"The city on strike" documentary (2021)

 Last night I did something for the very first time - I actually sat in a front of a Dutch documentary screened on a local TV and decided to give it a go with help of Dutch subtitles (I would have probably cheated but English was not available). The movie was titled "De stakende stad" ("The city on strike") and was actually premiered at the end of February, when there is annually a memorial day in remembrance of  famous 1941. February Strike. I had already walked around old Jewish neighbourhood and saw people placing flowers on a particular spot but never knew a real background behind it so this just came as a perfect introduction to a dark chapter in Amsterdam's history.

What happened is that as Germans entered The Netherlands, they immediately started with intimidation of large Jewish population - for centuries Jews were always arriving here and specifically Amsterdam was known as a safe place, where all over Europe there were fires, persecutions and pogroms. Like elsewhere, there were always locals willing to join the invaders, in this case they were known as NSB (The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands) and they basically persecuted people much more than Germans, because they were extremely focused on showing their zealotry. They would intimidate and beat up Jewish citizens, scare the bar owners from serving Jewish customers, etc. At the very start of 1941. they marched to Waterlooplein (same place where today is a flea market and most of the tourists have no idea what happened here) to beat up Jewish people there - Jews were not waiting helplessly but were armed and helped by communists so there was a huge street fight that left Nazi collaborator Hendrik Koot dead on the ground. He was found holding a rubber hose with iron in his hand so he was obviously caught intent on beating up people but the media described him as "brutally murdered by cowardly terrorist Jews" and made it sound as he had multiple wounds. This was the main reason for two major raids in February 1941. when 427 random Jewish men of age 25-30 were arrested and brought to Jonas Daniël Meijerplein and from there deported to concentration camp. Only two of them survived the war.

It happened on a Sunday morning so lots of citizens of Amsterdam who were on the markets, saw what happened and the news quickly spread around the town. The Communist party quickly organised a full-blown protest against the treatment of their fellow Jewish friends and colleagues - on 25. February all the trams stopped and majority of companies were on strike. Even the ferries bringing workers to their works were on strike. To my knowledge it was the only full blown, open protest of citizens in the whole Europe against the treatment of Jews. The general strike in fact spread to other cities as well - Zaandam, Haarlem, Hilversum, Muiden and Utrecht - The Germans responded to this strike with brutality, arrests and even executions (9 people were killed), the city of Amsterdam was fined with 15 million guilders. 

The documentary deals with not just a strike but also a destiny of some of the men arrested and found on the photos taken by Germans on that morning. Since the men were arrested randomly, they all came from houses nearby and it was a task of the curator Wally de Lang to unearth the identity of the people who were simply taken away and gassed later as a revenge for death of Koot. There are several interviews with elderly men who were there at the time but none of them could really recognise any faces from the photographs. All the men on the photographs were looking away but there is one haunting face looking directly at the camera and all these years nobody knew his identity - in the documentary we see archivists and historians interviewing everybody but nobody knew who he was. Perhaps the hunger, stress and terror changed his face beyond the recognition or maybe he perished together with the rest of his family so nobody remembered them anymore. It was truly tragic and we were following with great interest as curators and historians searched ancient photo archive of all people who lived in Amsterdam at that time (they have tons of pictures taken for the passports and various documents) - they really looked on face upon face until finally they found him and matched the gaunt, despaired face with the handsome photo from a passport. He was leather worker Izak Lemberger who was only 19 and therefore probably the youngest person arrested in that raid - when his family arrived from Krakow, he was only 5 and he lived in a nearby Nieuwe Amstelstraat so this is how the raid worked, they basically arrested everyone in the neighbourhood, house by house. None of Izak's family survived the war. It is just heartbreaking to find the real identity of that unlucky young man who was just starting his life and to compare these two pictures. I can never walk by that square without thinking what happened here.