‘Bye dad, see you tomorrow’
During World War Two, Hitler and his Nazi party tried to murder all Jews. They built huge extermination camps in Germany and Poland, to which Jews in the Netherlands were also sent. This exhibition is about Jewish children who were rescued from a day care centre in Amsterdam, where they had been assembled for deportation to the camps.
500 smuggled
The day care centre took in some 5,000 children in total. Under the nose of the German guards, resistance workers smuggled 500 of these children out of the day care centre. Non-Jewish resistance groups then took them to homes where they could go into hiding.
More than 100,000 murdered
The Netherlands was home to 140,000 Jews before World War Two. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported and murdered: men, women and children. Many Jews wanted to go into hiding, but the Netherlands is a flat and densely populated country making it difficult to hide thousands of people. Jewish families often wanted to stay together, and it was also difficult to hide an entire family. Anyone caught helping Jews was punished severely by the Nazis. Very few people were willing to take the risk.
