van den Berg, previously the interim director of the Amsterdam Historical Museum: I felt that there was a need for some explanation. People who had not gone through the war found the existing monument hard to understand. […] Perhaps the grief after the war was too great, people were unable to tell the story. Now, fifty years on, you have to provide some explanation in that place. That place has an emotional significance.

In Van den Berg’s view, the solemn site was too abstract for a new generation that was unfamiliar with the history of the persecution of the Jews. The educational exhibition, which existed up till 2018, tells the chronological story of the different phases of the persecution of the Jews with reference to objects, photographs, and facsimiles of documents. As it was aimed at teenagers, the exhibition included little text on the grounds that children are visually oriented. According to museum personnel, the objects had to speak for themselves. The narrative began in the stairwell, where blackand-white photographs of Jewish life before, during, and after the war were intended to emphasize the continuity of the Jewish community. The exhibition gallery was split into two: a ‘dark’ section on the increasing isolation and eventual murder of more than 100,000 Dutch Jews, and a ‘light’ section on the hiding and rescue of children. The two sections were divided by a wall, over which a cardboard cutout of a woman lifted a small child. According to the project leader and former museum director Judith

186 

Semi-permanent educational exhibition Jodenvervolging 1940-1945 (Persecution of the Jews 1940-1945) at the Hollandsche ­Schouwburg, 1993. Collection JHM / Photo Jeroen Nooter.

Belinfante, visitors had to ask themselves whether they would have taken the baby. The emphasis was thereby laid on the visitors’ own responsibility. Although the exhibition thus provided much more information about the persecution of the Jews, the visitor was only indirectly confronted by the extreme suffering of the victims. The Jewish Historical Museum, which had been reopened in 1955, had always been extremely reticent about openly showing horrors, in an attempt to take the first- and second-generation survivors into consideration. This was also true of the educational exhibition at the Hollandsche Schouwburg: the ultimate consequence of the persecution, the murder of millions of Jews, was presented by means of a map of Europe showing the deportation routes and the locations of extermination camps. Moreover, this was not the end point of the exhibition: after this map,

187



the visitor crossed over to the section on the hiding and rescue of Jewish children. The visit thereby ended with a message of hope for the future. The narrative of the exhibition was interwoven with the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg itself. In the place where the registration of the Jews of Amsterdam was addressed, the visitor looked out of a large window onto the former auditorium, although it was not explained what exactly had happened there. Furthermore, the part on the rescue of children looked out on the place where the former nursery had stood and from which hundreds of children had been smuggled. In this perhaps overly subtle way, the exhibition made use of the history of the site itself. What was missing, however, was an explanation of the actual events that had occurred in the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the nursery opposite. During the building of the exhibition, the chapelle ardente on the ground floor was replaced by a wall monument showing the 6,700 surnames of all the Jewish victims who had been deported from the Netherlands and murdered. On the wall was written the following poem: these are the surnames of/fathers and mothers/aunts and uncles/little brothers and little sisters/male and female cousins/grandfathers and

Memorial space with wall of names, May 4 2009. Collection JHM / Photo Ruud van Zwet.

188 

grandmothers/104,000 people/104,000 Jews/many from Amsterdam/ deported from the Netherlands/and senselessly/murdered

This space, too, was a compromise between abstraction and concreteness, whereby some surnames might stand for a few thousand individual victims and others for just one. Nevertheless, to this day, it continues to be a meaningful space for many visitors, to judge from the many personal objects that are left there, such as a stone, a card, or flowers, or the number of visitors who touch and photograph the wall and search for particular names.

Local History and Personal Stories The development of the memorial museum has continued since it was opened in 1993. Each year, tens of thousands of visitors, mainly schoolchildren, come to the museum to learn about the persecution of the Jews. Over the years, various educational programmes have been developed in which survivors often play a central role. They come to tell their stories or exchange letters with the pupils, who ask questions about the war period. Once a year, young people organize a children’s ceremony of remembrance that they are able to design themselves. Yom Hashoah and 4 May are heavily attended each year, whereby the building frequently holds its maximum number of visitors. Despite this, the 1993 exhibition does not meet all the needs of the general public. The exhibition, in particular, is in need of modernization: too little historical context is provided, and, in particular, local history and personal stories from the Hollandsche Schouwburg are lacking. In order to fill this gap, the museum voiced, in 2002, its ambition to renovate the site. At first, the staff sought to make relatively small interventions to create greater clarity and more interactivity. A plan was subsequently drawn up to found a new National Holocaust Museum. The paradoxical character of an in situ memorial museum lies in the balance between conservation and intervention. We instinctively do not want to see any museum-type additions to places such as Auschwitz or the Anne Frank Museum, but instead want to experience these places as they were in order to come closer to the past. It is an illusion, however, to think that this is possible to do so without any intervention. Visitors need to be told about what exactly they are seeing, because the past itself is no longer visible. This can be done using the traces that have been left behind. Whereas, in the 1950s, part of the Jewish community in Amsterdam argued



