Ich habe jetzt kurzfristig die Moderation übernommen und für Sie zur Info, was Sie vielleicht jetzt ein bisschen irritiert, wir werden jetzt zwischen Deutsch und Englisch switchen, weil Bas hat uns gesagt, er versteht sehr gut Deutsch, das heißt, Sie können auch gerne dann die Fragen im Anschluss auf Deutsch stellen, aber der Vortrag wird auf Englisch sein und ich werde Ihnen auch jetzt kurz seine Biografie auf Englisch vorstellen. Wir freuen uns sehr, dass er aus den Netherlands zu uns gekommen ist. Bas Korthold ist Historian und er ist Head of Research at the Camp Westerbork Memorial Center and Coordinator of the Team Year The Memory of Camp Westerbork, which includes the International Collaboration Projekt Houses of Darkness erzählen. Wir werden dann kurz Filmclips sehen aus His Name is My Name und am Ende there will be questions and great answers hopefully. Hopefully, that's always the question of course. So, please. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you first of all for the invitation to be here. In my life I've studied for like 10, 15 years. I never had one good grade for art and now I'm speaking on an art university so this is one of the high points of my life. I would say tomorrow I'm quitting my job. No but it's a truly lovely city and some of, I was this morning in Sloss Hardheim. Very interesting. So great to be here. I want to tell you about, already said, about a project called Houses of Darkness, which we did with the Geringstädter Bergen-Belsen and a former concentration camp in Norway called Falstad. And again Bas Korthold working now for 16 years in Westerbork as a researcher including these kind of projects. For the beginning of this project, Houses of Darkness, the memory of Kamp Westerbork, we have to go back to 2018. Because in 2018 we as Westerbork, and you may know Westerbork. Westerbork was a concentration camp from which during the Second World War, some 107,000 people, Jews, Sinti and Roma, were deported, from which only 5,000 survived. And it's been a memorial center since 1983, so around 40 years. And in 2018, we were asked by the Refugee Foundation, which is quite a bigger foundation in the Netherlands, raising awareness for modern day refugees. We were asked if we want to collaborate with them on an event. They have a yearly event called the Night of the Refugees and this means that from the big cities in the Netherlands or places in the Netherlands, people walk for 20, 30 kilometers to raise awareness and money for refugees worldwide. And they asked us, Westerbork, do you want to collaborate in this event? And they said to us, because it was in 2019, this event would be done, because they said, in 1939, Kamp Westerbork was built as a refugee camp before it was a transit camp. So then refugees now maybe we can do a collaboration and and raise awareness for this and we thought about it and we said after a couple of weeks we said okay let's do this and one of the reasons was again 80 years refugees this was one of the histories of Westerbork you can say and the other reason was that we've done events with the refugee foundation for over 30 years and in January 2019 we came out together with a press release saying, okay, the night of the refugees will start in Westerbork and people can walk from Westerbork to Groningen, which is the biggest city nearby, some 30 kilometers. And came out with the press release. And immediately after that, a big discussion broke out on the internet. Especially on social media media people were discussing the the meaning of of Westerbork and a lot of people said okay it's fine that you do that but there were some people from especially the Jewish community and from right-wing parties in the Netherlands that said don't talk about refugees in a place like Westerbork you only have to talk about what happened during the Second World War and not about history before and after the war. And I didn't know the word cancel until that moment. Cancel culture is now a big, big thing in the Netherlands. But this really happened to us. And you see some of the lines, some of the letters we got, some of the messages that were posted on the Internet. And some of the people said it's an outrageous and ludicrous attempt Je ziet wat we op de internet hebben gezien. Sommigen zeiden dat het een verblijvende uitdaging is om te verantwoorden aan het kritiek van de migratie met het Holocaust. En een ander personage zei dat het het historische gebied van Cambesterbork is aan het afvallen. Dus een grote discussie. In het einde werd de Nijfheer van de Refugees afgesloten. So a big discussion at the end. Really the night of the refugees was cancelled. We didn't do it because we got threats on the internet. That people said okay we're gonna go there. And we're gonna really mess up the event. So for us it was a kind of moment saying okay. We have a kind of meaning as a memorial site to what Westerbork should be. But other people have other meanings about. Other views of what Westerbork should be. And it wasn't the first time. If you look at the history of Kamp-Westerbork after the war, so the history of the memory of Kamp-Westerbork, almost from 1945 on, there has been discussion of what Westerbork should be, how the historical side should be represented, for example, visualized. For example, to the left, you see this is one of the most...historische site moet worden voorbeeldelijk opgelegd. Aan de linkerkant zie je een van de meest beroemde monumenten. Het is een vreemde moment. Het is de 4e mei van de Nationale Commemoratie. Ik heb het net op mijn telefoon gekeken. Aan de linkerkant van het monument......zijn er 6000 mensen die zich hier aan het commemoren. phone there are some at that on the top left that monument there are some 6 000 people over there commemorating but this was monument the first monument for westerbork and it was built you can say in 1970 so 25 years after the war it took 25 years of discussion of okay should there be a monument in westerbork the first plans to get a monument in Westerbork already were there in the late 1940s. There were discussions, should we do that in a place like Westerbork, have a monument for the people who were murdered, the more than 100,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma. And first of all they asked the city of Westerbork, because camp Westerbork was in the city and theving van de stad van Westerbork. En ze vroegen de maire van Westerbork, oké, is het oké dat we een monument neerkomen in Westerbork voor die mensen die worden vermoord? En de maire van Westerbork in de jaren 1940 zei, ik denk niet dat dat een goede idee is. Want Westerbork is een prachtige stad, prachtige fietsen, mooie cafés. Een prachtige stad, prachtige fietsen, mooie cafés. En elke keer dat mensen over Westerbork praten, is het altijd over het kamp. Het is altijd negatief en nooit positief. Dus voor mij niet een monument in Ken-Westerbork. Toen vroegen ze de militairen. Want op dat moment werkten soldaten bij Ken-Westerbork. En ze vroegen de koninginnen en generaals van de Nederlandse arme. En die mensen zeiden, die mensen nu in Westerbork and they asked colonels and generals of the Dutch army and those people said those people now in Westerbork those young soldiers they were born like in 1930 so they were teenagers during the second world war and this is way too sensitive this this historical period we want to forget the second world war so for us no monument in Westerbork and the last people they asked was the Jewish community in the Netherlands and they said do you want to have a monument in Westerbork and a lot of Jews at the time said we want to forget we don't want to think about it anymore so no monument in Westerbork for us and from that time on every time there was talk about het monument, maar ook over wat we moeten doen met de barrikes dezelfde antwoorden, dus bijna elke barrik in Westerbork werd in de 50's en 60's versterkt en dat duurde tot 1970, voor er een monument was dus weer een discussie in de eerste 25 jaar, hoe moet Westerbork eruitzien, wat was de doel van Westerbork, et cetera. Aan de rechterkant zie je een ander beroemd monument in Westerbork. Het heet de 102.000 stenen. En in Westerbork is er voor elke vriendin één kleine steen. En dit monument is in het begin van de jaren 90. En ik heb het je al verteld, het Memorial Center in 1983. Tot het begin van de jaren 90. Niets in Westerbork. En toen zeiden de directeurs aan elkaar. until 1983, till the beginning of the 1990s, nothing in Westerbork. And then they said to each other, the directors at the time, okay, we have to visualize a little bit how Westerbork looked like. And they made a plan with some hills put in Westerbork, which showed where the barracks were, but also this monument. And they discussed this with the Jewish community, with other people. And when it was opened in 1992, on the same day, there was a very critical article in the biggest jewish newspaper in the netherlands that said memorial center westerbork you're creating a fun park a fun theme park out of the holocaust this goes way too far putting a monument like this and creating hills in a place like westerbork don't visualize it visualize it let it be as it is completely empty with only one monument the national monument so again discussion...als Westerbork, niet te visualiseren, het te laten zijn zoals het is. Helemaal