The emptiness that they left behind. Three personal accounts on the postwar reconstruction of Jewish life and Jewish-gentile relations in Amsterdam 1945-1960

Before WWII, Amsterdam had been considered a safe haven for Jews. The community of some 78,000 Jews constituted a well integrated part of the overall population. Yet between May 1940 and May 1945 the German occupier succeeded in deporting the vast majority of nearly 60,000 Jews. A few thousand Jews returned from the camps and together with those who had survived in hiding, they made up the postwar Jewish community of Amsterdam. In the immediate postwar period, a substantial number left their homeland and emigrated, mainly to the US or Palestine: the increasingly antisemitic climate in the Netherlands had been an important push-factor.

This paper focuses on Jewish-non-Jewish relations in the first decade after war in Amsterdam, exploring the question of postwar cohabitation on a microscale, through the study of diaries and personal notes and correspondence, of both Jews and their non-Jewish fellow citizens. It discusses the return of Jews, as perceived by Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and looks into the memorialization of the Holocaust in the first decade after the war. The main argument is that larger parts of both the Jewish and non-Jewish community did think of a ‘status aparte’ for Jews as undesirable: in the individual accounts as well as in the early monumentalization of the exceptional suffering of Amsterdam Jews this viewpoint came to expression.