189

for the demolition of the Schouwburg at the same time as the demolition of the Anne Frank House was on the agenda, nowadays people are aware of the importance of this painful heritage. One consequence of this awareness is that architects and curators intervene in authentic situations only with great reservation. Wholly in this spirit, the stretch of grass in the inner courtyard of the Hollandsche Schouwburg was replaced with pavestones in 1993. In this way, many more people were able to take part in the commemorations, whilst the memorial remained recognizable for older visitors. Although this intervention was relatively small, the original script of the space – one walks around the stretch of grass that represents the victims – was nevertheless disrupted. Small benches were added, so that visitors could sit in the place where the former victims sat, something that was completely at odds with the previous arrangement. Since 1993, there have been no major constructive interventions, but the exhibition is continuously adapted to the wishes of the visitors. When the space behind the inner courtyard was opened, the memorial museum was expanded outdoors in order to tell the story of the deportations in a personal way. When you step outdoors, you see the photograph that was taken illegally during the occupation. You stand eye-to-eye with a girl who is smiling at you and waving. She is standing in a sunny and untidy courtyard with other children and adults, including a young boy, who looks at you with a defiant expression. In the middle of the photograph stands a man, drinking from a cup, wearing the white armband of the Jewish council – the only sign indicating that this photo was taken during the war. Only when you read the back of the board do you understand what is going on: the photograph was taken by Lydia, a girl who lived next to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, who, in the summer of 1942, unexpectedly saw her old Jewish school friend, Greetje, in the courtyard of the theatre. To capture the moment, she took a photo while her friend waved at her. A few months later, Greetje would be killed in Auschwitz. The photograph shatters the stereotypical image of an isolated and dark site of deportation. The persecution of the Jews did not only take place in distant places, but began in the heart of Amsterdam and other cities, under the nose of all the residents. In order to make the wall showing the names of the victims interactive, the IkPod was developed: an adapted iPod that can be held against the wall to detect a particular name. The user can then select this surname – often one that covers a number of individual victims – to get more information. The device is linked to an online database containing information about all of the individual victims. This database can also be consulted via the Internet and is expanded on a daily basis by a large online community:

190 

for every victim, there are dates of birth and death, the last known home addresses, and their family situation, often supplemented with personal stories and other documents. The museum is also attempting to go beyond the Hollandsche ­Schouwburg with the Open Jewish Houses project. Around 4 and 5 May, the National Commemoration Day and Liberation Day, meetings are organized throughout the Netherlands in the former houses of the victims of the Holocaust. Unlike, for example, the Stolpersteine [stumbling stones] project, an initiative by the German artist Gunter Demnig, who has installed small brass plaques throughout Europe in front of the former houses of Jewish victims of the Nazi persecution, these houses are transformed only temporarily into sites of memory. The current resident acts as the host, and a guest speaker gives a short lecture. The idea is that the focus should be not only on the death, but also the life of the former residents. Sometimes the ritual is extended with a musical intermezzo; often those present ask questions or come with their own stories about the past. These developments reveal the dynamic character of the landscape of remembrance. A new generation is coming forward; a generation that is more distant from the war, but no less engaged. These young people want to hear concrete, personal stories that are linked to their immediate surroundings. For this reason, the importance of sites of remembrance will only increase in the future: particularly in places such as the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the past is both tangible and concrete.



