130 performances in 58 municipalities will accompany Remembrance Day commemorations

Performances will be held in 58 locations in the Netherlands on Thursday evening after the annual Remembrance Day commemoration of the country's war dead. There are 130 performances in total. About 1,500 people participate in Theater na de Dam, an annual event connected to the Remembrance of the Dead memorial services.

The title refers to the commemoration at the National Monument on Dam Square in Amsterdam. The event has its origins in 2010, when it started on a small scale in the capital. The initiative was introduced at the time by theater makers and philosophers Jaïr Stranders and Bo Tarenskeen. They feared that the commemoration could lose its expressiveness, and wanted to raise the question of what World War II means to society today.

It has now become a national event, in which mainly professional performing artists participate, and often also many young people. This time there are also more than forty special youth performances for this group among the total number of performances.

The offer and the locations are very varied. For example, Jacob Derwig plays the performance Waar wij voor strijden in the Carré Theater in Amsterdam, but there is also a performance in the capital's Artis zoo, called Duif in Artis. During the occupation, several hundred people hid in the zoo for a period.

One of the performances, Sjiwwe voor Sobibor at Camp Westerbork, features a performance by seven young people in remembrance of the transports to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. These young people from Sittard in the province Limburg, delved into their town's wartime history and engaged in conversations with witnesses. These discussions are now portrayed in the performance titled Vergeten Verzet. Similarly, young people from Middelburg in Zeeland created the show Schemer.

At Twente Airport in Enschede, Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege presents her new musical theatre show De Vergeten Twentse Lente, featuring music by Boudewijn de Groot. The performance recounts a largely forgotten strike against German occupiers in 1943 and delves into the current state of democracy and its vulnerabilities.

In 1943, half a million people participated in a strike against the forced labor deployment of released Dutch soldiers in Germany. The protest began at the Stork machine factory in Hengelo. De Vergeten Twentse Lente will be performed a dozen times in the coming weeks.