The National Holocaust Museum stands in a Protestant teacher-training college whose students smuggled Jewish children out of the city. The theatre directly across Plantage Middenlaan was where Amsterdam's Jews were ordered to report from July 1942, and more than forty-six thousand passed through it in a year. Children up to thirteen were walked over the road to a day nursery next to the college, and the two gardens backed onto each other. Around six hundred children were passed over the hedge.
Neither of the two people who made it work came through. The woman who ran the nursery was deported and murdered in 1943, and the nursery itself was closed that September. The theatre's Jewish administrator, who handled the German paperwork on the other side of the road, was deported in 1944 and was dead by the start of 1945. The museum opened in 2024, and it gives one whole wall to the regulations that arrived one at a time: a job gone, a bicycle gone, a school place gone. Stand in front of that wall and read down it. The intervals get shorter.