Sources, Literature, and Quotations

1. Occupation, Persecution, and Destruction: the Netherlands under German Rule, 1940-1945 a. Literature Most important works used for this chapter: Griffioen, Pim, & Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en België 1940-1945. Overeenkomsten, verschillen, oorzaken. Amsterdam: Boom, 2011. Jong, Loe de, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog I-XII. The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1969-1988. Moore, Bob, Refugees from Nazi Germany in the Netherlands 1933-1940. Dordrecht, Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1986. Moore, Bob, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945. London: Arnold, 1997. Presser, Jacques, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Souvenir Press, 2010. Romijn, Peter, et al., The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945. New Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Romijn, Peter, ‘De oorlog (1940-1945)’ in: Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland. Amsterdam: Balans, 2017, 360-406. Snyder, Timothy, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. London: Random House, 2015. Vree, Frank van, Hetty Berg, & David Duindam (Eds.), De Hollandsche Schouwburg: theater, deportatieplaats, plek van herinnering. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. b. Source of quotations p. 16 Simon Dekker quoted in: Lucas Ligtenberg, Mij krijgen ze niet levend – De zelfmoorden van mei 1940. Amsterdam: Balans, 2017. p. 18 Seyss Inquart’s speech taken from Algemeen Handelsblad 29 May 1940; local newspapers presented an abridged version. p. 21 Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. p. 24 Rede van den Rijkscommissaris Rijksminister Dr. Seyss-Inquart gehouden op Woensdag 12 Maart 1941 in het Concertgebouw te Amsterdam voor het Arbeitsbereich der N.S.D.A.P. in de Nederlanden. Departement van Volksvoorlichting en Kunsten 1941. See further: http://www.geheugen​ vannederland.nl/.

192 

p. 28 Romijn, Peter, ‘De oorlog’, in: Blom et al., Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland, 380. p. 32 Romijn, ‘De oorlog’, 384. 2. In and Around the Theatre: Jewish Life in Amsterdam in the Prewar Era a. Sources This chapter is mainly based on historical studies, predominantly published in Dutch, as well as research reports by students. Apart from these, some information is derived from the archives of the city of Amsterdam as well as digital collections, such as Delpher, the comprehensive newspaper collection of the National Library of the Netherlands. Many plays of Herman Heijermans have been translated, such as The Ghetto: A Drama in Four Acts (London: Heinemann 1899), which is an adaption by Chester Bailey Fernald and was staged at Broadway, and The Good Hope – A Drama of the Sea. b. Literature Most important works used for this chapter: Bloemgarten, Salvador, Henri Polak. Sociaal democraat 1868-1943. The Hague: SDu, 1993. Blom, Hans, David Wertheim, Hetty Berg, & Bart Wallet (Eds.), Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland. Amsterdam: Balans, 2017. Gans, Evelien, De kleine verschillen die het leven uitmaken. Een historische studie naar joodse sociaal-democraten en socialistisch-zionisten in Ne­ derland. Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1999. Goedkoop, Hans, Geluk. Het leven van Herman Heijermans. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1996. Groeneboer, Joost & Hetty Berg (Eds.), … Dat is de kleine man…. 100 jaar joden in het Amsterdamse amusement, 1840-1940. Zwolle: Waanders, 1995. Leydesdorff, Selma, We Lived With Dignity, The Jewish Proletariat of Amsterdam 1900-1940. Wayne State University Press, 1998. Moore, Bob, Refugees from Nazi Germany in the Netherlands 1933-1940. Dordrecht, Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1986. Vree, Frank van, Hetty Berg, & David Duindam (Eds.), De Hollandsche Schouwburg: theater, deportatieplaats, plek van herinnering. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.



193

c. Source of quotations p. 41 City Archives Amsterdam, ‘Rapport betreffende de telling van het aantal Joden en Christenen in Amsterdam’, 1795, coll. nr. 5053, invnr. 166. – ‘Jerusalem of the West’ – the origin of the qualification is not clear; some sources refer to the early nineteenth century, but the first reference found is by Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (New York 1898, p. 82), in his chapter on Uriel da Costa (Acosta), supposedly using the term c. 1630. p. 43 Hans Blom & Joël Cahen, ‘Joodse Nederlanders, Nederlandse joden en joden in Nederland (1870-1940)’, in: Blom et al., Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland, 276. p. 45 Qualifications ‘members of the Jewish nation’ by S. Wijnberg, De Joden in Amsterdam. Een studie over veranderingen in hun attitudes. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967, 3. p. 46 H. Daalder, ‘Dutch Jews in a segmented society’, Acta Historiae Neerlandicae: Studies on the History of the Netherlands (Ed. I. Schöffer) Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1978, 186. – ‘Jewish religious community’ – Blom & Cahen, ‘Joodse Nederlanders’, in: Blom, Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland, 303. p. 47 Jaap Meijer, ‘Moeder in Israël’. Een geschiedenis van het Amsterdamse Asjkenazische Jodendom. Haarlem: Bakenes, 1964, 105. p. 53 Algemeen Handelsblad 23 November 1916. – Jacob Israël de Haan, ‘Een joodsche tentoonstelling’, in: Het joodsche lied. Tweede boek. Amsterdam: Maatschappij voor goede en goedkoope lectuur, 1921, 123-132. p. 57 Quotes from De Maasbode 10 May 1933 and De Tijd 26 May 1933. p. 60 Evelien Gans, De kleine verschillen, 872-873. p. 61 Nieuw Israeliëtisch Weekblad 11 June 1875. p. 63 De Telegraaf 21 November 1924. p. 64-66 Philo Bregstein (director), Op zoek naar Joods Amsterdam, documentary 1975. Also published as book, Meulenhof: Amsterdam, 1981. p. 68 De Grondwet 31 March 1933. 3. In the Shadow of Nazism: Theatre and Culture on the Eve of Deportation a. Sources This article is based on existing literature as well as original archival research, particularly in the collections of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (NIOD), Jewish Historical Museum (JHM), Municipal Archives of Amsterdam (SAA), the National Archives (NA), National Agency

