Every year since 1945 we commemorate the victims of the Second World War. For more than seventy years, there has been two minutes of silence on May 4 at eight o'clock, but the thought behind the silence has changed over time. We no longer just commemorate fallen resistance heroes, but keep the memory of a humanitarian disaster alive for future generations.
The first Remembrance Day took place on May 9, 1945, on Dam Square in Amsterdam. The Second World War had just ended a few days ago and the city council decided to organize a commemoration. The municipality wanted to commemorate the fallen resistance members who had revolted against the occupying forces. Jewish victims were not included in this ceremony.
Ignored victims
At that time, people also did not know the extent of the destruction of the Jewish community, especially in Amsterdam. Drop by drop, Jewish survivors of camps and hiding places would return to their city in the following months, but they were often not received very warmly. They had to fight for their possessions and houses and even received additional taxes from the municipality for unpaid bills. That while others, often NSB members, had lived in their houses during the war. The shelter that was organized for former camp prisoners was only intended for resistance heroes and not for Jews.
The extent to which we in the Netherlands had knowledge of the extermination camps during the war is still hotly debated. What people heard, they often did not believe because of the unprecedented horror and the fact that news in wartime could not always be trusted. But after the liberation, the Allies in Europe spread horrific photos and reports of starving prisoners, countless dead and of the gas chambers. Anyone who had dismissed the stories as rumors or propaganda during the war could no longer avoid them:the Nazis had knowingly wanted to exterminate a people.
At that time, however, sentiment in the Netherlands was 'forgotten and carry on'. Reconstruction was all about looking ahead and rebuilding the country, rather than looking back. What had been done to the Jewish people was terrible, but things done did not change. In addition, new enemies were already lurking. The old Russian ally could well push through to the west with his communist ideas and 'rioters' in the Dutch East Indies wanted independence from the Netherlands.
Resistance organizes Remembrance Day
In the first years after the war we in the Netherlands were busy with all kinds of things, except for the Jewish victims. After the initiative of the Amsterdam municipality for the first commemoration, a club of former resistance members organized the National Remembrance Day from 1946. This National Remembrance Commission pursued a military ceremony to commemorate deceased resistance heroes and fallen soldiers. Commemorating gassed Jews or civilians who died in the Netherlands as a result of hunger and (Allied) bombing was still out of the question.
The fate of Jewish victims was not only forgotten during Remembrance Day. It would take until 1962 before they got their own memorial monument, at the Hollandsche Schouwburg in Amsterdam. A large part of the Dutch Jews should have gathered in this theater before being deported to camps such as Westerbork. The text on the monument was as follows:"Remembrance place of the Jewish compatriots who fell in 1940-1945." However, this text received a lot of criticism because it looked as if the Jews had perished on the battlefield.
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This criticism was one of the first signs of a different way of looking at one's own war history and victims. The extensive Dutch television documentary The Occupation historian Lou de Jong also played an important role in this. For five years, between 1960 and 1965, the series kept viewers glued to the tube. Most of the people who had lived through the war, including the traumatized Jewish community, had felt little need to look back for years. But now war memories were no longer swept under the rug and the fate of the Jews was no longer kept secret.
It was time to commemorate the more than 100,000 Jewish victims, about 40 percent of the total number of Dutch victims of the Second World War. From 1961, all war victims or killed since the outbreak of the Second World War were officially commemorated. In the years that followed, the Remembrance Day took on less and less of a military character and the focus shifted more to the victims.
Remembrance becomes Holocaust tourism
This development parallels the interest in extermination camps such as Auschwitz and the Dutch transit and prisoner camp Westerbork. Westerbork already existed before the war broke out to receive (Jewish) refugees from Germany. After the war, the camp would be used to lock up collaborators and other 'wrong' Dutch people, pending their trial. Although eyewitnesses suggested immediately after the eviction to make Westerbork a memorial site, it took until 1970 before a national monument would be built here. Before there was no need for it, the generation that had not (consciously) experienced the war had that need. And more.
In the years that followed, the idea arose not only to create a place of remembrance, but also a place of remembrance to tell the story of the war. In 1983 the Kamp Westerbork Memorial Center opened its doors. The government also felt that it should intervene to ensure that the memory of war and its consequences are not forgotten. In 1987 she established the National Committee for 4 &5 May to organize the National Remembrance Day and Liberation Day. The commemoration was therefore no longer a private initiative.
There was little original about camps like Westerbork, but by reconstructing them, visitors could experience how miserable the conditions were during the war. Over the years, Westerbork changed in the national experience from a Dutch camp to part of the Nazi regime. After the fall of the wall in 1989, the Eastern Bloc was open, making it possible to reach Polish concentration camps such as Auschwitz. By turning it into memorial sites and museums, a new kind of tourism emerged:Holocaust tourism. No longer only survivors or relatives visited these horrific places.
The next big change in World War II commemoration was caused by another war. Or actually because of a genocide:the one in Srebrenica. What no one thought possible happened in 1995:despite the horrific lesson of the Second World War, a mass murder of a people took place again. 'Never again Auschwitz' changed to 'Never again racial hatred'. Children are taught at an early age about the Second World War and the fate of the Jews at school in order to understand what racial hatred can lead to.
Today, this emphasis on education and awareness can also be seen during the National Remembrance Day. Children even got a role during the ceremony, including reading a poem they wrote themselves.
With the passage of time, the interest in the Second World War has only increased and the places of commemoration more important. For we, the later generations, do not have our own memories of these horrors.