Verzetsmuseum: The Choices of the Occupation
Why is it significant?
Look up at the building on the corner, with its stately classical front: it looks like a temple of the arts, and in a way it was. The Plancius building was put up in the 1870s for a Jewish choral society, and for decades concerts and festivities filled it.
Key Facts
| Place | Verzetsmuseum: The Choices of the Occupation |
|---|---|
| Address | Plantage Kerklaan 61, 1018 CX Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36780, 4.91270 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
Look up at the building on the corner, with its stately classical front: it looks like a temple of the arts, and in a way it was. The Plancius building was put up in the 1870s for a Jewish choral society, and for decades concerts and festivities filled it. Today it houses the Verzetsmuseum, the Dutch Resistance Museum.
The museum asks a quiet, uncomfortable question: what would you have done? Under the occupation, most people simply tried to get by. Some collaborated. A minority resisted, and resistance came in many sizes. Listening to forbidden radio from London, printing illegal newspapers, forging documents, hiding a neighbour in the attic, or, very rarely, taking up arms.
Forgery was an art in itself. The Dutch identity card introduced during the occupation was one of the hardest in Europe to fake, with photograph, fingerprint and watermarks, and the authorities were proud of it. Resistance workers stole blank cards, copied stamps by hand, and later printed near-perfect fakes. Thousands of people in hiding, called onderduikers, those who dived under, depended on them for ration coupons and for their lives.
It was dangerous work. Thousands of Dutch resistance fighters were executed or died in camps, and every person in hiding needed a whole chain of helpers who risked the same. Anne Frank's family, a short walk west of here in the canal ring, was hidden for two years by just such a small circle of helpers, before they were discovered and arrested in August 1944.
The museum tells these stories through ordinary objects: a false bottom in a cupboard, a radio in a hollow book, a ration card. That is what the resistance mostly was, small acts of courage in ordinary homes. Now cross the street to the old main gate of the zoo, where one of the boldest acts of all took place right next door.