Adjust, Collabarate or Resist

This could apply to sorting out my feelings towards Amsterdam.  The canals look picturesque and many of the buildings are interesting.  But I am still ambivalent ... not adoring like the other places ith have been.

But that's not it!  ADJUST, COLLABARATE OR RESIST is the main focus of the Resistence Museum we visited today.  It was one of the responses by the Dutch to a modern move towards Right Wing thinking.  Those older citizens, who had witnessed such a severe swerve to the Right in their country, were ready to share their experiences, as a warning!

When the Germans arrived in 1940, their initial approach was friendly, attempting to win over the Dutch.  Some chose to collabarate. They joined the Dutch Nazi Party, and were given preference in employment, etc.

Some tried to ignore or not react to what was happening to their Jewish fellow citizens.  They just tried to adjust to their circumstances.

Others chose the more courageous path ... of resistance.  This took many forms.  Illegal newspapers, organising strikes, hiding Jews, forging coupons and identify papers, hiding Dutch males who refused to go work in German industry, building illegal radio receivers to hear the war news on BBC or Dutch Orange radio.

The Museum gave individual examples of Dutch who had chosen the various options.  When Germans were rounding up Dutch males for German industry, one man tried to hide at his uncle's who wanted 25 guilders a week.  Not having that money, he was shipped off to Germany.  His own uncle!!  One couple facilitated the hiding of many Jewish children.  One little girl, when her own mother returned after the war, had grown so attached to this woman she initially refused to leave her. One girl rode her bike 60 kms a day, picking up messages and delivering them elsewhere.

Overall it seemed an even handed display, explaining why some people chose to ADJUST or
COLLABARATE, without excusing their behaviour.  The only area not focused on was where those in hiding were "betrayed".

After that was lunch in a really funky bar/cafe.  When I needed the toilet, I was confronted with two doors, simply marked H and D.  

"Am I an H or a D?" I asked the owner.

"You are definitely a D," he replied.

So in I go, to find another woman waiting.  We hear the toilet flush and out comes a MAN, with an embarrassed look on his face.  

"Sorry, I am in the wrong to one," he said in accented English.  He scurried out, AND he had left the seat up!!!

We wandered down to catch the Canal Bus.  The captain grabbed my tickets, wrote the time and date on them, giving them back with the stern warning they are only eligible for the next 48 hours.  Fine with me, given the Captain YESTERDAY MORNING never marked the tickets at all!!!  So we cruised about for over two hours and did a complete circuit of the blue line.