In history lessons at primary school I learned what to think about if you were silent for two minutes on May 4. There was plenty of material. I had a master named Roel who was not very strict with the Kijkwijzer. In group 5 he showed us images from a gruesome past, when everything was still black and white. On a big TV at the front of the classroom we saw large wagons full of lifeless bodies. They had once been people.
So I thought about that on Remembrance Day, and it was both frightening and comforting. Two minutes to imagine how dark it was here, during that defined period of five years. Once the wreaths were laid I could watch something cheerful and colorful and the next day it was time to celebrate freedom. Besides being a sign of respect, that was also what commemoration was intended for: as a guarantee that the future would always remain free. The mistakes of that time, no one would make again.
The mistakes of that time, no one would make again
In high school, all kinds of new images and thoughts emerged to fill those two minutes of silence. At the beginning of May, documentaries and fiction films were broadcast, highlighting aspects of the Second World War that I did not yet know. It did not happen overnight, the persecution and murder of Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals and other minorities. During Remembrance Day I now also remembered the language and the pictures I had heard and seen, on TV and in history lessons. The comparisons drawn between Jews and rats; pests. The way in which a group of people was identified as the cause of everything that went wrong. That clear distinction: ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The bodies that Master Roel had shown were no longer recognized as human; not even when there was still life in it.
Images from the present
When the two minutes approached again on Monday, I spent most of my time thinking about images from the present for the first time, because of all those times of dwelling on the past. Images of former Minister of Education Gouke Moes, who explains why he wants to sue the Dutch state for “the consequences of mass immigration”. Van Wierd Duk, who says that “certain refugee groups commit a much higher percentage of sexual crimes.” From Raymond Mens, who proclaims from an empty square in an American state that, after all the ICE deportations, people feel much safer there. From Raisa Blommestijn, who makes a plea to encourage “people with a migration background” to “remigrate” to “their country of origin”.
And when, after those two minutes, I saw the Minister of Defense bow her head in front of a wreath of flowers, I thought of how she had dressed the morning before. WNL on Sunday had suggested that she wanted to “amend international law, for example on asylum and human rights.” Or “tighten.” Tightened human rights. None of that comes from grayscale documentaries. They are everyday TV fragments.
There is a lot to think about in those two minutes of silence. But now I would like to learn what you do after that silence.
