Tag Archives: Dockworker

Always Remember: Amsterdam’s February Strike 1941-2021

On this date every year, I tell two stories: the February Strike in Amsterdam which is still little known outside the Netherlands, and how my life changed when I attended the 60th commemoration of that Strike in 2001.  As with Passover and Christmas, the stories don’t change much, but every year they have different insights to offer.  New facts and memories always appear if I pause and look for them.  This year is the eightieth anniversary, and given the pandemic it will have only a virtual celebration and broadcast, so it’s even more important to write and remember.

Big crowd of people

The February 25 Strike in Amsterdam, 1941

On the historical side, I try to learn something unfamiliar about the Strike every year, as well as reminding myself and everybody else of why and how it happened.  When the word spread that 425 Jewish men had been rounded up in the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, the communists and trade unions reacted first.  Without the internet to help them, they immediately organized a meeting at the Noorderkerk in the Jordaan, the workers’ quarter.

Overnight, they produced a mimeographed sheet:  “Strike! Strike! Strike!” to protest the roundup.  Was it the dockworkers who struck first on February 25, or the tram workers?  It doesn’t really matter.  My new fact for this year is that workers on bicycles pedaled through the city went and knocked on doors to bring people into the streets.  They were wildly successful, with 300,000 people participating.  Those who have read An Address in Amsterdam may recall that my heroine Rachel attends the Strike, and it’s her first link to the resistance.  That scene was re-created from historical accounts and photos, so I feel as if I was there myself.

The Noorderkerk, where the Strike was organized

People decided to strike in a context that would dishearten almost anyone.  The Nazis had been in power since the prior May 1940.  The Aryan attestation had been inflicted on all government employees, which meant many had been fired for being considered Jewish – people like the musicians in the Concertgebouw orchestra, professors at the universities, civil servants at all levels.  The press was under the German thumb, so people were already depending on underground papers which would multiply later.  The economic hardship of war had begun, and people needed their jobs more than ever.  They lived in a society where being law-abiding was a cardinal virtue.  And yet they decided to strike.  Not because their uncles and brothers had been rounded up, but because their Jewish fellow citizens and comrades were under attack.

Many Jewish people were largely assimilated into the middle class, and somewhat in the working class.  One theory about why the Dutch protested the first roundup when others did not is the personal connections among workers, since in many industries Jews and Gentiles worked side by side.  Another factor is that the Netherlands was a far more open and tolerant society than many around it – a secular, commercially based country with a high regard for human rights.  And yet another is that many Dutch hated the Germans and the Occupation, and the Strike expressed that.

Crowd during February Strike

Source: Dutch National Archive

The measure of their actions is not effectiveness in a practical sense.  They didn’t stop the Germans; in fact, the reprisals were severe, beginning with bloodshed on the streets and ending with executions of 18 of the organizers.  What they created, however, is this:  a beacon that is still shining on us, enjoining us to speak up for what we know is right.  That moment of solidarity still illumines our lives and changes our reality.  What is the challenge to us, when we read about the example of people who saw a moral outrage committed, and immediately organized to make a widespread and public protest?  Today, when we see a great wrong being committed, we know it is our duty to act.

My first moment of understanding all that was exactly twenty years ago.  Come back with me.  It is a frigid day, grey like many Amsterdam winter days, with a pervasive chill.  My partner Joanna and I stand as close together as we can, held back by a fence.  We are in the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, named for the Netherlands’ first Jewish lawyer.  The immense 17th century Portuguese Synagogue looms over us, its windows providing the only illumination within.  Behind us are the four small Ashkenazi Synagogues, skillfully merged into today’s Jewish Historical Museum.  I’d never heard of the February Strike until I visited there the week before.  “Does anything special happen on the 25th?” I’d asked.

The guard pointed out the glass doors.  “Yes, right by the statue of The Dockworker over there. He’s the symbolic figure of the Strike.  Come at 5:00.”

The Dockworker, by resister Mari Andriessen

Joanna and I did, as a gesture of respect for the strikers who made a futile but courageous and beautiful effort.  We arrived at 5:02, but the event was already in process.  We’d expected hours of speeches and a modest crowd, but instead the square is absolutely crammed.  Within ten minutes silence falls, and here we are.  A few people at a time are allowed to step forward (from an orderly line, of course) and lay flowers at the feet of the beefy Dockworker.  Although the crowd is mixed in age and otherwise, the first people permitted to approach are the oldest, their white hair shining against their dark coats, some utterly upright and others bent or needing a wheelchair.