194 

for Documentation on Art History (RKD), Netherlands Red Cross Archives (NRK), and the Collection Theatre Institute of the Netherlands (TIN, part of the Special Collections University of Amsterdam). b. Literature Most important works used for this chapter: Davids, Henriëtte, Mijn Levenslied. Gouda: Johan Mulder’s UitgeversMaatschappij, 1948. Dutlinger, Anne D. (Ed.), Art, Music and Education at Strategies of Survival: Theresienstadt, 1941-45. New York: Herodias, 2001. Geisel, Eike, ‘Da capo in Holland’, in Geschlossene Vorstellung. Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933-1941. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1992. Gelder, Henk van & Jacques Klöters, Door de nacht klinkt een lied. Amusement in Nederland 1940-1945. Amsterdam: Reed, 1985. Grohs-Martin, Silvie. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2000. Klöters, Jacques, ‘Amusement in de dagen van Olim’ in …Dat is de kleine man…. 100 jaar joden in het Amsterdamse amusement, 1840-1940. Zwolle: Waanders, 1995, 97-106. Micheels, Pauline, De Vatenman. Bernard van Leer (1883-1958). Amsterdam: Contact, 2002. Perschel, Lisa, (Ed.), Performing captivity, Performing escape. Cabarets and plays from the terezin/ Theresienstadt ghetto. London: Seagull Books, 2014. Presser, Jacques, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. London: Souvenir Press, 2010. Raad, Marianne de, De Hollandsche Schouwburg in oorlogstijd. Nota Bwerkgroep Kunst en Bezetting, januari 1995 Vakgroep Theaterwetenschap. Not published, coll. TIN. Regenhardt, W. Het gemaskerde leven van Eduard Veterman. Amsterdam: Balans, 1990. Rovit, Rebecca, The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin. Iowa: Barnes & Noble, 2012. Rovit, Rebecca & Alvin Goldfarb (Eds.), Theatrical Performances during the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Zaich, Katja B., ‘Ich bitte dringend um ein Happyend’: Deutsche Bühnenkünstler im niederländischen Exil 1933-1945. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001. c. Source of quotations p. 71 Henriëtte Davids, Mijn Levenslied, 111. p. 75 Menno ter Braak, Het Vaderland 20 June 1938.