leeg met maar één monument, het Nationale Monument. Dus weer een discussie over hoe Westerbork er zou moeten zien. Op de linkerkant zie je natuurlijk een bus. Tegenwoordig is Westerbork Museum drie kilometer van het site zelf. Omdat in de jaren 60 grote telescopen in Westerbork geplaatst. Het is een compleet andere soort van geschiedenis, maar deze telescopes werken nog steeds. Ze zijn de meest krachtige in Europa, vreemd genoeg. Dus niemand kan naar Westerbork met een auto. Je moet stoppen bij het museum, dat 3 kilometer van het site zelf is geplaatst. Dus in de beginnende jaren 90 zeiden we, oké, we hebben vermoorde mensen die misschien niet naar de campstijl kunnen lopen, laten we een bus hebben. Een grote discussie over de busrijding van het museum naar de campstijl, want oké, sommigen zeiden voor vermoorde mensen, maar nu niet zelfs voor vermoorde mensen lopen en je moet echt de weg naar de vorige campstijl ondergaan. Het is veel te luxeus om een bus te hebben en tegelijkertijd hadden we een klein museumcafé don't walk anymore and you should really undergo the walk to the former campsite. It's way too luxury to have a bus and at the same time we had a small museum cafe with drinks. Don't drink and eat at a former concentration camp, it goes way too far. Again, discussion about the memory you could say of Can Bestebog. The last one, I was present already at that time, 2008. Ik was al present in 2008. Na de oorlog had Cambesterbork verschillende functies. Voor twintig jaar, van 1951 tot 1970, werden mensen uit Indonesië gehouden. Het was een oude Nederlandse kolonie in Westerbork. Maar zelfs daarvoor, twee weken na de liberatie, werd Cambesterbork een gevangenis voor collaboraties. En we werden gevraagd door gevangenis voor collaboratoren. En we werden gevraagd door de kinderen van deze collaboratoren, waarom maak je geen uitstraling in je museum drie kilometer van de site over deze periode? Het duurde zo'n tien jaar denken en toen zei de oude directeur, het is nu tijd om een uitstraling te doen over die periode, over de vermoeding in Kent-Westerbork. En we kwamen uit met de idee in 2007, 2008. En ik was werken in Westerbork, ik was 23. Ik was nog steeds aan het studeren, dit was mijn masterthesis over dit periode. En ik had nog steeds de imagijn op 23, oké, de oorlog is over. Het is net 70, 60 jaar geleden. Het is net de doodhistorie. Maar voor mij was dit echt een belangrijk les die ik op dat moment heb geleerd, dat de Tweede Wereldoorlog heel erg een leefbare geschiedenis is. Want we kwamen uit met de idee, en we zeiden in de pressereleases, we gaan dit doen, we gaan een uitstelling maken over het collaboratiescamp. En je moet weten dat de eerste drie maanden de oude juwile inmaten, die in april 1945 worden verlaten, And you must know that the first three months, the former Jewish inmates, so who were liberated in April 1945, they were still in the same camp as the collaborators. And they got a new role. They were the former inmates. They were now the guards. They had to guard those NSBs, those collaborators. So a very sensitive period. And with some 80 collaborators died in Westerbork. And we came out with the press release saying, okay, we want to do this. We want to have an exhibition about this period. And at the time, a lot of letters came in. And my old director who was working in Westerbork for like 30 years, he said, this was the period in which he got the most negative letters out of all those 30 years. Because a lot of Jewish former Jewish inmates and the family members said don't do this in Westerbork do this in a museum 10 kilometers from here but not in a place like Westerbork in Westerbork you should talk about what happened during the second world war and not about what happened after the war and there was a man he was like a professor very intelligent man and he wrote and i never forget this he wrote i can understand that you are doing this rationally i can understand but my heart says no so this was a very much a discussion between the head and the heart and and people said i can understand why you do this but maar doe dit niet in Westerbork, omdat je een soort hierarkie creëert binnen pijn en moord. Doe dit niet. Dus nogmaals, een discussie over wat Westerbork zou moeten zijn. En als je kijkt naar de geschiedenis van de herinnering van Come Westenbork, vergelijken opinies. Natuurlijk, zoals hier, geloof ik dat in Nederland de meeste museum's gesloten waren tijdens corona, tijdens de COVID-periode. We hebben ook... Het museum was gesloten, maar buiten het kamp. Mensen konden daarheen gaan. En mensen waren erg bang voor ons dat de bus niet drijft tijdens de COVID-periode. Want hoe zouden ze naar Westerbork, naar de campsite, moeten? Nu moeten ze wandelen. Dus in de jaren 1990 waren mensen bang dat de bus 30 jaar later werd gestuurd. Het is een compleet ander soort van manier. Dus de opinieën veranderen. En in de afgelopen maand van de nacht van de refugies, natuurlijk hebben we gesproken met elkaar, we hebben geprobeerd om te reflecteren op wat er is gebeurd. In 2019 hebben we gezegd dat we iets moeten doen met dit. We moeten iets doen. Natuurlijk, in Westerbork moeten we het gesprek over de geschiedenis van Westerbork praten, maar we moeten ook over de geschiedenis van de herinnering van Westerbork praten. Want wat Westerbork nu ziet, heeft meer te doen met de laatste 80, 75 jaar dan met wat er in 1939 en 1945 gebeurde. Dus we hebben gezegd, laten we een groot project over dit en noem het de herinnering van kan westenbork en en echt centrale vragen hebben die centrale voor ons zijn als memorialiteiten in westenbork maar waarschijnlijk ook vragen die heel centrale zijn voor veel andere gedankstatussen in de wereld zou ik zeggen eerst van al de degree of experience ik denk dat dit een van de thema's is vandaag. Kun je bijvoorbeeld comics gebruiken om de verhaal van een plek zoals Westerbork of Schloss Hardheim of Mauthausen te vertellen? Kun je een VR gebruiken? Kun je hologrammen gebruiken? Als je genoeg geld hebt als memorialist, kun je alles doen. Je kunt wat je ziet in de filmen creëren, maar kun je zo erg zo ver gaan? Dus dit was een interessante vraag die we wilden stellen. Authenticiteit. Er is bijna niets meer in Westerbork. Maar we weten dat sommige huizen in de jaren 60 verkocht werden. We weten waar ze zijn. Kunnen we die huizen terugbrengen? Als die huizen vergaan en we willen een huizen visualiseren... kunnen we een fake huizen in een plek zoals Westerbork plaatsen? Hoe moeten we dat aanpakken? Een belangrijke vraag. Verhouding tot de dag van de reffers. Kunnen we over de reffers in Westerbork praten? Kunnen we over de Ukraine praten? Kunnen we over dit soort belangrijke dingen praten? Kunnen we een les leren van een plek of is Westerbork alleen over deesterbork only be about the history shocking images of course there are a lot of shocking images of the second world war maybe not of Westerbork Westerbork was a transit camp but Westerbork also talks about a place like Sobibor also talks about a place like Bergen-Belsen because transports left from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen and I think the only images really that are there of Bergen-Belsen are of the liberation. And you may have seen those images of the stocking piles. Really, really hard to see if you are an adult. But in Westerbork nowadays, a lot of children come, children of 10, 11, 12 years old, but also in summertime, children of 7, 8, 6 en 5 jaar oud. Hoe moeten we de geschiedenis van Bergen-Belsen aan deze kinderen laten zien? Zouden we schokkende imago's gebruiken? Of doen we dat niet? De verschillende periode van Comestiborg, ik heb het je gezegd, de entournementcamp-exhibitie. Is dit een plek waar we over de refugiecamp, over de Molokkencamp moeten praten? En voor nu een heel belangrijk heritage van de beperker. Want het enige gebouw dat nu echt in Comestibok is, dat niet in de jaren 60 werd verbroken, is het commandantsehuis. Er is dus niets op de campsite en we hebben een commandantsehuis. En wat moeten we doen met dit commandantsehuis? Tot 2008 werd dit commandantse's huis geinhabiteerd door een vrouw die daar in 1951 woonde met haar ouders. Ze was de eigenaar van deze huis en ze zag ons als de vijand. Ze wilde niets met ons doen. Dus de eerste keer dat we de binnenkant van deze commando's huis zagen was in 2009 toen deze vrouw dood. En toen we in deze huis stonden, we zagen echt, omdat deze vrouw dood is, en toen we in deze huid stonden, we zagen echt, omdat deze vrouw een vreemde vrouw was, we zagen echt hoe het was in 1939. De kist van 1939, we hadden foto's, was de kist van 2009. Dus alles werd gepreserveerd. En natuurlijk kwam de vraag, wat moeten we doen? En er is een beroemde professor in de geschiedenis in Nederland die altijd over historische sensatie praat. Dat je binnen een gebouw stapt of een beeld ziet en zegt, oké, dit is een historische sensatie. En natuurlijk kunnen we de huis openen en mensen gaan binnen de huis en hebben een historische sensatie. En dan verliezen we Westerbork. En ze hebben alleen over de perpetrators gedacht en niet over de vliegtuigen. Dus hoe moeten we deze soort problemen bepalen? have thought about the perpetrators and not about the victims so how should we deal with this kind of problems so very important question we want to really pose to to to the to the public and really