A man in a wheelchair preparing to lay flowers

Someone who remembers

The woman behind us whispers that these are the living strikers, and their families and friends.  Their faces are somber.  No one looks proud or pleased with themselves; the ghosts of the Jewish people who were rounded up are too close for that.  The Strike isn’t mere history that happened before I was born in 1948.  These people, their very bodies, had been there, and now we are in the same place and time, connected.  They had been there.  And “there” is here, where the roundup had actually happened, where the strikers had surged past, hundreds of thousands of them.  The story knocks me on the head like a bat.  These people are all here to remember, and their story has become mine.  Mine to reckon with, be tormented by, and find some way to tell.  It isn’t just something in a book; the people who had been rounded up in this square had almost all been murdered, and so had the strike organizers.

Only the flowers make it bearable at all.

Almost everyone except us has brought them:  everything from small batches of forced forsythia cut at home to immense formal displays.  The procession to the Dockworker moves very slowly:  first the strikers, then synagogues, Jewish organizations, labor unions and churches, then countries, and finally individuals.  Each one bends over to lay their flowers among the others, choosing their spot, then straightening up and pausing to remember, perhaps to pray.  They move along, and the handful of people follows.  The whole event takes on a meditative pace.  If we weren’t shivering, time would hardly seem to pass at all.

Grandmothers hold hands with little ones and probably tell the story that must never be forgotten, a few people of color watch quietly until it’s their turn, and oblivious toddlers ride on their father’s tall shoulders.  The sun is going down somewhere behind the clouds, and the darkness thickens.  Still the people keep coming to the feet of the Dockworker, still pile flowers by the flowers that were already heaped, arranging them so nothing is hidden.
At last, at 6:30, it is our turn.  We waited until the very end, as outsiders with nothing to offer but ourselves.

We kneel.  We are close enough to see the flowers now.  A note in spidery handwriting is attached to a bunch of white snowdrops, held together with aluminum foil.  Hebrew letters embossed in gold on broad ribbons flow around an arrangement of cascading scarlet tulips.  The printed words from the “people and government of Sweden” bedeck a sumptuous wreath of red roses and white lilies.  The fragrance is euphoric, mingling spring and summer on that dark, cold day.  It gives the dead back to us, makes us feel their courage and the terrible loss.  It gives us the stories to tell as long as we live.

 

It couldn’t happen there, either

The February 1941 Strike brought 300,000 Amsterdammers into the street to protest the first roundup of Jewish people, the only such strike in Western Europe. Every February 25, thousands still gather and lay flowers at the foot of the Dockworker, the statue who symbolizes this mass action. The strikers participated despite the presence of German soldiers and police throughout the city. For the Jewish people, it was a significant moment of affirmation by their fellow citizens.


  
Statue of symbolic figure of the February strike with flowers at his feet
The Dockworker Statue in Amsterdam on February 25

 

The Strike challenges progressive Americans. When the word spread that 425 Jewish men had been rounded up and shipped off, the Strike was organized almost overnight. What would it take to bring us into the streets in comparable numbers (almost 40% of the city in that case)? Children in cages? Turning away prospective refugees as the U.S. did in the 1930s when Jews were fleeing Hitler? Slashing food stamps to the bone? The slaughter of school children with assault weapons?

And yet, how much would a strike like Amsterdam’s really accomplish? Although it was a courageous gesture and lifted spirits for a few days, the February Strike sputtered out. The Germans were astonished that the other Dutch would stand up for their Jewish neighbors, so the ensuing crackdown was delayed – but vicious. Only a tiny sliver of people actually resisted from that time forward. Most hunkered down, shook their heads, complied, and tried to survive.

In reflecting on what such people “should” have done, it’s all too easy to make snap judgements and condemn those who were barely surviving on many levels. When the Nazi Occupation began, the Germans carefully started small in attacking the Jewish people and others whom they hated. Initially, the invaders simply turned the other way when local anti-Semites started beating Jewish people up and breaking windows. That set the tone for what was to follow, an air of permissiveness. Slowly but surely, the Nazi propaganda worked. Attacks intensified, depicting Jewish people as barely human, with ugly language to match.

Poster of Nazi propaganda against Jewish people
Poster for the Dutch version of “The Eternal Jew,” a Nazi propaganda film

Following the Strike, the other Dutch people were being conditioned not to look, not to notice, much as we are today. The reporting on family separation of refugee families, for example, is a rarity, so that the anguish of children placed with unknown foster families or in institutions is erased. The threats to Vermont’s migrant dairy workers are escalating, but only the workers themselves and close allies hear about it regularly. New prisons are called “detention centers” and are buried in rural areas where legal help is almost non-existent. Our country, 97% immigrants and refugees, is closing the door to asylum seekers. How quickly what is patently wrong becomes normalized.

The miracle in the 1940s is that a few Dutch people didn’t buy the Nazi propaganda. Their minds kept working after the Strike, and they resisted wherever they were, however they could. They transcribed illegal BBC broadcasts, they produced and distributed underground newspapers, they hid their Jewish neighbors or strangers, they forged identity cards and more, they cleaned hideaways for airmen, they smuggled Jewish children to the countryside and much more. They risked their lives and their peace of mind, and that of their families. Historians say about 25,000 people resisted, and it could be many more, but it still is far less than 1% of the population.

