This year, the city and The Hague paid millions of dollars in restitution to victims from whom it had unjustly collected taxes. They now open dozens of houses in some 20 municipalities for visits by the public each year on the Dutch memorial day.Īmsterdam, meanwhile, is preparing a huge Holocaust monument at its center. In 2012, the Netherlands saw the creation of a grassroots network of homeowners whose properties once belonged to Holocaust victims. The renovations coincided with major developments in attitudes to the Holocaust in the Netherlands, which received its first national Holocaust museum only in 2016. But then we just closed the hidden space and installed a new floor on it.” “It was an old house - that’s also what drew us to it - and so you naturally discover things. “The discovery story sounds romantic but the truth is, we just weren’t aware of the findings,” she said in the interview. The operation’s secrecy kept it out of the history books even though it was a rare case in which Dutch Jews not only escaped the genocide but helped others avoid capture.Įven as they were making these discoveries, van Iperen and her partner did not register their significance - at first. The nine-room estate is mostly hidden from view by large trees that afforded privacy to the tenants. In one secret space, van Iperen even found wartime resistance newspapers.ĭozens of Jews passed through the safe house, which is “perfectly located near Amsterdam but in the middle of nowhere,” van Iperen said. Van Iperen found evidence of the sisters’ ingenuity as soon as the renovations began, discovering double walls, secret doors and walled-off annexes that had been concealed so well that they were left undetected for decades. But at great personal risk, they then opened their safe house to Jews and others in need. He said the “High Nest” story “shows not all Dutch Jews went like lambs to the slaughter, and that’s very important.”īut to general readers, part of the book’s appeal lies in the strong characters of the people who did the rescuing at van Iperen’s home: sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper and their families.ĭaring anti-fascist activists - Janny fought as a volunteer combatant in the Spanish Civil War - they used connections to hide from the Germans in the house in Naarden, situated 10 miles east of Amsterdam. “Many Jews resisted, but of most of them we know very little,” said the Jewish filmmaker Willy Lindwer, who has produced several documentaries on the Holocaust in his native Netherlands. In bookstores, “The High Nest” stayed for weeks on the top 10 list of locally produced nonfiction. Recounted in a best-selling book that van Iperen published last year, the story generated strong media interest amid a wave of introspection about the Dutch society’s checkered Holocaust-era record.
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