Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Confronting emotional political issues in the heart of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
September 11, 2024 at 10:59 p.m.
It’s hard to leave domestic and international politics behind you when you take a vacation these days.
My wife and I have been visiting her family relatives in the Netherlands prior to a cruise we will be taking from Amsterdam to Rome.
Last Friday, Sept. 6, one of those relatives and his wife took us to the Holocaust Memorial Monument in the heart of Amsterdam, which opened on Sept. 19, 2021. It’s next door to the Museum of the City of Amsterdam.
The memorial is dedicated to “the murder of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma from the Netherlands.”
And to visit it is heartbreaking.
A closeup photo of a tiny section of the Netherlands Holocaust Memorial in Amsterdam. Each brick has the name, date of birth, and age of the Jewish victim at extermination.By Dick Hubert
The organizers behind this monument, in their own words, want the visitor to remember the following:
“This monument contains the names of more than 102,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma from the Netherlands who were murdered during the Holocaust. They never received a grave.
On 10 May 1940, the day of invasion by Nazi Germany, 140,000 Jewish men, women, and children, and several thousand Sinti and Roma, lived in the Netherlands.
Between February 1941 and September 1944, more than 107,000 Jews and 245 Sinti and Roma were deported from the Netherlands, of whom only 5,200 Jews and 30 Sinti and Roma survived the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Another 2,000 Jews perished by other means during the Holocaust persecution.
The walls with names carry the Hebrew letters that spell the word “Le’zecher” which means “In Memoriam.”
This is a place of contemplation and mourning—of remembrance and contemplation—a warning for all generations all over the world, now and in the future. Through the names written here, the victims are not forgotten. They will never be forgotten.”
I was walking back to our hotel deep in thought about the monument’s warning, and whether as a Western society we’ve learned anything from it, when I saw a dozen heavily armed police heading in our direction, and a noisy, chanting, street-filling march of protesters behind them who turned a corner while passing our hotel.
I’ve taken a couple of photos to show you what I saw. What I heard was the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” with marchers carrying all kinds of signs, many of them denouncing Israel.
I can’t stop thinking, and maybe some of you can’t as well, what did it take for the survivors of the Holocaust in Israel to wind up in 2024 being caricatured as 21st century Nazis?
That’s the subject for a future column. Right now, though, the best and toughest analysis of where we are today with the Netanyahu Israeli government can be found under Thomas H. Friedman’s byline in The New York Times. Look up his Sept. 3 opus: “How Netanyahu is trying to save himself, elect Trump and defeat Harris.”
The City of Amsterdam Museum
and indigenous Native Americans
To my great and pleasant surprise, the City of Amsterdam Museum was featuring an exhibit they plan to bring to New York next year on what they call the “Manahahtaanng of New Amsterdam—The Indigenous Story Behind NewYork.”
The indigenous people to whom the exhibit was referring were the Lenape, with whom the Dutch were already trading before the Dutch West India Company established the colony of New Netherland, with New Amsterdam at its southern tip.
The Lenape had lived there for centuries or more, and the sense of the exhibition was that it was a 21st Century official Dutch apology for how they had treated the Lenape as colonizers or worse.
In other parts of the museum, there arere apologies for how the Dutch, especially the wealthy Dutch in Amsterdam, had treated their colonized people in Indonesia.
That exhibit is coming to the City of New York Museum in 2025. I would love to visit it again, but this time in the company of our readers and letter writers Ron Weckessar and Thomas Ceruzzi, whose historical perspective might be broadened by the ancestors of our continent’s original settlers and colonizers.
Columnist Dick Hubert left the Holocaust Memorial in Amsterdam to walk back to his hotel. There he witnessed a march through Amsterdam of pro Palestinian, anti Israel demonstrators shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.”By Dick Hubert
If some of the City of Amsterdam Museum curators are present, the dialogue among them and Messrs. Weckessar and Ceruzzi ought to be in the exhibition itself.
A cheer for Port Chester High School’s
ban on cell phones
I sent a copy of the Westmore News’ report on Port Chester High School’s cell phone ban in educational spaces to my daughter-in-law in Bellevue, Wash., in the hopes that she would send it to that community’s school board where my twin 12-year-old grandchildren are in 7th grade.
It turned out not to be necessary.
That Bellevue School Board announced to parents in their middle school that cell phones would be banned this school year—period.
Mind you, Bellevue is in the middle of tech country—its biggest corporate citizen is Microsoft. So, for that community to ban cell phones for young and growing impressionable minds is a big deal.
Port Chester, I’m pleased you beat Bellevue to the punch.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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