Aanspraak Juni 2016 English

June 2016 AanspraakAfdeling Verzetsdeelnemers en Oorlogsgetroffenen Words can kill Betty Bausch-Polak warns young people against discrimination and racism Contents The page numbers refer to the original Dutch edition Page 3 Speaking for your benefit. Page 4-5 Speech by Ahmed Aboutaleb, Mayor of Rotterdam, at the 4 May Commemoration at Dam Square. Page 6-7 Interview with Ahmed Aboutaleb. At fifteen, I had never heard of Hitler. Page 8-11 Betty Bausch-Polak warns young people against discrimination and racism. Aanspraak - June 2016 - 2 Contents The page numbers refer to the original Dutch edition Page 12-15 Philip Everaars tells of his imprisonment at the camp at Dampit in East Java. Page 16-17 The Backpay benefit scheme. Page 22 Questions and answers. No rights may be derived from this text. Translation: SVB, Amstelveen. Aanspraak - June 2016 - 3 Speaking for your benefit Being invited to address you in this preface for the Our visit to Auschwitz left an indelible impression. first time is especially significant for me, particularly The infinite emptiness and silence of Sobibor, the as it coincides with the fifth anniversary of the factual description in Jules Schelvis’ book. The warm implementation of the war victims’ schemes by welcome in the Beth Joles and Beth Juliana homes the Sociale Verzekeringsbank. It gives me the in Israel. The ever-present memory of the war in opportunity not only to express my appreciation for my conversations with the SVB Client Council for the way our staff carry out their day-to-day tasks, but members of the resistance and victims of war. Our also to underline why we do what we do, and for interest in the Dutch East Indies community through whom we are doing it. contact with the Pelita Foundation and the recent implementation of the Backpay scheme, discussed I would like to start by introducing myself. My name in this issue of Aanspraak. is Ruud van Es and I am currently Acting Member of the SVB Board of Directors. I was born in Rotterdam All these experiences make me fully aware of our in 1959, after the war. My parents lived through duty to implement the schemes for victims of war every aspect of the war. It affected my father the with the utmost care and sensitivity to what you have most. As a boy, he watched the city burn from his been through, and realization of the responsibility bedroom window on the Noordereiland, and he was that our country bears. It is in their daily contacts 12 years old when he was hit by a stray bullet during with you that our staff have come to realise the a raid. It made him fearful. As he grew older, the importance of what they are doing. And I have come incident came back to him more and more often in to realise that they put their hearts and souls into his dreams, but he hardly ever spoke about it. His their work for you. suffering scarcely compared with what many others had suffered, but it had a huge influence on the rest of his life. His silence on the subject meant that the war had little effect on my life. That changed in 2011 when Ruud van Es we took over the schemes for victims of war. Acting Member of the Board of Directors of the SVB Aanspraak - June 2016 - 4 Speech by Ahmed Aboutaleb, Mayor of Rotterdam at the 4 May Commemoration at Dam Square Ladies and Gentlemen There are so many stories. They cause us a lot of grief. But they can also teach us a lot. They can teach It does me good to see so many children here us that evil begins with prejudice and humiliation: today. Children whom you are holding by the the Jews were forced to wear a star, their children hand or carrying on your shoulders. Children who were barred from their own classrooms. Roma and will soon, in turn, be carrying the world on their Sinti, gay people, and people who were mentally shoulders. When I was just a child, I lived in a small disabled: they did no one any harm, but there was village very far away. There were no books there, no place for them in Nazi Germany. and no TV. I had never heard mention of the Second World War. That is how a country can fall prey to primitive instincts and thoughtless emotions that wrench The height of evil for us was drought, because it society apart. Instincts that can pave the way to hate, caused the harvest to fail. It wasn’t until I went to to violence, and finally even to murder. Even today. the secondary school in the city that I learned about ‘war’. I still remember clearly my first ‘May 4’ in the That is why we must listen carefully to the stories Netherlands. I was 16, and living in The Hague. The of the past. The stories of survivors, eye-witnesses flags flying at half mast, the sorrow and the two- and those who lost their loved ones. It is our duty minute silence: it all made a deep impression on me. to them. They are asking us to cherish those stories and pass them on. Girls and boys They are asking us to keep using our hearts and Imagine that your class at school keeps getting minds, to continually examine our consciences, emptier. That your teacher tells you that Esther, so that the burden that falls on the shoulders Bram and Marianne are not allowed in your school of our children will be a little lighter. anymore because they’re said to be different. That is why we have come together today. 686 Jewish children from Rotterdam were murdered That is why we remember. in the death camps. Every year, we remember them, together with the school children who have studied their lives. Imagine that your father or your big brother is suddenly taken away from your home. That is what happened during the huge raids in Rotterdam in November 1944. A football stadium full of tens of thousands of young men taken away and forced to work for the German war industry. Aanspraak - June 2016 - 5 At fifteen, I had never heard of Hitler The man who spoke at the Dam Square comme- What made the strongest impression on you? moration ceremony on 4 May 2016 knew nothing ‘When I heard that people had been gassed during about Hitler until he was fifteen. In the isolated Rif the war. The fact that people were deported and mountains where Ahmed Aboutaleb grew up, Adolf gassed, not because they had done anything wrong Hitler and the Second World were simply never but simply because of who they were. I still find that mentioned. “I’d never even heard of the man”. shocking.’ He says it again, louder, ‘I still find that shocking’. What did you hear about the Second World War during your childhood in Morocco? As a young boy, what did you consider Ahmed Aboutaleb: ‘I didn’t know who Adolf Hitler to be the ultimate form of evil? was until I was fifteen. I’d never even heard of the ‘I had no notion of it. You have to understand, there man. As a child in Morocco, it wasn’t until high was Ahmed on a mountain with thirty or forty houses, school that I had my first history class. For the two no electricity and no television or newspapers. We years I was there, we only focused on the history of even spoke another language than the Arabic on the Morocco, that is, the Spanish occupation and the radio. So I didn’t have a concrete picture of a world French protectorate. We were never told anything enemy. For me, evil was hunger, lack of food and about the Second World War; nothing about the water. If there was no rain, the harvest was bad and concentration camps and the Holocaust.’ you starved.’ When Aboutaleb emigrated to the Netherlands Did you stand at Dam Square on 4 May at the age of fifteen, the Second World War was as a citizen of Rotterdam? certainly part of the curriculum at his new school ‘Not particularly. Of course I am a ‘Rotterdammer’ in The Hague. He acquired Dutch friends and the and inextricably linked to my position as Mayor – volunteers at the Regional Centre for Foreigners that permeates everything you do – but I wouldn’t played an important role in making him aware of like to think that I only stood there as the Mayor ‘the war’. They also brought him into contact with of Rotterdam. I wanted to be there primarily as an The Hague branch of the 4 and 5 May Committee. individual. And I wanted to be able to say things ‘The Centre encouraged me and other Moroccans to as an individual. It was a speech by this man in this take an active part in the commemoration. I would place on this particular subject. In any case, it dealt go with them to the Houtzagerij Community Centre with something I feel strongly about. in Hobbemastraat in The Hague. I also went to the commemoration at Parallelweg, where groups of The Mayor of Rotterdam looks at the Second World people had been executed by the Germans. War from a rational and sociological viewpoint and makes a number of sharp analyses. He has noticed Gradually I came to understand the significance of that as time goes by, the image of ‘the war’ remains the Second World War.’ Aboutaleb watched a lot the same.

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