195

p. 76 Algemeen Handelsblad 24 December 1938. – Het Volksdagblad 6 March 1939. p. 78 Both citations Davids, Mijn Levenslied, 99-102. p. 83 Franz Molnar’s ‘Spiel im Schloss’, Het Joodsche Weekblad 27 June 1941. p. 86 Rebecca Rovit, The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin, 187. p. 87 According to Alice Levie (1988), reflecting upon Levie’s visit to the Jewish Council, quoted by Eike Geisel in ‘Da capo in Holland’, 200. p. 88 Ella Schwarzschild, Tagebuch. Niet leszen Als ’t U blieft – Nicht lesen Bitte: onuitwisbare herinneringen (1933-1943). Amstelveen 1999. – Het Joodsche Weekblad 5 September 1941. – Davids, Mijn Levenslied, 105. p. 89 Het Joodsche Weekblad 24 October 1941. p. 91 Silvia Grohs-Martin, Silvie. – Quote Lex van Weren, interviewed in television documentary by Hans Keller, Vast beraden maar soepel en met mate (VPRO 1974). Collection Beeld & Geluid Hilversum. p. 93 Hetty Bloemgarten, ‘Toneelspelen in de Joodsche Schouwburg. De verkeerde deur’, Vrij Nederland 20 November 2013. p. 94 Silvia Grohs-Martin, Silvie, 54-55 p. 94-95 Ines Fellner-Cohn, interviewed by Esther Göbel 10 July 2014, Israel. p. 96 Silvia Grohs-Martin, Silvie, 54-55. – Davids, Mijn Levenslied, 111. – Herbert Nelson. Gestern ist noch nicht vorbei, z.p. 1984 (typescript), 65. p. 97 Shirah Lachmann and Monique Marreveld, ‘Artiesten en publiek warmden zich aan elkaar in Joodsche Schouwburg’, NIW 10 June 1992. p. 98 Max Raber, interview nr. 05870, Visual History Archive, Shoah Foundation Institute – coll. JHM. – Lachmann and Marreveld, ‘Artiesten en publiek’, NIW 10 June 1992. – Abraham van der Linden, interview nr. 06173, Visual History Archive, Shoah Foundation Institute – coll. JHM. – Dick Houwaart, ‘Inleiding’ in: Het Joodsche Weekblad. Uitgave van den Joodschen Raad voor Amsterdam. Onder verantwoordelijkheid van A. Asscher en prof. dr. D. Cohen. Amsterdam: Omniboek, 1979, 35-37. p. 100 Etty Hillesum, Het werk. Amsterdam: Balans, 2012, 470. p. 104 Bloemgarten, ‘Toneelspelen in de Joodsche Schouwburg’, Vrij Nederland 20 November 2013. p. 105-106 Sylvain Poons, Interview TIN 1975, CD nr.2. p. 107 Letter of Werner Levie to Veterman, quoted by Regenhardt, Eduard Veterman, 162. – Het Joodsche Weekblad 17 July 1942.

196 

p. 108 Het Parool 14 July 1942. – Toni Bouman, Een schitterend vergeten leven. De eeuw van Frieda Belinfante. Amsterdam: Balans, 2015, 127. p. 109. Three quotes from Davids, Mijn Levenslied, 125, 127. p. 110 Davids, Mijn Levenslied, 128, 131. 4. Sixteen Months as a Site of Assembly and Deportation a. Sources This chapter is chiefly based on archival collections, oral history sources, articles, and other historical studies, mainly published in Dutch. The archive collections of the Jewish Historical Museum; the NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies; the War Archives of the Dutch Red Cross (NRK) in the Hague; and the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam were used. Within the NIOD collection, the files ‘Joodsche Raad Archief 182’, ‘archief 77’, and ‘deelcollectie Vught 250g’ were important, and two unpublished reports were used: Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Alfons Zündler en de bewaking van het gevangenkamp aan de Plantage Middenlaan 24 te Amsterdam (voortaan: Zündlerrapport), Amsterdam August 1994-January 1995 (NIOD collection doc. I 2390 – 1); and Mark Schellekens & Elma Verhey, De zaak Alfons Zündler. Analyse van getuigenverklaringen en schriftelijke bronnen, August 1994 (NIOD collection Doc 1 2390). At the NRK, the ‘Jewish Council Registration index’ and the collection of transport lists were important. The collection ‘2000 Witnesses’ of the Jewish Historical Museum, which is part of the worldwide USC Shoah Foundations archives, and the DVD collection ‘Scenes beyond imagination’ with testimonies about the Hollandsche Schouwburg were the main sources for oral history. Apart from these collections, some information is derived from Delpher, the comprehensive newspaper collection of the National Library of the Netherlands, and from the following websites: www.joodsmonument.nl and www.andereachterhuizen.nl. b. Literature Most important works used for this chapter: Bakker, Alex, Dag pap, tot morgen. Joodse kinderen gered uit de Crèche. Hilversum: Verloren, 2005. Bolle, Mirjam, Letters Never Sent: Amsterdam, Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2014. Davids, Henriëtte, Mijn levenslied. Gouda: Johan Mulder’s UitgeversMaatschappij, 1948.



