Amsterdam Museums, P2: Amsterdam has many Oriental restaurants and stores—Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian and Thai. It also has Surinese places because Surinam had been a colony. How they got that colony is a story that the Dutch must think about with some degree of embarrassment. We learned about it in the historical section in the Rijksmuseum. This display had a lot of things to say about many Dutch colonies. Being Americans, we kept looking for anything they had to say about New Amsterdam, but we saw almost nothing about it. When I asked a guard, he did not understand me at all. He asked if I meant South Africa!! Then we came upon a poster that explained that after one of the battles between the Dutch and the English, a truce went into effect during which the two powers negotiated a deal. The Dutch traded lousy old New Amsterdam to the English in exchange for promising up-and-coming Surinam. How about that for something you don’t want to feature in your resume!
MUSEUM OF THE DUTCH RESISTANCE: We also visited the Museum of the Dutch Resistance. It told essentially the same story as the war museum in Overloon had told, with different exhibits, of course. This museum declares that it has decided to take a "personal " approach to this history, showing how individual Dutch families experienced the war. It did not aim at providing a statistical portrait illustrating the average experience. When you do this, you aim at making the museum interesting to a wide range of people, but you also run the risk of distorting history. We’re not sure that they do not present a somewhat biased picture. It is a resistance museum, so they concentrate on displaying the words and pictures of resistors more than of those who went along as best they could with the occupation. So one may get the feeling that there were many more resistors than in fact there were even though the text accompanying the exhibits did try to describe the true extent of the resistance.
In addition, the narrative almost totally ignores essential facts about the Nazi occupation, like how many troops were there, where they were located, in what sorts of installations, with what sorts of armaments, and with what sorts of units. In fact, we were talking to the people at the reception desk about this, and were told that they’ve been having a discussion about adding just that information. The museum does report statistics about what happened to the Dutch Jews. Nearly 80 percent were deported and killed, in spite of one general strike called to protest their treatment and some valiant efforts by the general population, mostly in the Catholic south, to hide Jews and to prevent the slaughter.