New Holocaust museum in Amsterdam aims to tell full story of persecution of Dutch Jews

A new Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam aims to tell the full story of the persecution of Dutch Jews during World War II.

The museum tells the story of the Holocaust through video images, photos, scale models and mementoes of the Dutch victims of Nazi occupation. 

Three-quarters of the pre-war Jewish population of the Netherlands were murdered by the Nazis, the largest proportion anywhere in Europe.

Head Curator Annemiek Gringold pulled together exhibition rooms that show the atrocities of the Holocaust, and also small mementoes of the lives lost.

For Gringold, the museum opens at a vital time. “The generation that survived the Shoah (Holocaust) is slowly leaving us,” she says.

“It is our responsibility, we feel, in the Jewish Cultural Quarter, to tell their story from generation to the next. For the Netherlands, to know about this history, to be aware of where anti-Semitism might lead to in certain circumstances.“

The walls of one room are filled from floor to ceiling with the texts of hundreds of laws discriminating against Jews that were enacted by the German occupiers of the Netherlands, to show how the Nazi regime, assisted by Dutch civil servants, dehumanized Jews ahead of operations to round them up and send them to their deaths.

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