have a question mark with it and not give the answer but really hear the ideas of everybody that visits Westerbork and beyond so how did we do that we had of course long read articles things on the internet a symposium we had a couple of weeks ago a guest curators we did an exhibition with eight guest curators cindy and roma and it's still still going on the next guest curatorship will open in two weeks it's with the cindy roma but also with jewish uh guest curators uh gastcurators van een meer academische vorm, dus een heel breed uitzicht op wat Westerbork is. Publicaties, online lektes, en nogmaals een uitstraling. En voor nu een project genaamd Houses of Darkness, dat we met de Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen en Falstad gedaan hebben. De idee om dit Houses of Darkness project te doen, kwam een paar jaren geleden. Tegelijkertijd, rond 2018, bezocht ik Gedingsted in de noordelijke deel van Duitsland in een ander internationaal project en we hebben een echt, zoals we het noemen in Nederland, een echt Duitse-style tour. Het duurde dus vier uur. We zagen elke grasvlees. Er was een soort uitleg over het. En na vier uur, of iets van dat soort, we liepen door een huis. Ik was nieuwsgierig over het huis en ik zei oké, wat is dit huis? En toen zei de tourleider, dit is het commando huis, we hadden geen tijd om er iets mee te doen. Dus we gaan gaan niet binnen. Ik zei, het is 65 jaar na de oorlog, natuurlijk had je tijd om er iets mee te doen. Maar net als in Westerbork, bepaalde je het niet te toetsen. Omdat het heel gevoelig is. Dus ik was meteen geïntrugt, oké, het is niet alleen in Westerbork, het is ook in dat kamp. En ik sprak met de collega's van Bergen-Belsen and Falstad, they had the same kind of problem, you can say. And then we said, okay, let's try to combine it and really attack this question together and not by ourselves. So we went to the European Union and we asked for some money and we got the money to start a project called the Houses of Darkness, which is really about perpetrator heritage, but also about perpetratorship. How do you pose questions about perpetratorship? How do you talk about perpetratorship? In a country like the Netherlands or in Norway, for example, there's a famous word for explaining collaborators, which is kvissling, which is a Norwegian word. So in Norway, it's the same kind of problem, you can say. And I don't have to explain, of course, what the situation is in Germany. But I think for us it was really, OK, how should we talk with the public? And after a couple of months of talking, we really decided, OK, even for us, for staff at the memorial site, we zijn te geïnteresseerd in dit. We hebben te lang gewerkt op dit project, dus we kunnen het zelf doen. Maar misschien is het beter als we artiesten vragen om erop te werken. Om een beetje terug te stappen en te zeggen oké, we geven je een afspraak om echt op deze vraag te werken van je persoonlijke vorm en misschien om een verhaal te maken. En van deze verhaal kan een discussie beginnen. work on this question from your personal view and maybe to make a statement and from the statement discussion can start and we asked three teams of artists you can see him here in Bergen-Belsen Jacob Gansermeyer worked with Onias Landveld and Anna Sibylnik. Jacob Gansermeyer was born in the city of Dachau so really he really grew up with the second world war in his back yard and with dag al zo wie die hier jullie groep op wist de seconde wil voor in de specie arden was de concentration camp in is bekke jarden en die was team top dit oon is landveld en oon is landveld is een black man coming for a former colony de suriname van de nederlands hoe we liet in te hebben clue about the second world war hoe wil je zet dit is nog maar historie is history van europe en not from europe zo dit we teamed them up to really see okay how how does this work and they've made uh arts which you can see in bergen belton but also online so if you're interested you can go to houses of darkness.eu and see their artworks jacob gonzemayor also worked in valstad with simon stranger and and really creating work over there with the commander's house but tonight we're going to watch the arts made by elena jongsma and kel o'neill and they did a project called his name is my name and the background for this project is that uh elena jongsma is from the nearby hood of westeresterbork. Ze was geboren 10 kilometer in de grootste stad. Binnen, een kleinere stad, niet Groningen, maar Assen. En haar vader, Kel O'Neill, komt van de Verenigde Staten. Dus ze zijn partners. Ze zijn ook vermoord. En we hebben met hen over het project gesproken. En ze hebben echt besloten dat het over Eline Jongsma had. about the project and they really decided it had to be about Aline Jongsma because, and she just discovered that a couple of years ago, the paternal grandfather of Aline Jongsma was a mayor during the second world war, a collaborator mayor in the Netherlands. And he was one of the mayors that sent Jews to Westerbork and from Westerbork beyond. And this is a story again, she just discovered three or four years ago, and it wasn't talked about in a family. It was hidden, nobody wanted to talk about it. And for her, this was the opportunity to really dive in her family history and really discover, okay, how does a legacy of, is there a legacy of perpetratorship? Is there a heritage kind of, does it go beyond the collaborator itself? Does it go to the children and how does it work with the children? How does it work in families? And this is, I think, a big question in the Netherlands. It's a big question in Norway and probably also a big question here in Austria and in Germany. How do you deal with that if your great-grandfather or your grandfather or your father has done terrible things and and maybe you love him as a father but how do you deal with that and that's a very difficult question and again for this project it was perfect so they created his name is my name it's like 10 episodes of a couple of minutes animation we're gonna watch it later beautifully done and again this was the my promo this was the the the master thesis i wrote like 15 years ago and i know the sensitiveness of this topic so every time somebody makes something about it i'm extremely critical and saying okay don't use this word this word uh and and what they made i viewed it and i said i don't have any comments it's really good but again we're gonna watch it...extrem kritisch en zeiden oké, gebruik dit woord, dat woord. En wat ze maakten, ik heb het gezocht en ik zei ik heb geen commenten. Het is echt goed. Maar weer, we gaan het kijken en ik wil je opinie horen. Zijn naam is mijn naam, dus drie kunstprojecten. Het is niet het enige wat we in Houses of Darkness deden. We hebben ook een chatbot gecreëerd, wat je weer op de website kunt vinden. Omdat we vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral vooral voor which you can find again on the website, because we imagined that a lot of people seeing these kind of artworks had opinions themselves, had ideas themselves. And we really wanted to engage with them with those ideas. So if you go in the chatbot, the questions that are behind the artwork, so a legacy of collaboration, you can really engage with that. And most of the time, there are different questions. It takes a couple of minutes to really do it. Je kunt daar echt mee betrekken. En de meeste tijd zijn er verschillende vragen. Het kost een paar minuten om het echt te doen. Dus als je daarna naar huis gaat, werk er gewoon op. Het laatste wat ik wil vertellen voor we gaan naar de video's. Voor ons als Westerbock hebben we natuurlijk veel van dit project geleerd. En ik denk dat het team vandaag is van de comics en de holocaust. En voor ons, omdat het een animatiefyde is, de, de. And for us, because it's an animation style, the His Name Is My Name, we really said we want to go on with that. We are now working on the beginning of a project together with Noyen Gamma, together with Cassane Dossin, in creating a new exhibition and a new project with comics and the Holocaust, and it's called The Unimaginable Imagined. And we're going to ask 10 comic artists from Germany, from the Netherlands and from Belgium to make a comic, to make a graphic novel, to make an exhibition based on their ideas about Neuengamme, about Westerbork and about Dossin. And we are still in the phase of getting money, but hopefully next year you can see this in either Westerbork, Neuengamme of in Dosen zien en een grafische novel krijgen in de comic-stores hier in Oost-Zuid-Germanië en overal. Laten we gaan, ik zou zeggen, zijn naam is mijn naam. Oké. Maria. Okay. Yes. Maria. Vielleicht das Licht von ausschalten, dann sieht man das besser. Perfekt. Vielen Dank. It's about his crimes and about how those crimes have been hidden by his family, by government policy and by the sweep of time. During the Second World War, Gerrit was the mayor of a small town north of Amsterdam called Cromenie. He was a member of the Dutch SS and the NSB, the nationalist party that served Hitler's agenda in the Netherlands. He was a criminal who stole from Kromany's municipal coffers, and a Jew hunter whose signature damned at least one family to their deaths. He was an alcoholic and a bully who patrolled the streets in his uniform, with a dog on a leash and a pistol on each