From the humble street corners to the grand hotels, from the bridges over the Amstel canal to the tram stops near the Rijksmuseum, wherever you go in Amsterdam there is a story from the city’s years of Nazi occupation. This spot is where the first “No Jews Allowed” sign was posted. Over there is where the RAF mistakenly dropped a bomb. And here’s where the attack on the civil registry office was plotted.
“It’s a lot of stories,” agrees historian and film-maker Bianca Stigter, as we walk the streets, together with her husband Steve McQueen, taking in key locations from their new film, Occupied City. The sheer number of stories here – of tragedy, treachery, desolation – is overwhelming and yet, says Stigter, there is something sadder still: “What affected me most was when I couldn’t find any information about someone to make it a story. You could only find that someone was born and someone was murdered, and that was it.”
