I saw a very interesting documentary recently, something that I bet lot of visitors (and probably locals) are probably completely unaware of. Amsterdam was always known as place of freedom, tolerance and whatnot but from my point of view this is true only on a surface - it is and always was a cosmopolitan haven for all sorts of refugees from other places but truth to be told, foreigners are just tolerated, not really welcomed - scratch under that surface and there is a cold calculation that knows how to tax, charge and profit from the foreigners - most obvious in housing, where expats accept and pay astronomic rents just to live in the centre, while locals go elsewhere. If you talk to any local (including foreigners who live here) you would hear them bitterly complaining about "tourists" and my overall impression is that they would prefer if there is no tourism at all. I have remembered this during lockdown, when the streets were totally empty and apocalyptic & I was thinking "now you got what you always wanted, is this fun?"
“Lost City” is about Amsterdam during WW2. Than, just like now, the bureaucracy was responsible that all the wheels were turning orderly. That also means that arrested Jews were orderly waiting for the local city tram to collect them from the tram stops directly to Central Station, from where they were sent to camp Westerbork. GVB tram company (very same company that still operates today and we are all using it) was responsible for this rides and naturally everybody knew what was happening, the documentary makes no excuses about it - survivors tell their stories how their neighbours and other Amsterdammers were even gleefully watching them trough binoculars as they were standing with their belongings on the tram station, waiting to be sent somewhere (most of them expecting they will be sent to some German camps). According to the researchers, both the GVB and the tram drivers are complicit. Houwink ten Cate: "The drivers saw with their own eyes that the trams they drove were guarded by German police officers carrying guns. They therefore understood that they were transporting people against their will, who were in the power of their mortal enemies. They understood that those people went to transit camps after which you almost never heard from them again. If you add this up, you end up with collaboration."
For a film and book about the persecution of Jews in Amsterdam, Luijters investigated the system of Jewish transports with filmmaker Willy Lindwer. The invoices turned up in the archives of the NIOD war institute. During the Second World War, 63,000 Jews were deported from Amsterdam. The Germans used trams to transport the prisoners to train stations, from where they were sent to concentration camps. The invoices contain many new details. The Germans ran a total of 900 trams. “The Municipal Transport Company sent invoices every month for all the services they provided to the occupier and therefore made money from that,” says Lindwer. "The trams were specially hired by the Germans, they were not just regular tram rides." During their research, Lindwer and Luijters came across the bill for the last tram ride on August 8, 1944. They also discovered the names of Anne Frank and her family on lists of the people who were deported from Central Station to Westerbork transit camp that same day. "They were first transferred from the former prison at Weteringschans to Central Station by tram," says Lindwer. The invoice makes it clear that the GVB tried to recover the costs until after the war.
These old trams are still in use for a occasional Sunday ride and today completely unexpectedly I jumped into one and had a nice ride trough the city centre.
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