Freedom



Freedom is never given, but always taken!


The Netherlands celebrated Liberation Day (Bevrijdingsdag) about a week ago, on May 5-- a national holiday.   This is an annual commenoration of the day the country was liberated from Nazi occupation by the Allied troops in 1945. The evening before, May 4, at precisely 8:00 PM, there were two minutes of silence observed throughout the country, in a "Remembrance of the Dead."  All stores closed early, all public transport stopped, and things pretty much halted everywhere for those two minutes.  At the Dam square in Amsterdam, the Queen laid a wreath at the national monument while thousands of people stood silently. I watched the ceremonies on TV. Sometimes it is easy to get the impression that the Dutch don't go in for ceremony, or that they are not patriotic, because they do tend to be laid back, tolerant and anti-authoritarian.  But I saw a great deal of respect by young and old being paid to both those who died during WWII and more recent wars, and also to the royal family.  The Netherlands was occupied by the Germans for 5 years, during which the majority of the nation's Jews were deported and killed.  Most of the remaining Dutch population suffered through those years of occupation, culminating in the "Winter of Hunger" in 1944-45, when the Nazis cut off food supplies to the western provinces, many starved, and 18,000 died.  There were interviews on TV with old people who lived through those hard time.  Though it's not something people speak of often, there does seem to be a national memory of this loss of freedom, a gratitude for its return, and a modern sense that freedom needs to be guarded.  Back in 1969 when I first visited Amsterdam as a 19-year-old U.S. Navy midshipman in uniform, I did not get a very warm reception from people my own age.  (This was during the Vietnam War.)  But some of the older folks, those who lived through WWII, gave me a warm and friendly reception on the street-- perhaps still expressing their gratitude for our assistance in liberating them in 1945.