Site of Memory, Site of Mourning

This chapter deals with the postwar history of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater in Amsterdam used for the deportation of more than 46 thousand Jews during World War 2, in the context of the Dutch and European commemorative culture. Several months after the liberation, the Schouwburg was reopened as a theater. This caused much distress and an action comity collected funds to acquire the building. The struggle to find an ‘appropriate destination’ took until 1962 and is illustrative of the difficulty to deal with similar sites of dark heritage in the first decades years after the war. From the 1990s onwards, attention turned to education and other international developments. It currently is a memorial museum that receives tens of thousands of visitors annually and hosts the Dutch Yom HaShoah commemoration. It continuous to be an important landmark of Shoah heritage.