hip. with a dog on a leash and a pistol on each hip. And he was also my great-grandfather, but until recently I had never even heard his name. It was around ten years ago, and I was visiting my father for dinner when he casually let me know that his grandfather, my great-grandfather, was a Nazi. My father didn't tell me much, just that he had been a mayor of a small town during the war, and that his name was Gerrit, but that everyone called him Gekke Gerrit, which in Dutch means Crazy Gerrit. Now my father claimed he hadn't grown up knowing about the Nazi hiding in the family tree. The information came to him later in life, via his mother during her last years. So he could only fill in the broadest of outlines in the life of Gekke Gerrit, no specifics. Actually he did know one story. The Dutch resistance absolutely hated Gerrit, so they dispatched two assassins on bicycles to take him out while he was on his nightly patrol through the town. The bullet hit Gerrit in the chest and he fell down, backwards, over his enormous dog. Out came his pistol. He fired wildly. The assassins slipped into the night. Gerrit walked away from the incident without a scratch. The bullet had been stopped by his wallet, fat with money he had embezzled from the town and its people. You may be tempted to dismiss this as a tall tale. But since that night, I've heard the same story from historians, and read it in official documents in the National Archive. This leads me to believe that it's either true, or such a perfect encapsulation of who Gerrit Jongsma was, that it spread widely as truth. But we'll never know. Because Gerrit died in 1960, and everyone who knew him personally is either dead, or met him only in passing. But it's clear he was unhinged. A movie villain. And what do you do when you're the offspring of the offspring of a movie villain? Do you personally atone? Do you try to understand his motivations? Or do you hang him in effigy in a piece like this, beat him into submission in public and hope that his worst tendencies will be distilled out of your gene pool by the seven other great-grandparents who had a part in your creation. It's a story. It found Gerrit Jongsma in middle age, stuck in a row house in Rotterdam, working as a customs officer. He left few marks on the official record. There's a marriage certificate for his wedding to my great-grandmother Louise, and two birth certificates, one for his daughter Ellen and another for his son Tony, my grandfather. Although he claimed to have fought for the Germans in the First World War and earned the Iron Cross, no record of such military service exists. There are, however, records of two arrests for assault. Now it's unclear if Gerrit's aggression was driven by alcohol, ideology or both. Gerrit was known to be a drinker, but he was also an early member of the NSB, or the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands. The NSB was a law and order type party. Like the Nazis, they were anti-democratic and anti-communist, and their members were known to battle it out in the streets with anyone who opposed these principles. The NSB believed in an ideology of eigen volk eerst, or our people first. NSB members glorified the better days of the Dutch colonial past and became drunk on the imperial fantasies of their leader, Anton Mussert. Fighting the tide of history, Mussert and his circle supported a policy of renewed Dutch expansion. First, the Netherlands would absorb Flanders, then take control of swaths of Africa, and then join these territories with the existing Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, to create the Greater Netherlands, an independent, national socialist colonial power aligned with Hitler's Reich, but separate from it. German occupation of the Netherlands crushed this fantasy and put the country strictly under Nazi control. Any hope for a relationship of equality and mutual respect between the Dutch and the Germans collapsed, and the NSB and its members were left with a choice. Cling to their ambitions, or bend the knee to Hitler and become his servants. They chose the latter, elevated anti-Semitism over imperialism, and were rewarded for it. The Nazis outlawed all Dutch political parties, except for the NSB, paving the way for its members to step into power positions left vacant by the old guard. The NSB and the Nazis worked swiftly. They created a civil service test for open positions in the government and invited their members to apply. One of those open positions was for the mayor of Cromenie, a small town north of Amsterdam. My great-grandfather Geddet took the test, got the job. He packed up his family and stepped into his new role. And from what I've seen, he committed himself completely. Thank you. folder stuffed with photographs, embossed certificates, handwritten notes and hundreds of pages of witness testimony, printed on paper the weight of onion skin in preparation for Gerrit's war crimes trial. On every page, Gerrit's last name is capitalized, making it easy to skip around to find the most damning evidence. Jungsma threatened to shoot us to pieces after we chopped down a tree for our family's firewood. Jungsma stole gasoline intended for the fire brigade to fill up his own motorcycle. Jungsma wrote up the list of striking factory workers who would later be executed in Amsterdam. His name is my name. An hour into my second visit to the archive, I'm queasy from the smell of decaying paper. Fresh air rarely touches Gerrit's files, and when I open the boxes, fingernail-sized fragments of paper tumble onto the floor. The National Archive restricts access to material connected to former NSBers for reasons I still don't entirely understand. I had to call ahead to set my appointments and request Gerrit's file boxes. Once granted permission, I was placed in a well-lit room at a long table, watched over by security guards. Photography is forbidden. The guards made sure my phone was safe in a well-lit room at a long table, watched over by security guards. Photography is forbidden. The guards made sure my phone was safe in a locker, before finding me a seat at the table, then pasted over my laptop camera with a yellow post-it note. The net effect is that this material is not, in any real sense, public. The stories of the men and women who collaborated with the Nazis remain intangible and theoretical, unconnected to images that could make them real. There's a photograph of Gerrit giving a Nazi salute as he walks down the street on the day of his inauguration. On the right of the composition, a group of Jeugdstormer boys cluster in the foreground. On the left, a row of Jeugdstormer girls stand underneath a propaganda poster hung on the wall of the town church. Long, late afternoon shadows give the scene a dreamy electricity. Was this the best day of Gerrit's life? It could have been. The picture appears twice in his file. Once as a large print made by the NSB photo office. And then, in a smaller version, lovingly pasted into a cloth-bound family photo album. There, it sits alongside photos of home life and family gatherings. Without knowing its contents, it's easy to imagine such a book sitting warm and cozy in a drawer for generations. But Gerrit's crimes strip away any family claim on the book and its photos, turning memories into state property, transforming heirlooms into evidence. Thank you. through their names, they scrawled their positions. Police agent, council member, province commissioner. Think like an investigator, and you can imagine the value of this document. Break its linear structure, scatter the men's names and positions across a map of the Netherlands, then connect them with pen strokes or string, and you have an org chart, a snapshot of the mycelial network of the NSB regime, its tendrils crisscrossing and connecting beneath the country's soil. Nourishing this network were a collection of anonymous citizens eager to help. In their unsigned letters to Gerrit they complain about neighbor's transgressions and demand justice. This woman has a radio, and I know that's not allowed. That boy was supposed to go to Germany for army training, but he's still at home. Seize the radio, put the boy on a train. One day in December 1942, an unsigned letter arrived on Gerrit's desk. A young Jewish family is hiding in an attic above a barbershop in town. Arrest them. Gerrit and his colleagues followed the letter's advice. That evening, they raided the attic and apprehended the couple, Esther and Benjamin Drilsma. handed the couple, Esther and Benjamin Drilsma. Gerrit put them in custody and took possession of their furniture, food, money and clothes. Most of these items never found their way into an evidence depot, though Gerrit's wife, my great-grandmother Louise, was seen around town dressed in Esther's fur coat. Gerrit soon caught word that Esther and Benjamin's six-year-old daughter, Fien, was also in hiding, sheltered by a family in the nearby town of Beverwijk. He sent word to the police captain, who apprehended the girl. The Drilsma family reunited briefly when they were interned together at Kamp Westerbork. And in 1943, Esther and Benjamin were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Fien, once again separated from her parents, was murdered in Sobibor shortly after. I've read that the commander of Westerbork, a Nazi named Albert Conrad Gemmacher, would