Belgium’s newly-opened Holocaust and human rights museum stands symbolically on the site of a barracks commandeered by the Nazis as a wartime transit center for Jews and Gypsies being sent to the death camps.
The new Kazerne Dossin in the Flemish town of Mechelen, comprising a museum, memorial and documentation center, is located at the site of an 18th century barracks that officials dub “a silent witness to the greatest war crime, in the form of genocide, in Belgium.”
The new World War II remembrance complex some 30km from Brussels was inaugurated by Belgian King Albert II and opened to the public last month.
PHOTO: AFP
Like the Drancy camp outside Paris where Jews were rounded up and sent to death camps, the Dossin barracks — directly linked to the Belgian rail network — was turned into a last-stop transit center for the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp run by the Nazis during the war.
More than 25,500 Jews and 350 Gypsies from both Belgium and northern France were sent there after their arrest, often with the help of local police.
There were more than 70,000 Jews in Belgium before World War II broke out, notably 18,000 in the nearby port city of Antwerp.
After two or three months at Dossin, deportees were herded into trains for the Third Reich’s death camps. Only five percent of the Jews and Gypsies who left Mechelen in 28 convoys ever returned.
Last September, Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo presented the country’s apologies for crimes committed by people who had worked hand-in-hand with Nazis to deport Jews.
“This new museum takes a more profound look at the history of the persecution of the Jews in Flanders and Belgium, based on new historic sources of information and insights,” said Kris Peeters, who heads the Dutch-speaking government of Flanders.
“It also provides a link between the concepts of holocaust and human rights.”
In 1995, members of the Jewish community opened a small museum in a part of the barracks but much of the building had already been turned into flats and sold.
The new complex, built with the help of a US$33.5 million investment by the government of Flanders, adds a state-of-the-art cube-like museum designed by celebrated Flemish architect Bob Van Reeth.
The top fourth floor, destined to house temporary exhibitions, is open to the light of day but the other three stories smack of a mausoleum.
Rectangular shapes in the white facade symbolize bricked-up windows while the heavy sliding steel door recalls those on the freight trains used to carry the victims to their death.
Van Reeth said the total volume was equivalent to that of the freight cars used in the 28 convoys to the death camp; the number of bricks used being the same as the number of people deported.
The three floors touch on three themes — intolerance, fear and death.
The museum expects to see 100,000 visitors a year.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
RSS