A house of loss
Exhibition hall in the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam
Photo: Max Hart Nibbrig
In the garden of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam are four saplings, symbols of the resistance and resilience of Dutch Jewish people who survived WWII. These gingko bilboba and olive trees were planted by some of the 600 Jews who, as children, were smuggled out of this former crèche into hiding and safety during the Nazi occupation. They sewed the seeds together with their children and grandchildren.
On the other side of the street is a site that was once the Hollandsche Schouwburg theatre. It was used by the Nazis as a collection point for Jews and 46,000 people in total were held there, before being transported to camps and murdered.
Three-quarters of the Netherlands’ Jewish population was wiped out during the Holocaust and yet it took the country 80 years to be able to tell this story of suppression, isolation and murder. But Emile Schrijver, general director of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, believes that this historical distance and a conscious method of storytelling have created the first in a new generation of Holocaust museums.
“We have made a deliberate attempt to define a new kind of Holocaust Museum”
It is a story that Dutch people did not want to hear after the war, when they were concentrating on uplifting tales of resistance, survival and their own tolerance. There was indeed resistance and extraordinary bravery, but there were also other stories. These include individuals who denounced Jews; Dutch transport companies who carried out deportations for the Nazis and who earned money from them; normal people who seized Jewish people’s homes and possessions, and a large number of people who simply looked away from what was happening. So how do you tell this uncomfortable story in a way that generates empathy and humanity rather than denial and shame?
Emile Schrijver has been the director general of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam since 2015. Its memorial sites include the National Holocaust Museum.
Photo: Anneke Hymmen
“We have made a deliberate attempt to define a new kind of Holocaust Museum, and it has a relevance for the future: I think that is very important,” stresses Schrijver, sitting in an education room looking out onto the Hollandsche Schouwburg memorial site.
But at the beginning of the 21st century, there was a growing sense that enough time had passed to tell the painful war story in detail: “My predecessors were not at ease with the topic because they said there’s a risk that Dutch Jewish history will be reduced only to these five years of catastrophe – and that’s what they didn’t want. But there was no way around it,” says Schrijver. “It was time for a third generation becoming grown-ups to deal with the topic – and for us, from the beginning, Jewish ownership has been very important. Everybody was well aware that it was a big endeavour.”
A 2012 feasibility study showed that the Hollandsche Schouwburg wouldn’t work as a location, but a building opposite – once a school, then a squat – was eventually taken as the location.
In the following years, temporary displays in the former school building helped establish what would work in telling these stories to a modern audience. “Why do it now, so long after the event?” Schrijver says they asked themselves. “The answer is because [a national Holocaust museum] didn’t exist, but also because of the way that this event has defined Western and Dutch society in terms of trauma, looted art, psychology, legal issues, even the horrible genocide discussion that we are having right now [about Israel]. The concept of genocide was formulated after the Holocaust.”
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic – the shape of the museum and memorial began to emerge, alongside a fundraising operation and a pledge of national government support.
“My predecessors said there’s a risk that Dutch Jewish history will be reduced only to these five years of catastrophe – and that’s what they didn’t want.”
The redesign not only affected the main building of the museum, but also the architecture of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Instead of a complete rebuild, there is a largely empty space of remembrance and reflection behind the historic frontage of the Hollandsche Schouwburg theatre. In the centre sits an obelisk memorial and “droplets” on the walls tell stories of people who were brought here, often with excerpts from farewell letters, telegrams or diaries.
In the garden of the former crèche, trees and an installation commemorate the Jewish children who were smuggled out of the building and thus saved from deportation
Photo: Max Hart Nibbrig
On the other side of the street, the school façade remains as it was. The spot where children were rescued by being handed over a fence from the old kindergarten is marked with the new trees, visible through large windows from a display inside. “You want your audience to be aware of the fact that this is where it happened,” he says, “but we also wanted to break with the tradition of Holocaust museums being dark places.”
But light and reflection both played an important role symbolically and architecturally. “If you go to any Holocaust museum, what they do is they play with your emotions by pushing you into a dark alley in which you feel uncomfortable, before you’ve even experienced what that museum is about,” says Schriver. “For me, a light museum was the most important thing. We call it a house of loss, which is different from a house of horror.”
“What we concentrate on is the individual lives of people: these lives were made dark by the Nazis, but these were not dark lives. When you see a small child’s toy, realising that this child was killed at the age of four, you don’t need a dark design to understand that it’s dark.”
“If the goal of the Nazis was to dehumanise people, the goal of our museum should be to rehumanise them”
So, while the museum does show an uncensored, iconic photograph of a young boy walking past corpses in Bergen-Belsen, it also displays a portrait of his family and one of the artworks he made himself as an adult – consciously refusing to reduce his life to one of victimhood. “We as a Jewish museum have a moral obligation to always be aware of the dignity of the victim,” he adds. “People have criticised us because they expect a box with shoes and another box with hair. But one aspect of the permanent exhibition which was very important to us was: if the goal of the Nazis was to dehumanise people, the goal of our museum should be to rehumanise them.”
In this “guilty building” – which witnessed these events – the uncompromising language used is also very important. Although the story of Anne Frank, through her diary, is one of the world’s best known accounts of Nazi oppression, the story of Dutch collaboration had not been fully addressed before this museum.
“This is what happens to people if we forget to see the other as a human being”
“On the text level, we are very clean”, says Schrijver. “We don’t use language that covers up what was going on, we don’t use euphemism: we use very clear, factual language.” For example, the museum uses the word “murdered” instead of indirect formulations such as “did not survive”. A description board entitled In Memoriam by the garden, for example, ends: “During the war, Jewish children who were once cared for in the crèche returned when the building became a deportation centre. All the children in the photos were murdered.”
Another vital aspect of building a forward-looking Holocaust museum was the fact that although survivor groups were closely consulted, they did not create the narrative: it is a museum about a national story, for all Dutch people, all visitors, asking them in its final rooms to think about what happens now when we exclude, scapegoat and dehumanise others.
“This is really a next-generation Holocaust museum,” says Schrijver. “We choose a totally different angle. It’s not just ‘never again’ but this is what happens to people if we forget to see the other as a human being. That is a totally different approach.”