personally send off each train bound for the death camps to the east. I imagine him testing the doors of the cattle cars, then waving at the conductor as the train carrying a six-year-old child lurches away. He is one more node in the network As the train carrying a six-year-old child lurches away, he is one more node in the network that connects the Beverwijk police chief to Gekke Gerrit, the anonymous letter writer, the guards of Sobobor, and the German high command. This is a mechanism, organic and terrible, that distributes culpability through order, rendering all who engage with it both guilty and protected. I grew up in Ossë, a short car ride from Kamp Westerbork. It didn't feel like a Holocaust memorial in my youth. It was a big, flat, open space. A good place to walk around, since the Netherlands doesn't have unobstructed views. Something's always in the way. doesn't have unobstructed views, something's always in the way. Westerbork's openness is bound in by a ring of orderly forests. On one side sits a cluster of satellite dishes aimed at the sky. These dishes are known as the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, and they're part of a network spread spread across the world, of similar radio telescope stations. Together, they monitor space and gather their findings to give us insights into meteor orbits and the life cycles of distant stars. At times, their collective energy is harnessed in the surface of SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they trawl through deep space, listening for whispers that could tip us off to the presence of aliens. The ethnobotanist Terence McKenna once said that to search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. McKenna didn't see the point in looking for aliens, because to him the aliens were already here. After taking a handful of magic mushrooms, his consciousness was flooded by a message from a fungal spirit which he transcribed. I am old, the mushroom began, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on Earth for ages, I am from the stars. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the eons of time and space drift many spore-forming lifeforms in suspended animation for millions of years, until contact is made with a suitable environment. In other words, intelligent life is already here, and it's served in Italian restaurants. As a child, I knew none of this, and didn't even know what purpose the towering satellite dishes were meant to serve. I do remember the paths, through the forest, being dotted with signposts, telling me to look up and explaining the stars. And I remember thinking, I should come back at night, though I never did. But it definitely spoke to my imagination that there was a specific place to look at the stars, that somehow you were closer to them in that forest. I used to record myself as a kid, singing horribly. I don't have the tapes anymore, because my parents didn't save a lot. After they divorced, things just disappeared. Maybe when my mom is on her deathbed, she'll use her last bit of strength to guide me to a secret room filled with all of my childhood things this is my fantasy to have the evidence of my younger self and the life i lived with my family suddenly reappear because my childhood wasn't unhappy, or I don't remember it being unhappy. Or at least I know there was a time in my life when I felt at ease, and my family falling apart took this ease from me. Children leave a paper trail of pasted together art projects and stories spelled out longhand in notebooks. But kids live in the moment and are eager to move on to the next. So it's up to the parents to decide how precious this material actually is. Where does it go? A cardboard box on a high shelf? A filing cabinet? The trash? My family doesn't have the best track record for preserving the past. Evidence is thin, so thin that some ancestors have almost disappeared into nothing. This applies not only to Gerrit Jongsma on my father's side, but also to my great uncle Johan on my mother's side. During World War II, Johan was a resistance fighter. He was discovered running a resistance cell, so the Nazi intelligence service scooped him up and shipped him off to Bergen-Belsen. He died around liberation time, maybe from the conditions in the camp, or maybe he was bombed to death by friendly fire. The evidence is murky, and we'll never know the truth. Johan was in love with my grandmother, my mother's mother. She spent the war in a TB clinic, and they promised each other they would marry when they reunited. They kept their love alive through correspondence, writing letters to each other until the Nazi war machine severed their connection. This shattered my grandmother. She found comfort in the arms of Johan's younger brother, Jan. They married and had children, but she never forgot Johan. She made his letters disappear, but continued to praise him to my mother and her siblings. My mother grew up drenched in stories about Johan and bloodied by the resentment of her abusive father, Johan's brother, who perhaps knew in his heart that he would never be the hero of his family's story. In that way, I don't think it's a coincidence that my parents found each other. There's a continuity of shame and denial, a bond of silence tied up in the war stories that can never be spoken out loud, but can't quite be forgotten. Why treasure the past if it holds experiences too horrible to discuss? So the lesson of silence lives on Cromenie in 1942. I've seen the pictures in the family albums at the National Archive. I took office as the mayor of a town called Cromenie in 1942. I've seen the pictures in the family albums at the National Archive. It was a real Nazi affair. Black boots and hands in the air. The crowd looked dour. Perhaps because there weren't that many NSBers in Cromenie. Which meant Gerrit's inauguration wasn't something to celebrate. But maybe I'm writing too much of a story here. Maybe the crowd wasn't upset at all, but looked that way because nobody looks happy in any of the pictures that I've seen from that time. Except for the jeugdstormers, who look like they're having a ball. The jeugdstorm was the Dutch equivalent of the Hitler Youth. On camping trips and sailing expeditions, the happy boys and girls of the Jeugdstorm celebrated a sense of belonging and a hope for the future based on shared goals. Fitness, ethnic purity and the rooting out of the insidious elements who would oppose the NSP in the Reich. My grandfather, Tony, was a member. And while you can't blame a teenager for his father's crimes, Tony didn't make a very good impression on the citizens of Cromenie. Witnesses describe him as a funhouse mirror reflection of his father, always in his Jeugdstorm uniform, steering up trouble. Very, do-you-know-who-my-father-is energy. He was another movie type, the little snot-nose whose dad runs the town, and who uses that power to get what he wants. Who can imagine the hole in his heart when the war ended, and his father went to prison, and he was forced out of that role? Who can imagine the shame, the powerlessness? I'm saying this to summon some empathy for the man. In my earliest memories, he was hard and cold, and wielded disapproval like a weapon. When he spoke, everyone knew to shut their mouths and listen, or at least pretend to. As he grew old and frail, he kept talking, but no one listened anymore. I prefer to imagine him that way now, cranky and harmless, stripped of his rank, alone with his thoughts and memories. After the resistance, shot Gerrit Jongsma, he was transferred to another town called Martinsd, to take over as mayor and catch his breath. Martinsdijk was Gekke Gerrit's kind of place, decorated with signs reading, Jews not welcome. Gerrit served his term there in a state of relative equilibrium. He committed the same kinds of petty crimes he had become known for in Grummenie, but didn't make the same kind of waves. On September 5th, 1944, a rumor rippled through the Netherlands that the Allies had pushed into the country and were marching north to liberate Amsterdam. As the news went out over the radio, NSB families panicked. Some fled to Germany, others took refuge at Kamp Westerbork, perhaps seeking the protection of the camp's Nazi commander, Albert Conrad Gemmacher. Gettet stayed at his post. As the winter descended, he ran supply missions for the hiding NSBers. He broke into an abandoned girls' school to steal blankets and supplies, and shipped the spoils to Westerbork, but not before skimming off the best items for himself. The rumors of Dutch liberation were premature. Still, chaos reigned throughout the country. The political infrastructure crumbled, and the Germans cut off supply lines into the Netherlands, prioritizing their own country's well-being in the face of an unrelenting Allied advance. Food became scarce, and at least 20,000 Dutch citizens died of starvation in what would become known as the Hunger Winter. Then, on May 5, 1945, the Netherlands was liberated. Four days later, Gerrit tendered his resignation as the mayor of Martensdijk. He would spend the next three years being shuttled around the country from prison to prison, awaiting trial while an investigative team assembled their case. Finally, in 1948, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. A massive sentence when compared to many other