Verzetsmuseum (Resistance Museum) Amsterdam

Frommer's Review

Take a trip back in time to Holland's dark World War II days, during the Nazi occupation (1940-45). With authentic photographs, documents, weapons, communications equipment, spy gadgets, and other materials actually used by the Dutch Resistance, exhibits show the ingenuity -- along with courage -- the freedom-fighters brought to bear on German occupation forces. A pedal-powered printing press is a good example of items that evoke the period and bring it to life. The fate of Amsterdam's Jewish community, herded into a ghetto, then rounded up for deportation to concentration camps, has a prominent place, as do the actions of workers who in 1941 went on strike to protest the first deportation of 400 Jewish Amsterdammers. Yet the museum doesn't shrink from less palatable aspects of Holland's wartime record, like the actions of collaborators, including those who joined Dutch Nazi SS units. The museum, which has a cafe, is in the 1876 neoclassical Plancius Building, which once housed a Jewish social club. A changing program of exhibits takes the story beyond Holland's foreign occupation to feature resistance struggles of recent times.

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