Lives Cut Short: Considerations from the Jewish Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Near the end of our stay in the Netherlands, Thomas and I visit the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.  Artifacts here noiselessly cry out, silently shouting a story.

Jewish people have lived in Amsterdam for centuries.  In the Middle Ages, they fled here to escape the Spanish Inquisition, establishing a significant Portuguese and Spanish community, reflected in two synagogues erected in the Jewish quarter.  

Painting of the two synagogues in the Jewish quarter

Later, the Ashkenazi Jews from Northern Europe trickled in, finding relative freedom in the city.  Although they were barred from joining certain guilds, they still found other lines of work open to them.  By the nineteenth century, Jewish women were even holding literary forums in their homes.  By then, many viewed the Jews as equals to their Dutch counterparts.

 

Painting, a Jewish family walks to synagogue worship

Then Hitler arrived, attacking neutral Holland, hoping this European sister would join Germany’s evil plot. Many exhibits throughout the museum consider this devastating time.  While there, I took time to c how, in the few short years of Nazi occupation, the dreams of thousands evaporated. Plans dissolved. Ideals shattered.

One exhibit portrayed archives of family movies, filmed by individuals who treasured visual images.  One Jewish woman gathered her photograph albums in biscuit tins and hid them beneath the dirt in her garden, where they lay while she died in Auschwitz. After the war, her brother dug them up, finding her hidden treasure.  I spent several moments watching scenes from the life of this family—as real today as the day on which they were recorded.  The films, though silent, tell multiple stories:  

 

One documents a newborn’s first days of life.  The crying child, nestled in her mother’s arms, is cherished by visiting family members.  The older sister, a toddler, joyfully embraces her younger sibling for the first time.  A nurse, white pinafore starched and tidy, arranges the bassinet close to the mother’s bedside.  The mother, nuzzling the infant close, speaks lovingly to her newborn.

 

From preserved film reels, these moments live on.  

 

Another exhibit shares other stories, retold on screens, placed at intervals throughout the room. 

 

One nook tells of Jews hiding in safety.   Children, tucked away in a farm home, must share a bed with a heavy old couple whom they’ve never met before.  Because the children are Jewish.  

 

Another display showcases objects, which disclose the story of some fragment of Jewish life, before, during, or after the war.  A pink dress with the star of David still stitched onto it hangs in a glass display.  Its twelve-year-old owner Betty lost her life in a concentration camp in 1943.  

 

A sign, “Jooden Forboden” stares out at me behind display glass.  Shopping hours restrict the Jewish star wearers to completing their routine at a set time each day.  How many eyes read this warning and were forced to leave an area, disappointed, hurt, wondering why so many forces moved against them . . . because they were Jewish?  

 

And then, one day, their notice came, summoning them to a work camp, phrased in the language of a seemingly optimistic letter or masked in the verbiage of assisting the fatherland.  They chose their items, one by one.  This comb.  That nail file.  Those scissors.  But the toiletries proved unnecessary.  Pointless. Because the lives of their owners were about to be cut short in the worst possible way.  The smart work dress would be replaced by the shapeless, sagging cloth of prison garb—if the woman was not exterminated when she arrived.  

 

Photograph, Winter of Hunger

A walk through Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum reminds: This side of eternity, much suffering exists.  The kind of unspeakable atrocities of concentration camps and needless genocide victims testifies to the ever-present evil of the human heart.  Vanished victims witness to the extent of evil capable against one’s fellow humans.

 

I walk downstairs.  My mind is telling me I need a coffee break.  As I sip my cappuccino, a tear trickles from my eye.  Then another.  Before I know it, I’m dabbing at my eyes frequently, dampening the napkin I thought would make an excellent memento.  Another tear falls as I consider the memories of these departed.  Lives cut short, their discarded articles narrating multiple interrupted stories.

 

“Boast not thyself of tomorrow,” Proverbs 27:1 warns, “for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”  Life is uncertain.  Death is not.  While we deeply desire genocide never to occur again, the evil heart of humankind tells another story.  China’s Ugyers.  North Korea’s dwarfs.  Innocent victims of mass shootings or militant Islam’s terrorist attacks.  Such atrocities remind us: all is not well in our twenty-first century world.  Add to that the snuffed-out lives of millions of innocent unborn children, and we recount yet another way in which the depraved human heart displays its evil.

 

The future is unknown.  Evil abounds.  Any moment, life on earth may be extinguished.  The artifacts in this museum speak forth many lessons. Let us not fail to heed this one: we, the living, must prepare for the inevitable reality of death.  

 

Until Christ returns and establishes His kingdom, peace on earth will not exist.  Mass killings and genocides will likely remain an indisputable part of this planet’s reality.  But our time to prepare for eternity is today.  Let us make certain of our everlasting condition and live, considering that final day when we breathe our last.  For all we know, it may be today.