Remembering and Forgetting at Concentration Camp Sites: A Case Study from the Netherlands

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• Greta Lawrence, University of Cambridge
• Thursday 27 October 2011, 13:00-14:30
• McDonald Institute Seminar Room, Downing Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Liz Cohen.

Camp Westerbork. Camp Vught. Camp Amersfoort. These are just some of the names of the transit and penal camps left behind in the Netherlands by the Nazis at the end of World War II. As the Dutch began the process of national recovery in the post-liberation era, the physical landscape was littered with the remnants of penal and transit camps, a reminder of the recent occupation and the baggage of victimhood, loss, and collaboration. The Dutch psychological landscape was deeply affected by the experience of occupation and the legacy of the perpetration of the Holocaust on Dutch soil. In The Netherlands, historians and heritage professionals processed and responded to the concentration camp sites and formed a national patriotic narrative of the Dutch wartime experience, including and sometimes excluding the story of the Holocaust. The camp sites became “les lieux de memoire” (Nora, 1989), sites of memory for remembering a national story of the Holocaust. This dissertation uses the penal and transit camp sites in the Netherlands as a lens for looking at the change in the Dutch national memory of the Holocaust from the immediate aftermath of the war to the present day; from “retrospective glorification” (Lagrou, 2000, 2) of résistance fighters and ordinary citizens’ suffering to a narrative dominated by a recognition of the exceptionalism of the Jewish experience. This dissertation aims to shed light on how the Dutch views of the Holocaust affected the display and management of concentration camp sites under discussion here, focusing on current displays and their layers of past interpretation of the narrative of the Holocaust as perpetrated in The Netherlands.

This talk is part of the Heritage Research Group Weekly Seminar Series series.

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• Heritage Research Group Weekly Seminar Series
• McDonald Institute Seminar Room, Downing Site

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