The museum contains the famous photo of the little boy Siem Zondag, who walks past the largely naked bodies of murdered camp prisoners in the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anita experienced exactly this when they were loaded into a truck for the death transport. The Germans hoped to get the prisoners into an extermination camp. But that failed. Leeser-Gassan has no trouble talking about this. “The funny thing is that people don’t believe it when you tell them that we saw those corpses lying there with those cut open. People took out the livers to have something to eat.”
Persecution of Jews
The museum consists of three floors. The visitor is led via a staircase to the top floor where it is visible how the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands began. Director Emile Schrijver regrets that a National Holocaust Museum has taken a long time. “The emphasis after the war was mainly on paying attention to the resistance. And most people wanted to look ahead. But a museum like this is healing for the Jewish community. Very important. History must remain visible.”
Jewish Council
Schrijver believes that the most impressive object in the collection is the cartography of the Jewish Council. There are dozens of card indexes with the name and address details of all Dutch Jews. “The object moves me because it is the last place where the identities of all Jews were still together, after which 75 percent were murdered.” He acknowledges that the registration system is also one of the most poignant objects, because overzealous officials used this system to give the Nazis the desired data to round up and deport the Jews. “That’s why it’s in this museum.”