Excerpt from 2002 Letter about OVERLOON, p1: Just a few words about the World War II museum at Overloon. It was built on the field of the battle that took place there. The exhibits told several stories: the defeat, the Nazi occupation, the resistance, liberation, and the deportation of the Dutch Jews.

It seemed to us to be completely honest about the deportation of Jews during the war, including the complicity of the Dutch National Socialist Party, which never was granted much power by the German Nazi regime. In passing, it made a point that we’d never heard before. We have often wondered how it was that people in Europe, living in the same towns from which Jews were deported to the concentration camps and extermination camps could claim that they did not know what was happening to the Jews. After all, the deportations required a great deal of organization and visible movements of a lot of people. In Holland alone, many thousands were deported. But there may be an explanation which rests on communications structure and, in addition, what the Nazis learned on previous occasions. When word got out that Jews were being persecuted. Dutch workers stopped working for a few days, which the Nazis could ill afford. To prevent the deportations from becoming general knowledge, they issued all their orders concerning the deportations in the Jewish press, which was printed in Yiddish, and only in the Jewish press. Ordinary Dutch citizens, of course, could not read this press. So only the target people were informed, not the general population. And, of course, even if Dutch citizens did learn of the deportations, neither they nor the Jews knew where they were going, or what their fate was to be. Perhaps many of the Dutch assumed that their fate was the same as the fate of the many Dutch citizens who were conscripted and sent to Germany to work in the war industries. Remember the infamous Nazi slogan, "Arbeit Macht Frei" which adorned the entrance to concentration camps.

This museum has a lot of war hardware, including many pieces, like tanks, that had been put out of action right there in the battle for Overloon , Venray and Eindhoven. But the interesting part for us, was the building that described the history of Europe from the 1930’s through the war and after. The history was in three languages, one of which was English. The very interesting exhibits illustrating the narrative, including things like posters, orders, proclamation, account sheets, records, films etc., were in Dutch and we could not understand these very well.