The Hollandsche Schouwburg was not designed as a memorial museum from scratch, but evolved over time, superimposing older structures and functions into a fragmented and chaotic whole. The result is a site that is experienced by many visitors as authentic and evocative by using traces, signs and other markers that have a direct and actual connection to the past that they mediate. These indexical interventions emphasize the feeling of being there, at the site where part of the persecution of the Jews was carried out. These indices are not unmediated traces of the past. Instead, they are a conjunction of the site's promise and the visitor's expectation to find traces of the past. This is what I call the ‘latent indexicality’ of the Hollandsche Schouwburg that encourages visitors to look for fragmentary and material signs of the Holocaust. In some instances, these signs have been explicitly designed and curated as such, and at other times they are actively imagined by visitors. Indexical signs are constructs that are not inherent to a material environment. They are highly affective and allow visitors to reimagine their relationship with the past and potentially inscribe their own biographies in the museum's narrative. This process is a creative interplay between the site's materiality, exhibition strategies by the architect and curator, and the imaginative appropriation of the visitor.

An example of this complex interaction is the historic photograph placed on a large panel in the garden behind the courtyard, on the very spot the people in this picture were standing in 1942 (see figure 4.1). A girl depicted in black-and-white waves at you, smiling, standing in a disorganized courtyard. Her hand is blurry, her smile genuine. A boy in front of her has a somewhat defiant, but playful posture. A man in a suit with a white armband is drinking from a teacup and in the background a police officer is talking to someone. People are sitting alone in the sun while others are talking to each other.

The photograph is blown up to life-sized proportions and stands in the middle of a rather empty garden. You are now backstage, behind the former theater stage that holds the large pylon.