More than 70 years after tens of thousands of Dutch Jews were deported and killed by the Nazis, the Netherlands is finally getting a national Holocaust museum.
It will be three years before the new museum is completed, but on Monday it opens its doors to host a harrowing exhibition of paintings by actor and artist Jeroen Krabbe.
The location of the museum, a former teacher training school in the heart of Amsterdam’s old Jewish quarter, is a small but hugely significant ray of light in the dark history of Jews in the Dutch capital during World War II.
Some 600 Jewish children were spirited to safety via the school from a neighbouring kindergarten where they were being held while awaiting deportation, said curator Annemiek Gringold. On the other side of the street stands the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theatre used by the Nazi occupiers as a gathering point for Jews who were rounded up often with the help of Dutch collaborators paid a bounty for each person they betrayed and transported to their deaths.
In all, 1,04,000 Dutch Jews were among the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Collective title The nine paintings on show Monday are collectively titled ‘The Demise of Abraham Reiss.’ They trace the life of Mr. Krabbe’s grandfather, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1943 in the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.
From a man sitting in a forest of birch trees on the edge of Amsterdam, the paintings trace Reiss’ life in pre-war Amsterdam to his detention in the Westerbork camp in the northeastern Netherlands and his arrival at Sobibor, where he was greeted by a snarling dog and shadowy, faceless guards.
The final painting shows thick smoke billowing out of the chimney of Sobibor’s gas chamber and a flock of geese, whose honking was intended to drown out the screams of Jews being murdered, according to a text accompanying one of the paintings.
