Hollandsche Schouwburg

People came here in evening dress to see operetta. Fifty years later tens of thousands were held in the same auditorium, waiting for a train.

The theatre opened in 1892 in what was then a new and prosperous part of town, with a large Jewish middle class living around it. For decades it put on Dutch plays and musical comedy.

In 1941 the occupiers decreed that it was to be a theatre for Jews only: Jewish performers, Jewish audience. A year later they found another use for it. From the summer of 1942, Jews from Amsterdam and beyond were ordered to report here or were brought in after round-ups. They were held in the auditorium, sometimes for days, hundreds at a time, and then taken by tram and train to the transit camp at Westerbork. From there the trains went east.

Small children were separated from their parents and kept in a nursery across the street. That gave a few people a chance. The staff of the nursery, with students and members of the resistance, got about six hundred children out unseen, some of them carried away behind a passing tram that hid them from the guards, and placed them with families in the countryside.

After the war nobody could bear to see a performance here. The building was given to the city, and in 1962 the gutted auditorium was opened as a memorial.