War Diaries (February 27) (nonfiction)
War Diary entries for February 27.
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Diaries
Jan Christiaan Marius Kruisinga: February 27, 1941
On Tuesday and Wednesday, there was a general strike in Amsterdam. There was nothing about it in the papers, but we heard the first rumors from travelers on Wednesday morning, and they were confirmed in the letters from the capital that we received today.
The cause of the strike seems to have been the fact that the ‘Green Police’ 1 and the WA2or ‘Dutch SS’ took all male Jews aged between 20 and 35 from their homes in the Jewish area, herded them together on Waterlooplein,3 loaded them onto trucks and took them in the direction of Schoorl or Wieringermeer. There had been tension before, apparently, as a result of the requisition of workers for Germany at one of the Amsterdam shipyards, after which all shipyards and dockyards were telephoned and urged to immediately down tools. This issue seems to have been settled by the German authorities, but the imprisonment of the Jewish population was not accepted by their ‘Aryan’ fellow-townsmen; the Jordaan and Kattenburg areas turned out soon, improvising a kind of oranjefeest4 on Dam5 — which is forbidden at the moment. Signs (‘de Joden vrij, dan werken wij’ — ‘free the Jews, then we’ll work’) were used in the city to urge workers not to go to work on Tuesday.
Which is what happened: There were no trams or buses, and most public services — the gas and water company in particular — were largely or entirely suspended. It was eerily quiet in the city at night, only pistol shots could be heard from time to time. I don’t know yet whether there were any casualties and, if so, how many.
Dutch citizen Jan Christiaan Marius Kruisinga's diary features accounts of events in 1941, when the occupiers first began rounding up and deporting Jews. Members of the Dutch Communist party, which was illegal at the time, called for a protest strike in response. On Feb. 25, trams in Amsterdam stopped working. Dockworkers walked off the job. Many shops closed in solidarity. Kruisinga, a notary and poet from Den Helder, wrote 3,600 pages in his multivolume diary.
Some 300,000 workers joined the strike in Amsterdam, where there was marching in the streets. The next day, workers in Haarlem, Hilversum, Utrecht, and other cities joined in. Clashes with retaliating German forces in various places left nine dead and 24 wounded.
- Dutch War Diaries @ NY Times
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- Jan Kruisinga (nonfiction) - Dutch citizen who kept a diary during the Second World War
- War (nonfiction)
- War Diaries (nonfiction)
External links
- Dutch War Diaries @ NY Times