Beyond Anne Frank |
20-07-2016 |
Article in the New York Times
By NINA SIEGAL - JULY 17, 2016
AMSTERDAM — Anne Frank is only part of the story.
The diary of the young Jewish girl, who came of age hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, has long been the dominant narrative of the Netherlands’ experience during World War II. Hers is a story of inspiration and resistance that in many ways the Dutch have promoted and chosen to remember.
But the rest of the story of the Holocaust in the Netherlands has gone largely untold, and survivors and others fear that it is in danger of being forever forgotten.
So it was that after a 10-year struggle, the City Council in May approved a location for a memorial wall for the roughly 102,000 Dutch Jewish victims of the Nazis. The decision coincided with the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, a separate and sometimes competing effort to build a permanent home in Amsterdam for exhibitions about the Holocaust and other genocides.
Together, the new projects reflect a movement among a second and third generation of postwar Dutch Jewish leaders to balance what they feel is an incomplete, or even distorted, understanding of what happened during the five years of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
“When I talk to younger people, I tell them I’m the same as Anne Frank,” said Jacques Grishaver, 74, another “hidden child,” who was born in Amsterdam in 1942. “That’s always where I start, because I want to tell them that it wasn’t only Anne Frank. There were more.”
Read the whole article at the website of NYT: Beyond Anne Frank: The Dutch Tell Their Full Holocaust Story
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