Liberation Day

Liberation Day is the newest national holiday in the Netherlands and one of the few that have nothing to do with religion, with New Year's Day and King's Day. Rather than celebrate their Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo, they celebrate their more recent liberation from German occupation in World War II. May 4th is Remembrance Day, when people reflect on the sacrifices their countrymen made to free their people. May 5th is the day to party.

A popular event on Remembrance Day is to talk with survivors of the war. Watching how the people of the Netherlands treat their elderly is a beautiful thing. It is not simply respect for their elders. We have that in China. What I see in Amsterdam is a population that genuinely cares about what the oldest generation has to teach them. I could not help but imagine how much better off the United States would be if we followed this example, and how that is never going to happen. At least in my lifetime.

A lot of people also visit cemeteries. Someone told me that surviving members of military units go to the graves of their former brothers in arms. That sounds like a great tradition to me. Since World War II ended 74 years ago, there are still a few people around who remember it all in vivid detail. All too soon, we will only have what they told us.

At 20:00 on Remembrance Day, the entire country falls silent for two minutes of commemoration. It is a remarkable thing to witness. The people of Holland are not especially noisy. They can never compare to Chinese or Americans. But Amsterdam is a crowded city. It is never painfully loud, but I have never heard it as dead silent as those two minutes. As an American, I fully expected some smartass to make some smartass remark while everyone else was quiet. Americans are nothing if not attention whores. The people of Amsterdam were nothing but respectful of what those two minutes represent.

Liberation Day is less somber and a lot louder. Since the holiday is in spring, it looks a lot like Easter and King's Day, without all the eggs and orange. People go to free concerts and parades. There is a children's festival in Vondelpark. I have been to too few places where children are treated with the compassion and respect they need, and given the education they deserve. Israel and the Netherlands immediately come to mind. Nowhere else does.

Something Amsterdam did that I have never seen anywhere in the world is what they called open houses. It had nothing to do with real estate. On Remembrance Day and Liberation Day, people who live in houses where Jewish families lived or were hidden during the war open their homes to the public for short commemorations. Someone in each house, either a survivor, their descendant and/or the current occupant tells everyone the story of whoever lived in that house. Rather than a history of the entire war, it is a capsule history of a single family or a single person, and what they went through to survive, or in too many cases, not survive.

Each house was its own little temporary museum, but the procedure was mostly the same. The host read the names of everyone who was being remembered in that house, which is a very Jewish thing. If your name is read out loud, you are not forgotten. The best thing Steven Spielberg ever did as a filmmaker was have a lot of the actual names of the Schindler Jews read out loud. They were survivors, but it is the same principle.

Then someone tells the story of whoever lived in the house and, this is an important part, why they want to tell the story. None of this is a dry museum exhibit. These are all personal stories, mostly told by the people who lived them, or their children. Afterward was a short question and answer session that I wanted to last a lot longer. But no one had all day because we all went to multiple houses.

The first time I went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, I heard a little old lady tell her story. She sat in a chair and talked about her life. It was heartbreaking, even though she was overwhelmingly optimistic. The open houses had too few people of her generation, but they augmented the first person accounts with photographs of everyone in happier times. People read poems and sang songs. Most surprising, several people read from diaries. Most of us probably only think of Anne Frank when you talk about diaries of people trying to escape the war, but there were countless diaries written in as many quiet rooms. Anne Frank was one of the more naturally talented writers, but all of those stories need to be told.

The emphasis is on personal history, but the entire event is educational for the community as a whole. Before this all started, thousands of people were living in houses that were owned by Jewish families before they were kidnapped and taken away to death camps. Many of the current residents had no idea about the history of their homes. When you buy a house, they tell you when it was built and the last time it was remodeled, but no one ever gets a full history of the past occupants. For most of us, World War II is an abstract event in the past. The open houses bring it all closer to home.

The open houses are mostly for the people who live in the neighborhoods, but outsiders like me were more than welcome. Several people happily switched from Nederlands to English when they realized I was a foreigner. In my experience, the people of Amsterdam, unlike a lot of other places, have absolutely no objection to using a foreign language. Most of them speak better English than most Americans.