De Dokwerker

He is nobody in particular: a dock worker with his sleeves rolled up. He stands for the day a city stopped work because its neighbours were being taken away.

On the weekend of 22 and 23 February 1941, German police sealed off this square and the streets around it. This was the Jewish quarter. They seized more than four hundred Jewish men, more or less at random, lined them up here and took them away. Only two of them survived the war.

Amsterdam saw it happen. Two days later, on the morning of the 25th, the tram drivers did not take their trams out. The strike had been called by the banned Communist Party, with leaflets printed overnight, but it spread far beyond the party. Dockers walked off the wharves, then shipyard and factory workers, then office staff and shop assistants. By afternoon the city was at a standstill, and the next day the strike spread to the towns around it.

The occupiers put it down in two days, with gunfire. Nine people were killed and many more arrested. It did not stop the deportations. But it was the first mass protest in occupied Europe against the treatment of the Jews, and nobody had ordered it.

The statue was unveiled by Queen Juliana in December 1952. The man who posed for it was not a docker but a carpenter, a friend of the sculptor’s. Every year on 25 February, people file past this statue in silence.