About This Trip

I abandoned my standard naming scheme, partly because it is hard to come up them sometimes and partly because this indicated more of an informative tone than one about my adventure. So for the about me part and the explanation of what a Magellan Project is in the first place, I would like to refer you to two previous posts under my Malta Magellan Project label. Even though I like to think I did a good job in explaining what a Magellan Project is in the past, that tells you little about why I undertook this specific one to Amsterdam. In the simplest terms, my Magellan Project was to visit areas of Jewish Heritage in Amsterdam, understand the difficulties the Jews and the average Dutchman faced under Nazi occupation, and to see firsthand both the contributions the Jews had made to the city of Amsterdam and see the Dutch "freedom of conscious" which allowed all faiths to practice freely long before any other European nation albeit quietly.

If that was not long enough of a history lesson or reason to satisfy you, here is also an excerpt from my original proposal to visit Amsterdam referring to World War II and the Holocaust :

Unsurprisingly, Jews with the means to leave Germany left as swiftly as they could to any country that would take them. The Netherlands, again, showed its sympathy and willingness to help the persecuted Jews from Germany and Austria and took in between 25,000 to 34,000 Jewish refugees. At this time, the Jewish population of the Netherlands represented two percent of The Netherland’s total population, even before they took in the refugees. Unfortunately, Hitler’s hatred of the Jews compared only with Hitler’s thirst for conquest and by 1941, the Netherlands had fallen under Nazi occupation.

            Even under occupation, the Dutch showed remarkable compassion towards its fellow Jewish citizens. Despite the difficulty to hide Jews in the most densely populated country in Europe, many heroic Dutch took it upon themselves to attempt to hide their Jewish neighbors wherever they could. The most famous case of which is the diarist Anne Frank hiding in the attic of a Dutch family alongside her sister Margot. The Dutch were also the first in all of Nazi-occupied Europe to directly rebel against the inhuman treatment of their Jews in the February Strike. This showed that even the Dutch non-Jews understood the plight that the Jews of the Netherlands were facing.

During this time, most Jews were living in Amsterdam which is why this is the destination that my project will focus on. My project is to chronicle, visit, and reflect on the religious tolerance the Dutch have willingly granted to the persecuted Jews of Europe as well as Dutch resistance to the Nazi’s savage attempts to slaughter the Jews within the Netherlands. My travels will include the Anne Frank House, as well as different Jewish museums and those that relay the history of the Dutch resistance to Nazi rule. I also plan to attend a service in one of the Netherland’s many synagogues. The beauty of the Netherlands lies in its explicit desire to be accepting to all religious creeds. In the 1900s Netherlands was referred to as the “Jerusalem of the West” by its Jews, and to this day, the Netherlands remains a destination that is welcoming and accepting of its Jewish population."

If you have any questions please let me know, but in this goal I feel that I have succeeded in seeing all I wished to see. To see the everyday plight under occupation, I went to the Verzetsmuseum, to see Jewish heritage in Amsterdam, I went to the Portuguese Synagogue, the Jewish Historical Center, and the Diamond Museum, and finally to see the most popularized example of a neighbor attempting to save a Jewish neighbor, I went to the Anne Frank House. All in all, my goals were set and they were accomplished.