The Hollandsche Schouwburg, which lies opposite Artis Zoo in Amsterdam’s leafy Plantage neighbourhood, is one of the most emotionally charged, contested, and meaningful sites in the Netherlands. In July 1942, this building – where famous names in the history of Dutch theatre once celebrated triumphs – was requisitioned by the Nazis as an assembly and deportation site for Jews, with the intention of making the whole of the Netherlands judenfrei. A great number of Jews from Amsterdam, but also Jews from elsewhere in the Netherlands, were assembled in the Schouwburg. Between 20 July 1942 and 19 November 1943, more than 45,000 Jews, including refugees from Germany and Austria, were interned at the Hollandsche Schouwburg for shorter or longer periods. They were then put onto transports, mainly bound for the transit camp Westerbork in the north of the Netherlands, or for the concentration camp Vught in the south; from there, they were sent onwards to the east, to the concentration and extermination camps of Sobibór, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt.

In short, the Hollandsche Schouwburg fulfilled the same role as the notorious Drancy internment camp to the northeast of Paris, or the somewhat smaller Belgian assembly place at the Dossin Barracks in Mechelen. It is such an important site; yet, until today, no book – nor even an article – was available to enable those who do not read Dutch to discover what had happened there. This volume aims to change this, by telling the history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg from different perspectives: from its foundation as a theatre in 1892, to its establishment as a place of memory, and as a monument with an educational exhibition in the 1990s.

Persecution and occupation

In order to allow us to put the developments that occurred around the Hollandsche Schouwburg during and after the Second World War into perspective, the book opens with an outline of the German occupation and the persecution of the Dutch Jews. In the introductory chapter, Frank van Vree paints a broad picture of how the National Socialist occupying forces, actively assisted by collaborators and Dutch agencies, gradually isolated and eventually deported the Jews, a process that ended with the death of more than 100,000 Dutch citizens in the National Socialist concentration and extermination camps.