A new exhibition in Amsterdam examines the Holocaust through looted objects

During World War II, the Nazis murdered more than 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands, some of them 75 percent of the Dutch Jewish population. Many of those who survived were left with nothing, as the Nazis looted their personal belongings. Now a new exhibition in Amsterdam examines the Holocaust through the lens of these material losses.

Titled “Robbed,The show is organized by the Jewish Cultural Quarter and the Rijksmuseum. It examines eight personal stories of families and individuals whose artwork, clothing, books, religious objects, china, teapots, musical instruments and other items were stolen.

“We want to achieve two goals with this exhibition: firstly, we wanted to show that the looting of Jewish objects took place systematically, and secondly, how this affected people’s lives,” Mara Lagerweij, curator at the Rijksmuseum, tells Jan Hennop. by Agence France-Presse.

While many Holocaust museums and exhibitions focus on the horrors that followed the looting, this show highlights the connection between personal belongings and identity, and the feelings of loss and erasure that arise when those objects are forcibly taken.

“The theft of Jewish property was carried out with the same efficiency, brutality and scale as the physical genocide,” they write Stuart E. Eizenstatchairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and Julie-Marthe Cohencurator of cultural history at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, in the Art newspaper. “It was a vital attempt to erase more than a thousand years of Jewish history, root and branch, to dehumanize what the Nazis considered an inferior race.”

‘Looted’ is spread over two locations in Amsterdam: Visitors can become acquainted with five of the eight stories in the National Holocaust Museum, in which the return of stolen art is central. Meanwhile, the other three stories, which focus on the return of Jewish ceremonial objects, can be seen in the Jewish Museum.

One of the items on display is a print with the title Bad-mouthing little women by the Dutch artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquitawho was a teacher and friend of the artist MC Escher. After the Nazis raided De Mesquita’s house, Escher was able to save the print. De Mesquita and his family were sent to Auschwitz and did not survive.

“People think of theft as something impulsive, but this was also organized and systematic: isolation, theft, displacement and then murder,” said Taco Dibbitsgeneral director of the Rijksmuseum, at a press opening, per DutchNews“Senay Boztas. “In this exhibition we think it is important to focus on people’s stories, because these thefts have changed their lives forever.”

Another story is that of Max Heppner, whose parents left Germany for the Netherlands after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Nearly ten years later, when Heppner was eight, the family fled the Nazis for a second time, leaving Amsterdam and hiding in a chicken coop in a small farming town. The boy’s backpack and the drawings he made while in hiding can also be seen.

“The backpack really symbolizes everything: people on the run, people without possessions, people without a home,” Heppner, now 90, tells the New York TimesNina Siegal. “While we were on the run, things got lost along the way, or our things were taken. By the time we got to the coop, that backpack was all we had left.”

“Robbed‘ can be seen until October 27 at the National Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.