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The Netherlands' Unrighteous Gentiles
(Wall Street Journal) Tunku Varadarajan - Annemiek Gringold is a Dutch Jew and the principal curator of the National Holocaust Museum, which opened in Amsterdam in March. Some 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before World War II; 102,000 (3/4) perished. After the war, Jewish survivors were ostracized out of fear that they would reclaim property that many Dutch Christians had appropriated. The Jews were a searing reminder that the postwar national self-image - of a plucky, upright folk that had resisted the Nazis to the best of their abilities - was in many cases bogus. Young Dutch people aren't sufficiently taught in schools of the extent to which the country's people collaborated with Nazi occupiers. Too many older citizens still subscribe to the convenient myth that the deportation of their Jewish compatriots to Auschwitz were crimes in which the Dutch didn't participate. When the museum opened on March 10, anti-Israel protesters outside - many of them white and Dutch - called for the chief guest, Israel's President Isaac Herzog, to be tried for genocide. A section in the museum is the "corridor of collaborators," where a third of all portraits depict Dutch people. They were Jew hunters, who got a bounty for turning people in, and volunteer guards. The persecution of Jews in the Netherlands took place in plain view. "We didn't have brick walls and barbed wire and ghettos in the Netherlands," Gringold says. The isolation of Jews was done by laws and regulations, enforced by Dutch civil servants.