Nazis’ looting of Jewish families’ possessions recalled in Dutch exhibition
- A new exhibition in Amsterdam aims to bring home the personal impact Nazi Germany’s wartime occupation of the Netherlands had on Dutch Jewish families
- Among the items are an artwork with a boot print on the back, and a backpack used in a family’s flight to a chicken coop in which they hid until war was over
A backpack, a boot print on an artwork and a 17th century painting are some of the items featured in a new Amsterdam exhibition with a common theme: they all relate to the 1940-45 Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
Three of Amsterdam’s museums have collaborated on the exhibition, which opened on May 31, and for the first time shows the personal impact Nazi Germany’s 1940-45 takeover had on the country’s Jewish population.
Visitors to Amsterdam’s National Holocaust Museum and Jewish Museum can experience the story of eight people or families whose lives were irrevocably changed when their belongings were looted, before they themselves had to flee or died in German concentration camps.
Thousands of pieces of art, religious artefacts and other belongings were stolen during the period and returned to the Netherlands after the war, resulting in a decades-long struggle for their rightful owners to reclaim their property.
“These are eight personal stories,” said Mara Lagerweij, a conservator of the nearby Rijksmuseum, which worked together with the Holocaust and Jewish Museums.
“We want to reach two goals with this exhibition: one, we wanted to show that the looting of Jewish objects was systematic, and secondly, how it impacted the lives of people,” she says.