collaborators, and a full five years more than the one handed down to Gemacher, commander of Kamp Westerbork, who was responsible for the transport of 80,000 Jews to the death camps in the East. Gerrit appealed his sentence and received three more years of prison time, presumably for his lack of remorse. It's a miracle that he didn't receive a death sentence, but perhaps that can be attributed to timing. Had he gone to court earlier, the public may have wanted to see blood for his crimes. But by 1948, the world had heard the stories of the death camps and watched the Nazi war tribunals. Gerrit's crimes shrank in the shadow of a mountain of dead bodies. But death is death, and nothing can change the f of Gerdes' victims. The Dutch Queen Juliana was released from prison in 1955, the beneficiary of a clemency deal struck by the new Dutch Queen Juliana that was meant to invite wrongdoers back into society and heal the wounds of World War II. Shortly after Gerrit's release, my father had his one and only face-to-face meeting with the man. He recalls almost nothing about the day, aside from discomfort. A frost forming in the air between Gerrit and his son Tony. A quick moment on Gerrit's knee. A door closing. And a car ride back home. When Gerrit died in 1960, my father's family skipped the funeral. He and his crimes remained safely hidden in the boxes of the National Archive until, more than 50 years later, my grandmother chose to tell my father a fragment of the truth. My father chose to pass that fragment on to me. A fragment is all I have to this day. And with the main players dead and the next generation dying, this investigation can only take me so far. There are still holes in the narrative that can only be filled with guesswork, places where the archive splinters, and we'll never know the whole truth. Take the case of my grandfather, Tony Jongsma. During the war, Tony was an active member of the Jeugdstorm, the Dutch Hitler Youth. When he disappeared from the record around 1944. We know he left his family home, but where did he go and why did he leave? It's possible he had a falling out with Gerrit. It's equally possible he followed the path of many other Jeugdstormers and went to Germany to support the war effort. What we do know is that when he finally surfaced a few years later, he was fighting for the Dutch army in the Indonesian War of Independence. He had pulled off a kind of magic trick, disappearing out of one war and reappearing in another, again on the losing side. In Indonesia, Tony met my grandmother, Suzette Meijer, whose background made her a strange bride for the son of a Dutch SSer. The Meijer family were mixed race, part European, part Asian. They were also, by many reports, Jewish. But the Maier family history, like so many colonial family histories, is incomplete and fractured. I've heard a rumor about a Maier family gravestone in Surabaya, carved with the Star of David, but I never had a moment to bring it up to my grandmother before she died two years ago. If I had, I wonder if she could have provided me with answers. If there is one thing that brought Tony and Suzette together, perhaps it was the inaccessibility of their pasts. Tony hid his shameful family history from the world, and Suzette's lineage remained in a fog, weaving, as it did, between two different cultures, divided by an almost unimaginable gulf of power. Thank you. Both my parents were total World War II nerds. My dad loved reading books on military tactics and had a weekend hobby building model airplanes. My mom organized our walks around Kamp Westerbork. She would march our family through the camp's open field by the bent-up railroad tracks, weaving little narratives about the war and her dead uncle Johan, the resistance hero. As our hikes took us out of the campgrounds and into the surrounding forest, our attention turned to nature and the mushrooms that grow on the camp's periphery, pulling nutrients from haunted soil. I tried to memorize what she told me, which ones you could eat, which ones were poisonous, but there are so many. Foraging for mushrooms in the Netherlands is illegal, but sometimes you can't help yourself. On one of our hikes, we found a cluster of chanterelles right off the walking path. My mother and her brother wasted no time picking them, giggling as they stuffed their bounty into a plastic sandwich sack. That night, my father saut sauteed the mushrooms in butter and garlic and tossed them with fresh pasta. This was a rare treat in a country as orderly and managed as the Netherlands. Food picked by our own hands on our own plate by the end of the day. Gerrit Jongsma's story casts a long shadow that falls over even my favourite childhood memories. But it isn't so powerful that it can block out the joy I feel when I remember that meal. Around that same time, my sister and I were playing around in my father's book collection when we came across a Nazi porn comic book hidden on a high shelf. when we came across a Nazi porn comic book hidden on a high shelf. Its pages held an S&M free-for-all, floggings and sex slaves branded with swastikas. My sister and I hadn't hit puberty yet, but we were absolutely fascinated. We smashed each other with pillows and drew swastikas on our butts, just like in the comic. That evening, my mom undressed us to put us in the bath and was horrified by what she found. But then she laughed. It turned out the comic had been given to my dad as a gag gift by one of my uncles. It's a fun memory, and I still laugh when I think about it. No one, not even gekke Gerrit, can take that from me. Vielen Dank. Herzlichen Dank Maria fürs Zeigen. Was sollen wir uns da her setzen? Ja, sehr gut. Okay. Ja, also liebe Maria, herzlichen Dank für das Abspielen der Videos. Bas ist wieder bei mir und steht Ihnen jetzt gerne noch für Fragen zur Verfügung. Wie gesagt, Sie können die Fragen gerne auf Deutsch stellen und er wird sie auf Englisch beantworten. Sehr gut. Bitte. Thank you very, very much. It's totally impressive, especially since we've worked critically on accounts like Ich bin so viel schuld, that aired almost one and a half years ago now. So this is so, so much better and reflective. And what I wanted to ask are, I break it down to three questions what was your target audience and did you reach it did you have community management and what was this about what were the typical questions and so forth so these are the first two yeah the the project uh focused on on the broad audiences of our memorial sites, but especially also on young people. So within Houses of Darkness, again, we had the artworks, but also had summer schools, and still have summer schools in Bergen-Belsen next summer. So this was one of the target audiences, and this is also the reason why they chose to do it on Instagram, which is, of course, looking from a 40-year-old, a young person's social media kind of a thing they have the last time i checked some from 30 40 000 viewers young people but also and this really was was striking me children from collaborators who really said to them okay this opened up a lot of things also for me and i was very scared to talk about it and and i'm not alone anymore in viewing this so they got letters they got emails from from children of collaborators so again this was not a target audience but they they attracted this and we opened up because it's also an artwork in a memorial site it's a big mural of some 20 by 5 meters so very big we made a mural out of the of the of the videos and we opened it up at the beginning of the memory of kanbesterbock with also the first guest creatorship and this was a guest curatorship of four Jewish people, survivors and their relatives, who were very critical of the memorial center, very critical of us talking about this topic. So I was a little bit nervous, thinking, okay, is this going good? And I did a presentation, showed one of the first films, and afterwards, one of the Jewish survivors, probably the most critical I know, she came up to me and she said, I want to talk to you about this series. I said, okay, here are we going again? And she said, I really love this, I want to meet these people. So in that sense, again, I think that the tone is perfect and next to that it's beautifully crafted, but the tone and how to explain it and how they explain their questions really relates to different kind of audiences and this is beautifully and if you can do this then it's then it's it it's good so yeah just a small one do you use this beyond that it's being shown in instagram um in educational workshops or something like yes yes and and again the project is not over so we are uh the the memory of combustible houses of darkness it runs until the end of this year and our idea is to have it after the summer real in a important part of our educational program so in the next few months i will work with the educational department of westerbork and really talk to to elena and kel who made this but also go to bergen-belsen and see the artworks over there because i think that in general questions about perpetratorships are very important questions, and the questions they pose, how do you deal with this, is an important question, and they talked about for example the National Archive, that it's very difficult to see the things about the collaborators over there and this will change in two years because in 