Mayor’s apology for Amsterdam’s role in WWII persecution of Jews welcomed

The two main Jewish organizations in the Netherlands, the Central Jewish Consultation (CJO) and the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), have positively received Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema’s apology for the role the Dutch municipality played in the persecution of Jewish citizens during World War II, the Jonet.nl website reported.

Speaking on Thursday at an event marking Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Halsema said that civil servants in Amsterdam played an active role in the murder of some thousands of Jewish citizens of the city.

The government at the time “let its Jewish residents down terribly,” said Halsema.

Of the estimated 80,000 Jews who lived in Amsterdam at the outbreak of World War II, only some 20,000 survived. Among those deported was teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family. Only her father, Otto, survived.

“The Amsterdam government, when it came down to it, was not heroic, not determined and not merciful. And it let its Jewish residents down terribly,” the mayor said.

“On behalf of the city government, I offer my apologies for this,” she added in an address at Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theatre which operated as a collection point for Jews who were deported to extermination camps.

She related how the municipality helped with the registration of Jewish citizens and the drawing up of cards to indicate where Jews lived.

“Services were prepared to help enact one after the other of anti-Jewish measures,” she says. “Step by step, the municipal machine became part of the machinery of evil.”

Halsema’s apology came six months after what she described as “an eruption of antisemitism” in which Israeli fans were assaulted in the city after a football game with Maccabi Tel Aviv. The attacks garnered headlines worldwide and more than 60 suspects were arrested.

“We feel that these apologies were made to the survivors, the bereaved families and to us as a living Jewish community. A community that came out of the war heavily scarred by it in a human sense, in a material and immaterial sense, and which still bears the marks of it,” said the CJO.

According to Jonet.nl, the Amsterdam municipal college is making €25 million ($28.4 million) available to invest in the future of Jewish life in the city. To this end, a committee will be set up to advise the college on the frameworks and conditions for spending these funds.

“The apology and also the associated gesture, in the form of an amount of money, are there, as far as we are concerned, to give and return to the Jews of Amsterdam their identity, pride and resilience,” said CJO.

“As a national organization, we will also have to consider the significance of these apologies for other municipalities in the country and their actions during World War II toward their Jewish residents,” the statement continued.

“The apology is welcome especially now that recent historical research has confirmed how painful the role of the Amsterdam municipality was,” CIDI Director Naomi Mestrum told the Dutch press agency ANP.

“This acknowledgement has been a long time coming, but better late than never,” she said.

“This is happening 80 years after the war, but for many families, it lives on in their lives. This is a piece of recognition for suffering that was done to them,” Mestrum added.

‘’If it were up to CIDI, we would need to invest in education and strengthening the Jewish community. We want to show young people who Jews are today: not just victims of the Holocaust or party to a complex conflict far away, but people with a rich culture, a language of their own, a multifaceted history and an important place in Dutch society,’’ she said.

(European Jewish Press via JNS)