197

Flim, Bert Jan, Saving the children: history of the organized effort to rescue Jewish children in the Netherlands, 1942-1945. Bethesda: CDL Press, 2005. Göbel, Esther & Henk Meulenbeld, Betty, een joodse kinderverzorgster in verzet. Amsterdam: Gibbon Publishing Agency, 2016. Griffioen, Pim & Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en België 1940-1945. Overeenkomsten, verschillen, oorzaken. Amsterdam: Boom, 2011. Hond, Sam de, Een ster is een ster. Oorlogsherinneringen van Sam de Hond. Geredigeerd door Mark Schelleken. S.I, s.n., 1995. Houwink ten Cate, Johannes, ‘Macht en Machteloosheid. De bewakers van de Hollandsche Schouwburg en het door hen gepleegde geweld’, in: Met alle Geweld. Botsingen en tegenstellingen in Burgerlijk Nederland. Amsterdam: Balans, 2003. Kar, Jac. van der, Joods Verzet. Terugblik op de periode rond de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Amsterdam: Stadsdrukkerij, 1984. Liempt, Ad van, Hitler’s bounty hunters: the betrayal of the Jews. New York: Berg, 2005. Liempt, Ad van & Jan Kompagnie (Eds.), Jodenjacht. De onthutsende rol van de Nederlandse politie in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Amsterdam: Balans, 2013. Meershoek, Guus, Dienaren van het gezag. De Amsterdamse politie tijdens de bezetting. Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1999. Mendes da Costa, Judith, Zuster Judith Mendes da Costa, Dominicanes van de Congregatie van de H. Catharina van Siënna, te Voorschoten, Amsterdam 1895-1944 Oświęcim (Auschwitz). Voorschoten: 2006. Oberski, Jona, Childhood. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Petter, Debby, Ik ben er nog. Het verhaal van mijn moeder Hélène Egger. Amsterdam: Rap, 2012. Presser, Jacques, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. London: Souvenir Press, 2010. Prins, Marcel & Peter Henk Steenhuis, Andere Achterhuizen. Verhalen van Joodse onderduikers. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2010. Schellekens, Mark, Walter Süskind. Hoe een zakenman honderden Joodse kinderen uit handen van de nazi’s redde. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & van Gennep, 2011. Somers, Erik, Voorzitter van de Joodse Raad. De herinneringen van David Cohen (1941-1943). Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2010. Wielek, H., De oorlog die Hitler won. Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Boek- en Courantmij, 1947. Spier, Jo, Dit alles heeft mijn oog gezien. Herinneringen aan het concentratiekamp Theresienstadt. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1978.

198 

Verkijk, Dick, ‘Bertje was zo’n lief jongetje’: de tragische ondergang van de familie Sanders. Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2007. Willing, Willem, Afdrukken van indrukken. Dagboek en brieven uit Kamp Westerbork, barak 67. Waalwijk, 2004. Zwarte-Walvisch, Klaartje de, Alles ging aan flarden. Het oorlogsdagboek van Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch. Amsterdam: Balans, 2011. c. Source of quotations p. 111 Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw, interview from 1993. Geen voorstelling van te maken. DVD Hollandsche Schouwburg 2005. p. 115 Davids, Mijn levenslied, 125. p. 117 Jacob de Hond, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 03740. p. 122 Debby Petter, Ik ben er nog, 33. p.  123 Jacques Presser, Ondergang. De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlands jodendom 1940-1945. Heruitgave: Soesterberg, 2005, 275. p. 124 Catharina Polak-Soep, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 01091. p. 125 Fiep Benninga-Nopol, interview from 2005. Geen voorstelling van te maken, DVD Hollandsche Schouwburg 2005. – Erik Somers, Voorzitter van de Joodse Raad, 149. p. 125-126 Mirjam Bolle, Ik zal je beschrijven hoe een dag er hier uit ziet. Dagboekbrieven uit Amsterdam, Westerbork en Bergen-Belsen. Amsterdam: Contact, 2003, 73. p. 126 Levie Groenteman, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 27532. – Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch, Alles ging aan flarden, 37-38. p. 127 A. Schuster, ‘Opperrabbijn L.H. Sarlouis’, in: Bijdragen en mededelingen van het genootschap voor de Joodsche wetenschap in Nederland. vol. 8 196, 7-8. – Mendes da Costa, Zuster Judith, 85. – Sonja Schatz-Kopuit, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 07826. p.128 Willing, Afdrukken, 12-17. p. 129 Sonja Schatz-Kopuit, 2000 getuigen. p. 132 Erik Somers, Voorzitter van de Joodsche Raad, 145-147. – JHM 00000088, Joodsche Raad van Amsterdam. Interne informatie 99. 27 January 1943. p. 133 Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch, Alles ging aan flarden, 40. p. 134 Jozef van der Hal, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 49625. p. 137 Joseph Spier, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 14014. p. 138-139 De Hond, Een ster is een ster, 28.



