Resistance Museum - Amsterdam

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Adjust, collaborate or resist were the choices that faced the Dutch people when the soldiers and bureaucrats of Nazi Germany invaded and took over Holland. The stories of individuals and groups faced with these options fill the Verzetsmuseum, the Museum of the Dutch resistance.

Beginning in what feels like a patchwork of disconnected episodes and anecdotes, the curators weave together a set of narratives that relate the complex circumstances and calculations the women and men at all levels of society had to make to survive and to be true to their sense of their obligations to self, family, neighbors and the Dutch people as a whole.

One characteristic of the Dutch resistance was its creativity and variety. Women embroidered subversive messages on their skirts. People painted the letter V for Verzets, “resistance” on walls and other public surfaces. When the German propaganda machine reinterpreted the V for “victory,” people went out and turned the V into a W for Willamina, their queen-in-exile. Telephone workers wired alternative connections around the official switchboard through their own clandestine hub to create a more secure means of coordinating resistance activities. Women’s church groups became networks of support for people in hiding or on the run.

The mounting inconveniences, indignities, and violence of the occupation prompted increasing numbers of people to withhold their cooperation or actively resist German authority and their Dutch agents. The progressively more restrictive policies and actions aimed at Jewish neighbors motivated some Dutch people to aid even harbor Jews, like the 8 in the secret Annex. Otherwise apparently ordinary women and men took up increasingly risky activities in support of the resistance. At least one young women bicycled 60 kilometers a day as part of a highly efficient and regular courier service.

Courage and perseverance also emerged in all kinds of people and circumstances. Transportation workers maintained a strike even after its practice effect was minimized so as to avoid giving the German authorities a propaganda victory. Hidden presses and typed stencils produced scores of newspapers and bulletins containing news and information otherwise suppressed at great peril to all involved. Inventive electricians fabricated tiny radios that could be concealed in books, cigarette tins or any other small box that allowed the Dutch to hear news from Britain and from their government in exile.

An hour or so in the Verzetsmuseum left both Hannah and I in awe and left us wondering again how we might respond in similar situations. I think it is unlikely either of us would become full collaborators in any activities that might be parallel - denouncing undocumented coworkers or shunning people because of their race or religion, for example. But might we, like one Dutch mother who decided to exclude a Jewish friend of her daughters from a trip to a zoo from which Jews were excluded, find ways to adapt to the new norms so as to “keep our heads down,” avoid attention, “not make waves.”

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Hannah became intrigued and then deeply curious about the holocaust and its victims and perpetrators when she read Lois Lowry’s Number The Stars and Anne Frank’s Diary. She was moved by extreme circumstances and profound choices that confronted Annemarie and Anne and became committed to finding out all should could about the people involved, the psychology of victims and those who committed the crimes, and the systems and social structures that give rise to such things.

In the years leading up to Hannah’s introduction to these things, I was renewing my interest in the holocaust and the people and structures of the Third Reich and it's killing machine.

When all is said and done, the important question might not be the “big” question, ‘What would I do if we were invaded by violent and repressive regime?’ but the “little” questions about complicity, cooperation, looking the other way, allowing myself the security of a “bystander”. In the current atmosphere of nativism, xenophobia, and mean-spirited “me-first-ism”, the elemental acts of resistance - contesting falsehoods, insisting on details, challenging the ungenerous, refusing to acquiesce in the humiliation or downfall of another, may be the most important and have the most profound effects.

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Comments

[Lisa]

The little things
Nicely put, Gordon. Adam Gopnik recently pointed out in The New Yorker that those who say Donald Trump is not Hitler are, of course, correct. And then points out: "But then Hitler wasn't Hitler--until he was." The task isn't yet a great or insurmountable one, but it's a necessary one. And we need to figure out just what that task is right now.