Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Holland sheltered Jews during the war at considerable peril to themselves. They deserve to be
remembered too.
What must it have been to be a Jew in Europe in the 1930s? From the beginning they were subjected
to the grossest indignities: forbidden to sit in parks or caf￩s or to ride on trams, required to give up their
cars and bicycles, even their children's bicycles. If it had ended there, it would have redounded to
Germany's shame for ever, but of course it grew unspeakably worse, as the photographs and documents in
the museum's other rooms gruesomely testify - people being herded onto cattle trains, piles of stick-like
corpses, the gaunt faces of the living dead, all the pictures you have seen a thousand times.
One picture I hadn't seen transfixed me. It was a blurry photo of a German soldier taking aim with a rifle
at a woman and the baby she was clutching as she cowered beside a trench of bodies. I couldn't stop
staring at it, trying to imagine what sort of person could do such a thing.
It probably wasn't the best picture to look at just before heading to the station and catching a train to
Germany.