199

p. 139 Interview Gerrie Brosius-Hageboud by Annemiek Gringold, 2011. p. 140 Lydia van Nobelen-Riezouw, interview from 1993. Geen voorstelling van te maken, DVD Hollandsche Schouwburg 2005. p. 141 Prins & Steenhuis, Andere Achterhuizen, 77. p. 142 Göbel & Meulenbeld, Betty, 164. – Janneke te Hoven & Ruud Spruit, Onderduik in West Friesland. Herinneringen van joodse kinderen en hun redders. Midwoud: Uitgeverij Peter Sasburg, 2009, 53. – Joseph Spier, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 14014. p. 144 Cnaan Liphshiz, Nog 80 kinderen, wat moeten we doen?, De Volkskrant 4 May 2012. p. 146 Martijn van Halen en Bernd Wouthuysen (directors) De Stakende Stad, documentary, 2015, “48-49. p. 148 Esther Keijl-Coronel, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 04924. – Verkijk, De tragische ondergang van de familie Sanders, 109. p. 150 Fernschreiben an das Reichssicherheitshauptamt – Referat IV B 4, signed by Zoepf, Den Haag 15 April 1943. NIOD archive 77, inventory 1292; original quotation marks. p. 151 Interview Gerrie Brosius-Hageboud by Annemiek Gringold, 2011. – Julie Sprecher-Kattenburg, 2000 getuigen, VHF collection JHM. Interview 09586. p. 151-153 Heere Heeresma, Een jongen uit Plan Zuid ’38-’43. Volume I, Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers 2005, 120-121. 5. Site of Memory, Site of Mourning a. Sources This chapter is based on historical studies and PhD research. Important studies on the memory culture in the Netherlands are by Frank van Vree, In De Schaduw Van Auschwitz: Herinneringen, Beelden, Geschiedenis. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1995; and by Ido de Haan, Na De Ondergang: De Herinnering Aan De Jodenvervolging in Nederland 1945-1995. Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers 1997. Furthermore, information is derived from the digital newspaper collection Delpher of The National Library of the Netherlands, and the following archives: the Amsterdam City Archives, archive 624 and archive 5225, inv.nr. 4861 and 4862; and the International Institute of Social History, archive Sam de Wolff, inv.nr. 14.

200 

b. Literature Most important works used for this chapter: Aalders, Gerard, Roof: de ontvreemding van joods bezit tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 1999. Barnouw, David, ‘Anne Frank.’ In Een open zenuw. Hoe wij ons de Tweede Wereldoorlog herinneren. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010, 53–62. Blom, Hans, David Wertheim, Hetty Berg, & Bart Wallet (Eds.), Geschiedenis van de joden in Nederland. Amsterdam: Balans, 2017. Croes, Marnix, & Peter Tammes, “Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan”: een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen van joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940 – 1945. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2006. Gans, Evelien. ‘“Vandaag hebben ze niets – maar morgen bezitten ze weer tien gulden”. Antisemitische stereotypen in bevrijd Nederland,’ in: Polderschouw. Terugkeer en opvang na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Regionale verschillen. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002, 313–353. Griffioen, Pim, & Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en België 1940-1945. Overeenkomsten, verschillen, oorzaken. Amsterdam: Boom, 2011. Hondius, Dienke, Terugkeer: antisemitisme in Nederland rond de bevrijding. Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 1990. Lipschits, I, De kleine sjoa: Joden in naoorlogs Nederland. Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt, 2001. Munnick, Boris de, ‘Na de Zogenaamde Bevrijding. De Terugkeer van Joden in de Nederlandse Samenleving,’ in: Mensenheugenis. Terugkeer En Opvang Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Getuigenissen. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2001, 45–69. c. Source of quotations p. 160 De Waarheid 23 August 1945; Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad (NIW) 24 August 1945; and NIW 14 September 1945. p. 161-162 NIW 2 December 1945. p. 162 Quotes from Het Parool 23 December 1946 and Leeuwarder Koerier 22 November 1946. p. 163 Het Parool, 23 September 1946. p. 163-164 Letter by C.F. Helms to Siem van der Linden, 16 September 1946, SAA, archive 624; Het Parool 23  September 1946; and letter by H.A. Linthorst to Johan Winkler, 30 October 1946, SAA, archive 624. p. 164 Official press release 10 December 1946, SAA, archive 624; Het Vrije Volk 14 December 1946. p. 166 De Joodsche Wachter 19 November 1946; NIW 27 December 1946.