 

Woman with a group of children she tried to save from the Nazis
Miss Henriette Pimental in her child care center, which smuggled Jewish children to safety

Most Dutch people believed “It can’t happen here,” and tried to get on with normal life as much as possible. They believed the Germans wouldn’t dare go too far in their anti-Jewish program. The Netherlands had been the safest place in Europe for religious minorities since the Inquisition. Both Dutch Jews and Gentiles believed Hitler wouldn’t dare do in Amsterdam what he did in Berlin. Tragically, 75% of the Jewish people in the Netherlands were rounded up and murdered, 80% in Amsterdam. The Germans made rules about keeping the blinds closed during roundups. Toward the end, they came to the neighborhood of a resister and shot people at random, whether or not they were involved in any way. The poisonous atmosphere daunted people and twisted their thinking. Even when their neighbors were taken away under their noses, they did nothing. Some were the same people who roared into action for the February Strike.

What is happening to us, and what are we going to do about it?

 

A First Visit Back to Amsterdam’s Dockworker


As soon as I arrived in Amsterdam, I wanted to pay my respects to the Dockworker, the symbolic figure of the February Strike, the only general strike in Western Europe to protest the first roundup of Jewish people. I was sad not to get here a week earlier for the commemoration on February 25, but the flowers laid at that time were still there. As impressive as the big official wreaths are, personally I am always most moved by the little bunches of tulips laid right by his feet. And you wonder who has brought each one, and exactly why – because of a grandparent, someone who knew someone, a friend? Because of the kind of connection I have, which is not genetic or even circumstantial, but something else? I was so glad to go and stand by the Dockworker again. It is a ritual that I must complete every time I’m here, a touchstone. Attending the commemoration the first time gripped me emotionally in a way that has never let me go. I know so much more than I did that day in 2001, and feel so much more sorrow now that I understand more of the extent of the Holocaust here and how it devastated the city. I know that only a small percentage of the 300,000 people who went on strike that day actually engaged in further resistance. But I still honor them for that day. The strikers push and prod me to do the right thing in my own time, and I feel their presence wherever I am, especially at this time of year.  If you’d like to know more about the Strike, it’s here.

Amsterdam’s Silent March

A few words preceded the Silent March, following exquisite music by the Mirando Orchestra, the descendants of a Roma group which began playing before the war.  (Today, I learned from a friend that they survived because they were given jobs in the circus, and the Germans liked to attend it).  Several personal testimonies followed, but they were brief in the cold wind off the Amstel River.

Everyone needed to get moving.  The trams had been stopped all along the route, which was scheduled to last an hour and required brisk walking to ensure that the March reached Dam Square in time for the ceremony there.

 

A woman and man on horseback led the crowd, followed by drums who kept up a somber, repetitive beat.  A mass of school children of all colors followed, each carrying a white tulip.  At the very beginning, there was a little chatter among the adults (not the kids!) but it soon fell away.  The drum, the shuffling feet, the occasional nearby vehicle were the only sounds.  First we marched to the Jewish Historical Museum, once four lively synagogues which have now been combined.  Turning right onto what is now a big thoroughfare, we saw the remains of the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein where the hefty Dockworker statue stands.  He is the symbolic figure of the February Strike, the only such event in western Europe to protest the first roundup of Jewish people – a roundup that took place right there.  Beyond him stands the immense Portuguese Synagogue, thankfully still in use, and not an electric light in the whole establishment, only candles.
We crossed the bridge and turned right.  Eerily, the warning sounds that the bridge was about to be lifted bleeted loudly.  This is the same bridge the Nazis raised to isolate the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein for the first roundup.  Walking along the Nieuwe Keizersgracht, a small residential canal, we saw the markers at our feet which show the name and age of each person who used to live in the house opposite us.  All had been rounded up and murdered.  Every few feet, someone quietly read the names.

The March turned to cross the bridge which lay between us and the broad Amstel River.  The clomping of the horses’ feet and the drums sounded louder, and those still reading the plaques could see the crowd advance over the bridge.  We passed near the Carré Theater where numberless Jewish people performed, and crossed The Skinny Bridge, looking back up the River to the plaza where we had begun.  It was once a medieval Jewish neighborhood, torn down over great protest to build the City Hall/Opera House.

Through the narrow streets we kept marching.  People stood on their balconies for a few minutes to acknowledge us, but few stayed out.  It was too cold.  The flags were all at half mast.

At Utrechtestraat, I left the March so that I could participate in our old neighborhood’s commemoration, a much smaller and more modest affair than the one at the Dam.  It was hard to leave, but I knew that, wherever I am, in whatever country, I will always be walking in their footsteps.