Flourishing business, flourishing virus

Sunday in November, around 5 in the afternoon, I finished my latest reunion with a cross trainer and other similar unsavoury devices in my gym.

A few doors down there is a post-secondary vocational education centre for older teenagers. On the ground floor of the same building there is a big supermarket belonging to the Dirk van den Broek national chain of supermarkets.

I stumbled from the gym to the supermarket.

When it comes to corona infections, the Dutch are up a creek and cannot find a suitable paddle.

They do not know how many people are infected because the maximum of their test capacity has been reached. Regular hospital wards and ICUs are filling up with corona patients at an alarming rate.

There is now talk of "code black": a situation where they decide to let people die because there is not enough capacity to treat everybody.

A talk show guru physician said recently that if code black is activated, the hospitals will have to be guarded by the police.

The police immediately replied: we do not have enough capacity, it will have to be done by the army.

The government has reintroduced a few measures.

One is the mandatory wearing of a face mask in all indoor areas accessible to the public, including shops. The only exceptions are indoor places where the coronavirus entry pass is used

The supermarket that was the destination of my weary tread was quite busy.

People were walking in and out without a face mask.

There were two young female shop assistants standing near to the entrance chatting to each other. One was wearing a face mask over her nose and mouth, the other had it under her chin.

I am not really integrated into Dutch society as I do not think rules only apply to other people.

I approached the young ladies and asked them why all these not wearing face masks people were in their shop. Should they not do something about it?

They replied that wearing a face mask was only an advice and their team leader had told them not to say anything about it.

I told them wearing a face mask in shops had been mandatory for over a week. They shrugged their shoulders.

Most of the staff inside the supermarket were either not wearing a face mask or wearing it under their chin.

Next day, a report in the media, Dutch Security Council chair:

"If compliance with the measures does not fundamentally change and the number of infections does not fall substantially, there will be a lockdown that will last all winter."

Another report: "still hoping that a lockdown can be averted, the cabinet makes another appeal to us about our behaviour."

Don't mention the Verkaufsbücher

I have written before that during the Second World War almost all Dutch government and private organisations collaborated with the German occupier in the isolation, persecution and deportation of Dutch Jews.

I have also explained that the reason for this collaboration was not virulent overt antisemitism as it was in other occupied countries.
The reason was much more mundane: it was profitable.

In recent years there has been more research into the collaboration and as a result it has been raining profuse apologies.
However, it is not something people like to talk about.

The silence surrounding the collaboration can lead to a distorted view of the prelude to the Dutch Holocaust.
The following case is an example of this distortion.

The Jan van Goyen Medical Centre, a private, well-known Dutch clinic with a growing number of subsidiaries, has its domicile at Jan van Goyenkade 1.
It is a beautiful building in a very nice part of Amsterdam near to the Hilton Hotel.

On their site they write about their "long history":
"In 1942 an ENT clinic was established in the building on the Jan van Goyenkade."
According to their site, the building had a glorious war record as well: “During the occupation, people in hiding still needed medical care.
That was possible in a secret hospital in Amsterdam. The hospital was located at Jan van Goyenkade 1."

Strange, even though I searched as thoroughly as possible, I could not find any corroboration of a secret hospital there.
Surely, somebody would have recorded it somewhere? This was not the case.

The bigger problem for me was: why do they not mention the original owner?
He was the man who had the house built in 1923. His name was Alfred Cohen and he was a Jew.

The reason they do not mention him is because their "secret hospital", that is not mentioned anywhere else, was one of the houses Jewish owners were forced to leave and sell at a fraction of their value.
This is now referred to as the "theft of Jewish real estate."

The address can be found in the "Verkaufsbücher", the files the Germans kept of all stolen Jewish property.

"The Verkaufsbücher provide a gripping overview of Jewish real estate that was confiscated in World War II and subsequently stolen by war buyers.
These books describe in detail how more than 7,000 Jewish properties and plots of land ended up in the hands of mostly shady entrepreneurs and real estate traders."
KRO, NCRV television networks.