Today is World War Two day (there is always a WW1 or WW2 day on our
trips). We start with the one thing that
almost every tourist does in Amsterdam:
a visit to the Anne Frank House.
If you are clever, you buy your tix in advance because otherwise you
will have to wait a long time in line and it is – wait for it – kind of cold,
and windy, and oh yes, there is some more hail!
The structure is of course the building that housed Otto Frank’s
company, behind which was a little-used and invisible-from-the-street
storehouse. In 1942, as Dutch Jews were increasingly
being arrested, and after their older daughter Margo was called for labor duty
in Germany, the Frank family moved into a set of about four rooms in the
warehouse, along with another family and a single man whom they knew. You know the story – they lived there for two
years, silent during the day so that the company workers who did not know about
them would not hear them, and Anne chronicled their experience intelligently
and movingly in her diary. In the fall
of 1944 they were betrayed, by whom nobody knows, arrested, and sent to Auschwitz. Otto Frank alone survived, and upon his
return was presented with some photos and Anne’s diary, which their friends had
found left behind by the Germans. Anne
herself had already started to edit the diary for publication,[1]
and her father edited it further, published it, and the rest, as they say. Translated into more than 60 languages, the
diary is a world-wide phenomenon and the House is a center dedicated to
teaching about tolerance, democracy, survival, and human rights.
Despite the Sistine Chapel-like crowds wending their way through the
structure in endless lines, the space is unbearably moving. It is all empty, at Otto Frank’s wish, as
that is how the Germans left it and that is how he found it when he
returned. As you walk through the
offices in the front of the building, you learn about the incredibly courageous
colleagues who hid them, and you wonder what it must have been like to look out
those big windows and see Germans walking by, always wondering – would they
come for the families hidden here, did they know? The hiders survived the war and were lauded
by Yad Vashem.
There is the bookshelf-door, complete with the binders, which any
reader of the diary will remember. As
you go through the hiding rooms themselves, you think about living in these
small dark spaces and, inevitably, of the cold nugget of terror that must have lodged
in their stomachs when the bookshelf-door was opened by the SS and Dutch NSB
that August day in 1944. I find it all a lot to take, and need some
serious affection from my daughter in order to move on with the day.
More tramping in the rain and a mediocre lunch do not help but
restoration comes in the form of a really spectacular piece of Dutch apple pie,
which is mostly apples and not so much pie.
We didn’t plan for this to be WW2 day but adding the Verzets, or
Dutch Resistance Museum to our plans kind of nailed that. On our way there we find two Stolpersteine,
or “stumbling blocks,” small brass cobblestones set flush into the pavement,
which note the dates and locations of an individual’s arrest, deportation, and
death in the Holocaust. You can find
these all over Europe, they are small memorials that mark the last spot where mostly
Jews but also Romani or gay victims lived or worked freely. Stolpersteine are quiet, and you might miss
them, but they are also durable and once you’ve seen one, your idea of the
place changes forever. You can have one
placed yourself, if you do the research and pay your 120 euro to the artist,
Gunter Denmig. There are around 50,000
of them across Europe, placed since 1992 and going strong. They give one pause, as intended
Remember that the Dutch remained neutral in WW1, so they kind of
hoped for the same thing on the second go-round but National Socialism had its proponents
in the Netherlands so that was not to be.
Despite armed resistance, the Germans invaded in 1940 (famously
destroying Rotterdam in a senseless bombing designed to shock and awe the
population into submission), and the Dutch surrendered in five days. The Germans actually wanted the Dutch on
their side – you know, all those tall blond white people were tremendously
attractive to the Nazis – and at first, attempted to win them over with benign
treatment. But most Dutch would have none
of it, and spent the next five years working against the Germans in ways large
and small – sabotaging work and military installations, disseminating
information via an incredibly engaged secret press network, trying to save
Jews, and so on. Of course, some collaborated,
as people will do. The Verzetsmuseum
documents all of this in deep and excellent detail – I don’t think I’ve been to
a more exhaustively-prepared museum ever – with print, video, still-image, art,
and sound installations. It sets
excellent context, noting social and economic divisions in pre-war Dutch
society that were just begging to be exploited by national socialism, and asks
the visitor to consider the response: do
you adjust (accept), collaborate, or resist?
The best part is the kids’ room, the Verzetsmuseum Junior, where you
can learn about four children who had different experiences – a Jewish girl,
two boys who became active in the Resistance in different ways, and a girl
whose family collaborated with the Germans.
You learn about their lives during the war, and their fate
afterwards. They were real people! And they all survived. And in the last small room, there are
videotaped interviews with them as old people, about the war, their lives, and
their thoughts on things like free speech, democracy, human rights, tolerance,
etc.
The piece that stuck with me and Izzy was the interview with the
woman whose parents had collaborated. During
the war, she lost friends because of her family’s politics. After the war, they were imprisoned and then
socially isolated because of their actions.
