‘This is where evil triumphed’: The Netherlands, 80 years after its liberation from the Nazis

Visitors will find tales of horror – but also heroism and hope

On a lively avenue in Amsterdam Oost, one of the city’s hippest neighbourhoods, stand two buildings which staged one of the great escapes of the Second World War. On one side of the street is a former teacher training college. On the other side is an old theatre, the Hollandsche Schouwburg.
In 1942, Amsterdam’s Nazi rulers turned the Hollandsche Schouwburg into a deportation centre, where Amsterdam’s Jewish families were rounded up and processed, like animals en route to the slaughterhouse. Forty-six thousand people passed through here, on their way to the concentration camps, where almost all of them were murdered. Yet mercifully, some 600 children escaped, through that teacher training college across the road.
For the Nazis, accommodating fractious children in a crudely converted theatre was an administrative headache, so they housed the youngest in a creche over the road. This creche shared a courtyard with that teacher training college. 
Thanks to Walter Süskind, a German Jew who worked at the theatre, and the gentile staff and students at the training college, hundreds of Jewish children were spirited away, from the theatre to the creche and then into the college, down a hidden alleyway and off to safe houses in Amsterdam and beyond.
For their parents, trapped in the theatre, it was a heartbreaking decision – to put their trust in Süskind, to hand over their children to his unfamiliar comrades, not knowing if they’d be safe, or if they’d ever see them again. 
For the children, it was just as hard. In that hidden alleyway, they were given new identities, and handed over to complete strangers, who took them away and hid them, at huge personal risk, until the end of the war.
Last week, some of those children, now in their 80s and 90s, returned to that teacher training college, now transformed into the Netherlands’ new National Holocaust Museum. The exhibition within is very informative and extremely moving, documenting the persecution and genocide of over 100,000 Dutch Jews, but the most evocative exhibit is the building itself.
The opening of the Netherlands’ National Holocaust Museum is the first of many events throughout this year throughout the country marking the 80th anniversary of Dutch liberation from the Nazis by British and Allied forces (some parts of the Netherlands were liberated in the autumn of 1944, although the entire country wasn’t free until the spring of 1945).
May 4 and 5 are red letter days in the Netherlands every year – Remembrance Day and Liberation Day – but in this 80th anniversary year these dates will feel even more significant, since, come the 90th anniversary, there will surely be few folk left alive who bore witness to those times. Particularly notable for British visitors is the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ audacious bid to establish a bridgehead on the River Rhine. This heroic attempt, immortalised in the 1977 film, A Bridge Too Far, will be commemorated in Arnhem from September 20-22.
Yet for me, as someone whose two grandfathers fought on opposite sides (my British grandfather lost a brother fighting for Monty at El Alamein, my German grandmother lost a brother fighting for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front), the Holocaust commemorations feel especially apposite, the ultimate manifestation of the barbarity of Hitler’s Reich.
Most of the Dutch Jews detained at the Hollandsche Schouwburg were sent to Kamp Westerbork, a transit camp 110 miles east of Amsterdam. I travelled there by train, nice and comfy in first class, mindful that those Jews who made the same journey were crammed into cattle trucks.
Kamp Westerbork was a sinister halfway house. There were no gas chambers here, no mass exterminations, but virtually all of those detained here (some for only a few days, others for a few weeks or months) were sooner or later sent on to Auschwitz, and other death camps, where nearly all of them were murdered. Of the 105,000 inmates who came through here (including Anne Frank and her family), only 3,000 survived.
While they were imprisoned here, inmates were subjected to all sorts of atrocities, but as one of the ‘better’ camps, Westerbork became an insidious Nazi propaganda tool, used to try and fool the outside world that their camps weren’t quite as bad as people feared. The suave camp commandant, Albert Gemmeker, even forced one inmate, a German Jewish photographer called Rudolf Breslauer, to make a feelgood film showing contented inmates gardening, playing football and performing musical revues.
Breslauer’s life and work is the subject of a fascinating new exhibition at Westerbork, addressing the moral ambiguities of this movie, which he felt compelled to make, to try and keep his family alive. To no avail. After his film was finished, Breslauer and his wife and three children were all sent to Auschwitz. Only his daughter Ursula survived.
Overshadowed and overwhelmed by countless human tragedies, Westerbork remains a mournful place. Most of the buildings have been demolished, but you can still make out where the huts were. The eeriest relic is the commandant’s house, on the perimeter of the camp (oddly reminiscent of the Oscar winning film, The Zone of Interest, about the domestic life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss), weirdly cocooned within a gigantic greenhouse.
Breslauer’s photos of his son Stefan are incredibly affecting, working in the camp workshop, making wooden children’s toys. Yet even though the site is harrowing, I left there with a sense of hope. This is where evil triumphed, for a while, but where good eventually overcame it. Today this brutal place has become a forest. Trees grow where those huts once stood.
I finished my liberation pilgrimage back in Amsterdam, at the Hollandsche Schouwburg. The ornate façade of the theatre is still there, but the building behind has been demolished and left open to the elements. There’s a garden, and a memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews (and several hundred Roma and Sinti) who left here for the death camps, including Walter Süskind, who led the valiant rescue of all those Jewish children.
On an outside wall is a reproduction of a blurry black-and-white photograph. It was taken during the war by Lydia Riezouw, a teenage gentile girl whose house backed onto the backyard of the theatre. Her photo depicts a crowd of Jews, grabbing some fresh air in this backyard before their final deportation to who knew where. Lydia recognised her Jewish friend Greetje Velleman in the crowd, and so she took a photo of her. In the photo, Greetje is waving and smiling. She died in Auschwitz a few months later. Lydia became a resistance fighter. She died in 2005 in Amsterdam at the grand old age of 82.
You might suppose a trip to these grim sites would be a sombre experience, and for the most part you’d be quite right. Seeing the evidence of so much cruelty, so much suffering, is profoundly disturbing. Yet the zeal with which these sites have been preserved – victims remembered, heroes honoured – is inspiring. The liberation of the Netherlands is a cause for joy, but memories of the Holocaust are intrinsic to that celebration.
It’s a sunny afternoon in Amsterdam and the National Holocaust Museum is full of visitors. Outside, people of all ages are queuing to get in. The frontage of this building has changed beyond all recognition, but the deportation centre across the road still looks much the same as it would have done in Anne Frank’s day. It even bears the original title, Hollandsche Schouwburg, in big bold letters above the door. Inside is a newer inscription, which Anne Frank didn’t live to see. It’s a quotation from If This is a Man by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi: ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again; this is the essence of what we have to say.’
To visit the National Holocaust Museum travel by train from London St Pancras to Amsterdam via Eurostar or fly with KLM from London Heathrow, with British Airways from Heathrow or Gatwick, or with easyJet from Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, Southend or Bristol.
Kamp Westerbork is around two hours’ drive from Amsterdam, or a little under three hours by train. If you’re returning to Amsterdam, I’d recommend you spend the night nearby (it’s a long way for a day trip). Hotel de Jonge is a smart modern four star with a good restaurant, in Assen, a pleasant little city 12 miles from Westerbork. Doubles, including breakfast, from €119.