201

p. 167 Letter by C.F. Helms to Johan Winkler, 24 December 1946, SAA, archive 624. p. 172 Leeuwarder Courant 17 July 1958. p. 175 De Tijd De Maasbode 5 May 1962; NIW 11 May 1962. p. 177 F. Boode, ‘Hollandsche Schouwburg als algemene herdenkingsplaats’, Ons Amsterdam, jaargang 16, May 1964. p. 179 Haagse Post 12 May 1962. p. 180 NIW 26 April 1963. p. 182 NIW 19 May and 16 June 1978; 29 April and 13 May 1966; Jerusalem Post 2 May 1989. p. 182-183 NIW 28 April 1989. p. 183 NIW 5 and 26 April 1991. p. 184-185 Het Vrije Volk 29 September 1962. p. 185 NIW 12 March 1993.



About the Authors

This publication is for an important part based on De Hollandsche Schouwburg. Theater, Deportatieplaats, Plek van herinnering, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2013. We would like to acknowledge and thank its contributors Evelien Gans, Joost Groeneboer, Coert Peter Krabbe, Joosje Lakmaker, Pauline Micheels, Mark Schellekens, and Bart Wallet. Hetty Berg is Chief Curator and Museum Affairs manager of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam: the Jewish Historical Museum with the Children’s Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue, the Holocaust Memorial Hollandsche Schouwburg, and the National Holocaust Museum. She is responsible for collections, research, permanent and temporary exhibitions, education, and the resource centre. Furthermore, she was the project leader for the renovation of the JHM (2004-2007) and the Portuguese Synagogue (2010-2012). She is a graduate in Performance Studies from the University of Amsterdam; her master’s thesis focused on ‘Yiddish Theatre in Amsterdam in the late 18th – early 19th centuries’, and she participated in the post-academic programme ‘Management in non-profit organisations’ at the University of Utrecht. She has curated a great number of exhibitions, published various articles, and edited books on diverse topics. David Duindam is a memory and heritage scholar at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture and a lecturer at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam. He studied Philosophy, Literary Studies, and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and the Freie Universität Berlin and he was awarded a doctorate on the strength of his dissertation Signs of the Shoah: The Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory (to be published by AUP in 2018). He co-authored and -edited the monograph De Hollandsche Schouwburg: theater, deportatieplaats, plek van herinnering (with eds. Frank van Vree & Hetty Berg, 2013). Currently, he coordinates the European research network ‘Digital Memory of the Shoah’ with prof. Yra van Dijk and he works on the research project ‘Colonial Ruin: ruination and the persistence of European imperialism at sites of memory.’ Esther Göbel studied Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam; she is specialized in the history of the Shoah. As a researcher, curator, and interviewer, she was responsible for the exhibition Playing behind barbed

204 

wire, creativity of children in camps and during hiding and she was involved in the redesign of the Dutch Pavilion in Auschwitz. She has published Een hemel zonder vogels (2010) about the touching life of Auschwitz-survivor Janny Moffie-Bolle and was co-author of Betty. Een joodse kinderverzorgster in verzet (2016). Additionally, she has written various articles and educational online lessons for different institutions, including the Anne Frank Foundation and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. For the Jewish Cultural Quarter, she made an educational film trilogy about the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and carried out research about forced labour by Jews from the Netherlands after deportation. In 2016, she worked on the semi-permanent exhibition Tangible Memories from the Jewish Monument at the National Holocaust Museum. Annemiek Gringold studied history at the University of Leiden. She worked at the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum in Israel, both in the Dutch section as well as a teacher trainer from 1994-2000. There, she was involved in two exhibitions on the Shoah in the Netherlands. From 1998-2001, she worked for Yad Vashem Israel for a project on rescuers. From 2001, she has headed the Hollandsche Schouwburg in Amsterdam; furthermore, she was appointed curator of Shoah and Hollandsche Schouwburg of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in 2012. Currently, she researches and develops the exhibition concept for the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam and organizes temporary exhibitions in the start-up phase of this museum. From 2003, she is an expert-delegate for the Dutch delegation to the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance). Frank van Vree is Director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies; he also holds a chair of History of War, Conflict, and Memory at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, he has been Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Professor of Media Studies. He has published a large number of books and articles in academic and popular journals in the fields of memory studies, historical culture, media history, and journalism culture. He has been the co-editor of a number of volumes, including Performing the Past. Memory, History, Identity (with eds. Karin Tilmans & Jay Winter, 2010) and De Dynamiek van de Herinnering (with ed. Rob van der Laarse, 2009). Further relevant publications include History of Concepts – Comparative Perspectives (with eds. Iain Hampsher-Monk & Karin Tilmans, 1998) and In de schaduw van Auschwitz (1995), a groundbreaking study on the history of the memory of the Second World War in the Netherlands.