As an old woman, she was asked about bullying, and spoke about what a
bad thing it was, that one should never be bullied for one’s beliefs. She, Nelly, had felt this and it was
terrible. It struck me as such a blind
spot. She could not acknowledge that those
to whom she had declared allegiance (for she was in the Dutch version of the
Nazi Youth, all in) were the ultimate bullies. She also doesn’t share her political opinions
nowadays, she said, she just keeps herself to herself. So much for a human capacity for growth.
Still, this whole Junior part was incredibly sensitive and thoughtfully
prepared. Izzy and I are glad we persevered. And, it gave Bill and Peter time to go
through the part of the exhibit on the Dutch war in Indonesia. You’ll recall that the Dutch colonized what
was then known as East India in the 1500s, and they held on to Indonesia until
after WW2 except for a lengthy period of Japanese occupation during this war. Ironically, it was that occupation that finally
gave separatist forces the impetus to throw out the Dutch in the late 1940s. KT
says, don’t go to the Museum of the Tropics here in A-dam, because it is pretty
much all about how rotten the Dutch were in that part of the world, and damn
depressing.
Now another word about bicycles and transport more generally. I’ve said bikes are everywhere, and they are
ridden by everyone, helmetless. (Except
for one wee tot, in a front seat over his mum’s handlebars, and it was a good
thing he was wearing one because he was half-tipped out, so sound asleep was he
as his steed carried him home. He also
had a cozy little sheepskin-like blanket all tucked around him. Who wouldn’t fall asleep in those
circumstances?) I am in awe of most of
the female riders: they are beautiful
and tall and stylish with nice coats and just-so scarves protecting from the
(really biting) wind. They are always in
good shoes: sometimes fun sneaks, but
often boots and/or heels. One morning I
saw one woman in a very short skirt, with just as high heels, riding a bike
with a kid on the front, and holding an umbrella over them all in one
hand. Amster-damn, she’s good!
Most folks seem to take advantage of the excellent tram system, as do
we, hopping on and off with increasing ease, except when we go in by the wrong
door and get a stern talking-to from the conductor. There are of course cars, plenty of taxis and
Ubers, and lots of electric cars here, with charging stations busy on every
corner. We don’t see so many Smart Cars,
but we do see something even smaller, basically the size of a very small cow,
that can seat two people and store a bunch of stuff behind them. These vehicles are so small that they drive
in the bike lane which is pretty hilarious to see but which apparently pisses
off the cyclists.
Herons are like pigeons around here.
They just sort of stand around at the edges of canals and ponds, waiting
for someone to drop some food their way.
They scavenge along the remnants of the Albert Cuyp street market after
the vendors have gone, swooping in like pterodactyls and parading about,
looking out of place to those of us who are used to seeing them only in more
bucolic settings. KT tells us that the
little floating rafts of vegetation that we see alongside some of the
houseboats in the canals are for the waterfowl to root around and live in. Thoughtful, these Dutch.
Dinner at Bazar which was a church at some point in its former life,
and now is a sort of North African-Mediterranean mashup, with fabulous tiled
walls and a balcony and twinkly colored lights everywhere and all manner of
Arabic and Hebrew quotes and ads around the walls. It is a bit chaotic, but
fun, and the highlight is the dessert that Petey and Izzy order: Oasis. This is, according to the menu, a “grand
dessert with layered cake, Turkish fruit, so-han, chocolate mousse, and fresh
fruit.” We don’t know what so-han is but
there is also ice cream. Unfortunately
the lighting was too dark to get a good snap but imagine if you will, a giant
round tray, at the center of which are two Ben and Jerry’s shorties (flavor of
your choice), surrounded by mounds of chocolate mousse decorated with currants,
whipped cream with chokecherries, Turkish delight, a sharply-cardamom-ed cookie
with pistachio nuts, some pineapple, two little slices of stripe-y cake that
tastes of cinnamon, and all covered with what looks like bits snipped from a
fake Santa Claus beard. If you are
adventurous, like us, you will try to eat the fake beard, and discover that it
is a fabulous kind of cotton candy that tastes of almonds and honey and does
not harden into pink or blue bits that threaten to pull out your teeth as our
American crap does. This, this is cotton
candy of the gods.
The google tells us later that it is probably Turkish cotton candy,
or maybe Iranian or possibly Lebanese, there is a clearly a big cotton candy
practice in the Middle East. It is
possible that if they all joined together to export more of this, they might
resolve their differences because it really is all that.
One heron swoops down the now-empty market street as we make our way
home in the not-quite dark of 9 pm.
I thought grocer Albert Heijn was going to be the Cronig’s of this
trip, seeing as how we seem to need something there every day, but we didn’t
even go into one today!
[1]
Fascinating fact: during WW2, the Dutch
government in exile asked citizens, via a radio broadcast from London, to save
wartime diaries and documents, in order to document the Nazi occupation. This
strikes me as remarkably prescient on the part of the government. It is said that Anne heard this broadcast, and
started to edit her own diary for posterity.
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