2025 everything will be opened up every file of a collaborator and it will be digitized and put on the internet so again out of this digitizing and putting on the internet a lot of questions will arise in in the communities and also with young people i would say so it's very important to really put the question mark on these kind of things and really to talk to young people, I would say. So it's very important to really put the question mark on these kinds of things and really to talk to young people about it. And in Westerbork, we get some 40,000 students every year. So it's quite a big amount. And again, maybe this is not for every student, but it is important to really talk about it on schools, but also in a place like Westerbork. And for me, in places like like western bork and for me in places like western bork schloss hardheim bergen-belsen this is not only about the netherlands this is this is also about austria about germany about norway and again i'm also in the ira and one of the leaders of the ira is yhuda bauer one of the most famous historians, I think, about the Holocaust. And every time he talks, he begins with, okay, it's very easy to say it's all the fault of the Nazis, all the fault of the Germans, but also look at your own country, look at your own perpetratorship. And this is very important, I think, in the Netherlands, but in every country in Europe. And even nowadays, this project, for me, is also about the here and now. How do we deal with Russian children, for example, in the Netherlands? Perpetratorship isn't only about the Second World War. Perpetratorship is here nowadays. So again, how can we make those connections for young people between a long time ago and the place they are living in? In the chatbot, for example, we also try to have a connection with own perpetratorship in that sense if you buy sneakers and you know the sneakers are produced in China are you also a little bit of a perpetrator because you buy things of people who maybe have to build these and make these shoes and and slavery so perpetratorship is not all it's not only far away, it's also close, I think. You were talking about how you were meeting many problems when you tried to connect with more modern or current issues like the ones you just mentioned have you felt that that has gotten better or changed it it's it's a lot of times i've one of the things i've also did with this project i've done myself a big public research about westerbork so i interviewed like 20 uh survivors and relatives of survivors children of of wrong parents like they call it in the Netherlands Sinti and Roma so the memory groups that are connected to Westerbork we had queries with some 800 visitors to Westerbork and what you often see that a lot of times these questions and answers to the questions is a paradox it's the same kind of hard versus the head kind of discussion and the people who were very critical in 2019, for example, of us giving attention to refugees, one of the things they were very critical about, but at the time there were a lot of Syrian refugees in the Netherlands, people with a Muslim background. And the same people said to us in 2022 why don't you give more attention to the Ukraine Jewish refugees so it is most of the time it isn't linear it isn't okay we're against refugees it is way more to do and I think this is the answer what people think of Westerbork has way more to do in my opinion with people than with the history of Westerbork with the the baggage you bring to a place like Westerbork your cultural background the praise you grew up in and I think this is important also for us in Westerbork to show to visitors okay your view on Westerbork says something also about you and really pose that question. I think it will stay difficult talking about these kind of things. But on the other hand, if we want to make it very easy for us, every year we're going to have a big Anne Frank exhibition because Anne Frank was in Westerbork and Anne Frank touches a lot of people to Westerbork. But on the other hand, is this the right thing to do? Only talk about Anne Frank and only talk about Auschwitz. More visitors probably but is this the job of a memorial center or should we also talk about those other 100,000 people who were deported? Should we also talk about the Moluccan area, the Moluccan time of Westerbork? So at the end of this public research you can say I pose the question, how do we do at Westerbork? And the answer is we always do it wrong and we always do it right. Every decision we make, somebody will applaud us and somebody will be against us and this is you know this is working at a place like westerbork and i think working at a place like again a lot of memorial sites have the same kind of problem or yeah i don't know if you have to call the problem but yeah um hello uh great talk great information i wonder are you familiar with the situation of the birthplace of adolf hitler in are you in contact with some of the people who are trying to do something because the situation seems quite similar they just don't know what to do with it they found a solution in 2020 now it's again with a question mark up so maybe i thought they could learn from your experience yeah yeah of course being a holocaust historian coming to linz one of the things i wanted to do to find the birthplace of adolf hitler but again i it's the same kind of thing like you discussed with us in westerbork, especially in Westerbork, in a place that is so much about the victims. What should you tell about the perpetrators? And when people ask me, I think that the sentence that everybody knows is never again Auschwitz. Everybody in the world knows never again Auschwitz. If you look at that sentence and you really want to have never again Auschwitz, then you also have to look on how Auschwitz happened and for that we also have to look at the perpetrators and if we muffle up perpetrators places then maybe we muffle up a little bit of the history of perpetrators so of course there's always the danger this is I think the reason why a lot of these places are hidden a little bit, is of course it can be a holy place for people who still go for the Nazi thoughts. But on the other hand, for me, don't hide these kind of places put it in the right context this is very important for 70 years for example a lot of books of the nazis were mein kampf was forbidden in the netherlands did it work no forbidding these kind of books doesn't work in my opinion you have to contextualize it you have to put it in a museum maybe, but don't hide it. This is a very actual, this is a very nowadays discussion in the Netherlands, also looking at a colonial past, a lot of statues we have in the Netherlands of people who were heroes in the 17th century, but also people who participated in slavery. Should we tore these things down yeah as an historian i would always say no i would always say put it in the right context so again this problem is not only westerbalk it's lynch it's munich it's it's it's everywhere it's even moscow yeah it's even a problem that will arise i believe believe, in 40 years time in Ukraine and in Russia. So, yeah, this is why we have to learn from history and look at history and talk about history, because we can learn, in my opinion, something about today. Just after thought, you already touched upon it it but i wanted to say the situation with the hitler birthplace is of course different because normally nazis wouldn't go to a concentration camp to celebrate me sometimes they would come maybe in secret and gloat but every time on hitler birthday and so on, there will be people coming to Braunau and maybe don't obviously look like celebrating, but probably they are. So it's a different kind of situation. And I think that we are now talking about it and the dialogue sometimes is better than giving answers. So maybe not doing it there, but posing the question in lints, should we do it, is already a good step, I would say. And this is also with us, with these kind of things. We're just posing the question and talking about it. And sometimes that's better than waving the finger as a memorial center, to say this is how you have to commemorate. That doesn't work in the world, I would say. say this is how you have to commemorate, that doesn't work in the world, I would say. Just another, I'm stopping then. On the website it says it's not only the Instagram and the animated chapters, but also an AR experience. Could you tell us a bit more about the augmented reality part? Yeah that's really not my specialty in this kind of sense but with that they really wanted to engage also young people. So it works on some places in the places that are named. So like a commune is named. In Westerbork, it doesn't work because of the telescopes. You saw the big telescopes and the problem with the big telescopes that they disturb everything. So one of the most striking things I engaged in a lot of that every former concentration camp I go to it's the worst wifi in the world this is also with Westerbork you don't have any connection so we didn't do it in Westerbork but you can do it on different places in the Netherlands and again it's really to engage with people to let people engage with the topic even more. And they chose for AI, but they also chose for animation because Alina said that on the one hand, in this