After two corona editions without an audience, Dam Square is open to interested parties again this year. And there are. By 7:30 p.m., almost no one was able to get in.
Mayor Halsema spoke during the commemoration. She told about the sad day 11 May 1940, about how a bomb on the corner of Blauwburgwal and Herengracht killed 44 people. “It’s as if the city is moaning,” wrote an Amsterdam woman who heard the air raid siren just before that,” said the mayor.
Speech Mayor Halsema at the National Remembrance Day De Dam 4 May 2022
The spoken word counts.
A man bends over a woman who is lying lifeless in the street. Heaps of smoking smoke all around him, emergency services working frantically, people looking around dazedly and dead bodies under white sheets.
They are old photos but images that are all too current.
Nearby, a bomb destroyed the corner of Blauwburgwal and Herengracht. And 44 lives. ‘It’s as if the city is moaning’, wrote an Amsterdam woman who just before heard the air raid siren.
It was May 11, 1940. A tragic day. Yet the bomb in Amsterdam was only a harbinger. Three days later, Rotterdam was hit by the heaviest bombardment in Dutch history.
On that day, the Nazis came closer to their goals: to take power in Europe and commit a genocide that we still cannot comprehend.
On May 14, 1940, the people of Rotterdam lost hundreds of fellow citizens. A proud port city lost its ancient heart. The Netherlands lost its freedom, its democracy and its rule of law.
Survivors of the Second World War, people who have fled bombs from elsewhere, soldiers who risk their lives for peace and security: now that there is war on our continent again, many people’s memories come back. Of torture, oppression, of loved ones dying. The pain that never really went away makes itself felt intensely.
Commemorating together offers comfort. Here, at this symbol of national unity and at the countless memorial stones and monuments in other places in our country.
It is not for nothing that one of the most impressive war monuments is in Rotterdam. It’s called The Destroyed City. It is reminiscent of the suffering of a city that – in the artist’s words – ‘wanted to bloom like a forest’. He raises his hands to the sky. A big hole in his body screams out.
And yet it is also a monument of desire and willpower. It shows us how the Maasstad and the whole of the Netherlands would rise again: modern, free and reaching for the stars.
The survivors built on the memory of the dead.
“It’s like the city is moaning.” It sounds – even now – from the past. It rings out from cities not so far from here.
And it urges us to show willpower. The power to offer comfort where there is sorrow. To rebuild what is destroyed. And to whom we have lost, never to forget.
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