Walking through the soon-to-open National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, Flip Delmonte remembers the city’s dark history.
Delmonte was still a child when, during the Nazi occupation, a relative and the Dutch resistance took him from the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam.
His parents were captured across the street from a theater that the Germans were using as a collection point for Jews to be deported to death camps in Eastern Europe.
In total, more than 100 thousand Jews were deported from the Netherlands.
Flip Delmonte is now 80 years old. He proudly shows his photo, which was taken after World War II. It became part of the exhibition.
One of these days the museum will be officially opened by King Willem-Alexander. It tells the stories of Dutch Holocaust victims through videos, photographs, scale models and other objects.
The Nazis killed three-quarters of the pre-war Jewish population of the Netherlands. This is the largest share in Europe.
The chief curator shows a small collection of ten buttons found on the territory of the Sobibor concentration camp.
The walls of one room are filled from floor to ceiling with hundreds of laws that discriminate against Jews. They were accepted by the German occupiers to justify repression and murder.
Delmonte was glad to give the photograph to the museum, but kept the most valuable gift for himself.
The National Holocaust Museum is located in the historic Jewish quarter of the Dutch capital. Nearby is a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Netherlands. It officially opened in 2021.
