SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (Germany) TIMES OF ISRAEL
AMSTERDAM – Of the 110,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands during World War II, only 6,000 returned home from the concentration camps. The survivors mostly found that their homes had been destroyed, or had been taken possession of by non-Jews.
It was then, if they were from Amsterdam, that the municipal letters started to arrive.
From 1945 to 1947, the city of Amsterdam sent Holocaust survivors reminders for unpaid taxes and other unpaid bills from the war years. Unlike other Dutch cities, Amsterdam made no allowances for the reasons that the returnees had not paid up.
There was no public debate, although the newspaper Het Parool did report on the letters in 1948.
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Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam Wikipedia
It is only now, 65 years later, that the way the city dealt with the issue is receiving public attention. Michiel Mulder of the Dutch Labor Party (Partij van de Arbeid) called the way returning Jews were dealt with a “disgrace.” Amsterdam Mayor Eberhared van der Laan stated that the local government at the time had acted “formalistically, bureaucratically and coldly,” showing no “empathy for the victims.”
The Times of Israel ran a story titled “Amsterdam fined, taxed Holocaust survivors in hiding” illustrated with a photo of Anne Frank.
The revelations are particularly embarrassing because they only came to light by accident during the digitizing of city archives. Art historian Charlotte van den Berg told the Süddeutsche Zeitung she found documents relating to the matter “buried under other files.”
The documents included replies received from Jews taking issue with the payment demands or asking for extensions of the due dates for payments. “There were late fees being charged for late payment,” van den Berg said.
When she notified authorities about what she’d found, there was some notice taken but the archives department was more interested in staying on schedule with the digitizing project than worrying about 65-yer-old letters. Original documents were to be destroyed after the digitizing was completed. So van den Berg contacted Het Parool.
One of the spokespersons for those involved and their descendants is Ronny Naftaniel, the son of a Holocaust survivor and director of the Center for Information and Documentation Israel in the Netherlands. He urged swift clarification. While he did not mention compensation payments, he qualified as “shocking” that the city of Amsterdam had even claimed back-payments for local real estate taxes and public utilities.
