It is May Vacation and all schools in the Netherlands are closed. Now that we are commemorating the war and celebrating our liberation, it seems a good idea to visit the Dutch war museums with the older kids. The 3 museums are in no particular order.
Exhibition For Valor at the Airborne museum in Oosterbeek in Gelderland.
Now villa Hartenstein is a museum but it's were in 1944 the British headquarters were located, during the battle of Arnhem. A beautiful building, now hard to imagine it in wartime.
For the first time in history you can see the five Victoria Crosses of the Battle of Arnhem (Operation Market Garden) together. The Victoria Cross is the supreme award for British military personnel. This medal is only awarded for extreme valour (bravery); for a special act of courage or sacrifice; or for extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy.
In this exhibition you will get to know the 5 heroes of the famous Battle of Arnhem (Operation Market Garden) by a free downloadable audio tour. You can also do the Airborne Experience, very exciting!
A very special exhibition in a very special museum!
Museum Overloon, in Noord-Brabant. Which is the biggest war museum of The Netherlands, with the new exhibition 'The Netherlands in the Second World War'
In Overloon they feel: war belongs in a museum. This museum is a monument to the Battle of Overloon and was literally built on the battlefield in 1946. This gigantic museum probably gives the most complete picture of World War ll in The Netherlands. Here you hear the special war stories and you see many military vehicles, ships and planes, uniforms and lots of stuff from that time.
In the exhibition The Netherlands in the Second World War you travel back in time. You experience what daily life looked like during wartime. You can also experience on interactive screens what choices people made in war time. You can step into the shoes of resistance fighters or of traitors and then the question is: what would you do?
A beautiful, impressive exhibition that is definitely worth a visit!
Remebrancecenter Camp Westerbork, in Drenthe, with the new exhibition 'Stories from hiding'
Probably the most important museum in this short list is Memorial Center Kamp Westerbork.
The hardest to visit, though. You are directly confronted with the pitch-black pages of our history, which are perhaps the most difficult to understand for anyone born after the war.
Seeing all those names and the children's faces in the photos leaves no one untouched. You wonder how to explain this to your children. You sympathize with how desperate the parents of these children must have felt.
Difficult as it is, it is really important to remember! 100,000 Dutch Jews, Sinti and Roma were transported from this 'transit camp' in the Netherlands to concentration or extermination camps all over Europe and this must never happen again!
2018 is theme year of resistance, the current exposition is 'Stories from hiding'. There is always a permanent exhibition about Kamp Westerbork itself with special films and photos about the life of the people who were imprisoned there.
There are guided tours of the camp site with the monuments and the appeal site and regularly there are lectures given by eyewitnesses. Every year, on May 4, a commemoration of the dead is held here at the National Monument Westerbork.
A very important and moving museum, that received 170,000 visitors last year!
All three museums are very important to the Dutch, they each keep a very important part of the Dutch history safe for us. History that may never be forgotten and must be passed on to the young!
Click for all information about location, opening days and times and ticket sales on the link of the relevant museum.