Towards a national museum of the Shoah

Today, the Hollandsche Schouwburg is a monument and commemorative site, and it is also an educational centre of national significance. Every year, about 40,000 adults and children visit the building to commemorate and learn, and to look around the building that served as a link in a chain of destruction. The Hollandsche Schouwburg was once a theatre, a place for culture and civilized entertainment. During the Second World War it was used as a deportation centre: tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children waited here to be transported to labour and death camps. The Hollandsche Schouwburg seeks to meet the needs of all those who want to visit the building today: by providing a dignified and informative space for commemoration, and detailed and accessible accounts of the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands. To fulfil these needs as well as possible, the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Jewish Historical Museum, which manages it, have agreed on a necessary renovation operation: the building's interior is almost twenty years old. The aim is to convert the Hollandsche Schouwburg into a fully-fledged museum of the Shoah, a museum of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War.

Why is the Hollandsche Schouwburg to be upgraded and renewed?

• At present, the Netherlands does not have a museum that gives a total picture of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War.
• 'If walls could talk'… The stories attached to the Hollandsche Schouwburg serve as lessons for our own time.
• New research on the building as it existed before, during, and after the war has produced astonishing material, which must be made accessible to all those who want to see it.
• The Hollandsche Schouwburg wants new historical insights and new views of education to serve as the basis for a clear and comprehensive museum presentation. There is a great demand for this, in schools and elsewhere.
• In telling the story of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War, this history will be placed in a broader international context. The dramatic events in the Hollandsche Schouwburg in particular and in the Netherlands as a whole will be linked to defining landmarks of degeneration in Europe.
• More and more personal stories are now being told. The long silence that reigned on this subject has finally been broken. The Jewish Historical Museum and the Hollandsche Schouwburg are overseeing the Dutch part of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Collection. For this huge project launched by film director Steven Spielberg, over 50,000 interviews with Shoah survivors have been recorded on video worldwide, over 2,000 of them in the Netherlands. These testimonies should not be left to languish out of sight on bookshelves. A space will be created at the Hollandsche Schouwburg where the interviews with Dutch survivors can be seen and heard.
• The reactions of bystanders, rescuers, resistance fighters, and persecutors will also be given a place at the renovated Hollandsche Schouwburg, to clarify the choices that these people made.
• Since 1993, the commemoration room, with its wall displaying 6,700 family names out of the 104,000 Dutch Jews who perished during the war, has been the place where many people come to remember their loved ones, since there are no graves to visit. Over the years, it has become apparent that the surviving relatives feel a growing need to know more about those who were lost. The large-scale, remarkable projects Digital Monument of the Jewish Community and Ikpod have made it possible to convey far more information about the victims than mere names.

The Hollandsche Schouwburg aspires to be a centre that focuses attention on the Shoah and related themes in a variety of ways, from museum presentations to musical and theatrical performances. Debate and contemplation can also take place between 'these walls, which have so much to tell us'.