National Monument

People sit on these steps eating chips, and that is partly the point. For one evening a year the whole country stops in front of this pillar and says nothing for two minutes.

Every 4 May at eight in the evening, trams halt, trains stop on the tracks and the Netherlands falls silent. The king lays a wreath here. The ceremony remembers the Dutch who died in the Second World War and in conflicts since, and this square is where it happens.

The Dam was chosen for a reason. On 7 May 1945, two days after the German surrender, thousands of people gathered here to welcome the Allied troops. German marines, still armed and holed up in a building on the corner of the square, opened fire on the crowd. More than thirty people were killed, in the first days of peace.

The monument was unveiled in 1956. The four chained men at the centre stand for the suffering of the war. The figures on either side represent the resistance, the dogs at their feet stand for loyalty and grief, and above them a woman with a child and doves rises towards the peace that followed.

The curved wall behind the pillar holds twelve urns. Eleven contain soil from places where people were executed or buried in each of the eleven provinces the country then had. The twelfth holds earth from Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies, where the war was also fought.