way, and because the first ideas they had that she was, okay, we wanted to have a script where Alina tells a story as a human being in front of a camera, but for her, this went too personal. So with this animation, they could do it on the one hand personal, but on the other hand, step a little bit out, get away from it. Because she told me that for all the projects she did in her life, this was the most difficult one because this was really about her. And most of the times they do projects about other people so for her this was a actually that it was told in the in the movies and the clips it was a very intense period of making this but invitation go to the Netherlands go to and try to do it with the AR filter. So, yeah. No questions? And I will ask a question because I have the mic. So you just told that she didn't want to be seen in a way on video. And I think we saw that in the drawings as well we see her from behind or something like that but is it her voice that we actually hear yeah that's elena's voice and she uh she and her husband were also actors so they can do quite good voiceovers they now did it in in english and the idea is that we're going to make a Dutch version and we're also going to make, we have a lot of ideas still going forward to make it a little bit of more of a movie for on Netflix and these kind of things but these are the next steps of this project they won the ITFA with it this year, so the big documentary festival creative works in the Netherlands. They got an honorary mention for the Webby's which is quite big in Europe. And they're now going to go for, hopefully to win an Emmy. So in that sense, in that way also get this story in America where Kel comes from. So to spread really the word, okay, this is there, this is it. So in that sense, it was also super to be here in Austria and to tell you about it. And hopefully you tell your friends about it. And in this way, it spreads like a mycelium, like a mushroom. So they also chose the mushroom really for this, not only the historical kind of thing, but also that in that way on Instagram it can spread like a mushroom, like a kind of mycelium network. I have a small question. Do you know how the family recorded this? Do you know how the family recorded this clip? with resistance fighters and even Jewish family members and again, of course, the topic, the collaborators. They agreed with it, but they didn't really want to be part of it. And this is what you see often in the Netherlands. When we did the big internment exhibition, the collaborators exhibition in 2008, we said, okay, there were 8,000 collaborators in Westerbork and maybe they had two children. So there should be 16,000 children of collaborators who were in Westerbork. And we tried to look for these collaborators themselves to interview them or their children. At the end, we found 20 people and we really had a big project and flyers everywhere 20 people and out of those 20 people only four said okay you can use my name and you can put it out the other 16 said okay i want to do an interview but after my death my children can decide if you put it out there online or in videos etc and what we see is that most of the times it isn't the sons and daughters but it is the people who marry the sons and daughters who say no don't use it because it's not my background but i i have the name so don't talk about it we don't want to use it and still that's very problematic in in telling this history nowadays and again i've told you 2025 everything will be opened up and it's a big discussion even within those children of collaborators how should you do this shouldn't you do this and on the one hand people some of them are applauding this okay we can talk about it some of them are really against it and they're I have a comment rather than a question. Ich habe eher eine Anmerkung als eine Frage, weil was mich an der visuellen Sprache dieser Filme fasziniert hat, ist nicht nur, dass wir nicht nur die Familiengeschichte kennenlernen und auch die Geschichte des Lagers, sondern auch, das ist eigentlich eine Einladung zur Überlegung, wie man jetzt Gedächtniserinnerung und Vergessen visuell darstellen kann. Weil wir haben zum einen ganz klassische visuelle Metaphern von Gedächtnis, etwa das Raster, das Quintilian, dass man an bestimmten Orten bestimmte Elemente von zu erinnernden Inhalten platziert. Und zum anderen haben wir zum Beispiel die Pilze, of memories, and for example we have the mushrooms, the amorphous. How do you see that? That would be an interesting question for me. Is it more about memories or forgetting the amorphous? It's really interesting how and with which means it was presented. and we've talked about like two years, like one and a half years okay how should we show this in Westerbork for example and a lot of the ideas you see in the Instagram movies came back, they wanted to start a kind of mushroom farm and these kind of things was of course practical, it wasn't doable but you really see the journey and the struggles that she and the journey that she takes along in getting to, okay, is there an answer? And what is the answer? And we've seen all of them. There is no real answer you get out of it. It's way more about the question. And I think this is very good. And again, what I told you is that I think that if very good and again what I told you is that I think that if you ask everybody here everybody will have a different opinion about the series and again that shows that our background and who we are and where we're from and then how we view this has a lot to do again more with us than with the series and if we can get people and this is what the whole the memory of combustible project was about and hopefully that if people see these kind of things at the end and the next time they are on facebook and really want to okay i don't agree with you think a little bit and try to to view how the other person thinks and try to understand and there is also something like agree to disagree and if we have a little bit of more of this in the world on social media I think life would be a little bit better but again this is maybe a little bit of an utopia but if we don't try you don't get there Hi, you've mentioned a couple of times now that in you don't get there. Hi, you've mentioned a couple of times now that in 2025, I think you said, all the documents are going to be available for free access. Also in the digitized version, do you have some insight on how that came about? Yeah, because then it's 80 years after the war and then legally everything must be opened. And we have a kind of network of memorials and museums in the Netherlands. It's called the Network War Sources, which really focuses on digitizing it. And they talked to the National Archive and said, okay, one step is opening it. Another step, which we all want to do in the net is digitizing sources they started the project like three years ago and they talked to a lot of specialists and experts and and i was lucky to be a part of it in discussing okay how should we do this my advice and the advice of everybody was okay that there are going to be people who say we are against it and they're going to be people who say we are against it and there are going to be people who say we are for it. The most important things in these kind of things is to really communicate, to really talk before you do it to the Jewish community, talk to the community of the children of collaborators and really take them along and make them owner of the idea. And a lot of times, one of the earlier questions was, okay, can you talk about the refugees in Westerbork? It's way more about the process in getting this question than about the answer. So if you want to talk about collaborates, if you want to talk about refugees, take your time before you start a project and really approach those kind of memory groups who are emotionally attached to these kind of problems, these kind of questions, and really talk to them about it. And again, at the end, and this is also what came out because they came out with the press release like two months ago, and there was a big discussion in the Netherlands, and there will be discussions now in a year, in five years' time. So you can say, we're not going to do it because it's a big, big discussion, but then you will never do it so i think they the way they are doing it is really press release already in 2023 end of 2022 and then take your time and how should we do it and how should we get everything out of there but at the start it 80 years, so everything will be opened. This is how this legal system in the Netherlands works. Okay. No more questions? No? Okay, so thanks a lot. It was great having you. Thanks a lot for all the history of Westerbork all you told us about the project oh sorry now I'm speaking English without the microphone so thanks a lot again and hopefully we'll meet each other again in Linz or in Hardheim. It would be great. Yeah, and next time in the Netherlands. So feel free to visit Westerbork. Kind of a Westerbork promotion at the end. Yeah, great. So we'll all come to Westerbork and visit you. So thanks a lot again. Okay, thank you. And thanks a lot for your patience, your time. Have a nice evening. We'll see each other hopefully tomorrow in the morning, 10 o'clock. So, yeah, have a nice evening or a nice sleep and see you tomorrow.