Dutch West India Company

Dear Baby,

Before we started on this journey, I made your father promise that we could go on a Middle Passage tour of West Africa and a Holocaust tour of concentration camps in central Europe.

I want to do this because I want us as parents to be cognizant of our (and our child's) history.

But I may have been precipitous. A visit to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum looking at exhibits chronicling the Dutch participation in the slave trade, and the Jewish Historical Museum, watching videos of hundreds of thousands of people being led to slaughter was sobering.

I still want to do the tour, but maybe we should wait to take you with us - so we can all share the experience.

Love,
Dear Mama

Jood

Dear Baby,

Your father and I just returned from a trip to Amsterdam in The Netherlands. We spent some time during the first few days in the Joods Historich Museum (Jewish Historical Museuem). Your father wanted to follow the path of the exiled Jews (whose path we traced in Portugal earlier this year) to Holland.

While the museum was interesting, the single display that moved me the most was a bolt of cloth imprinted with Jewish stars. While I've seen dozens of documentaries and movies featuring the star worn by many European Jews during World War II, I never thought about them as a commodity.

But they were. And Jews had to buy them for four cents each to be sewn on the clothes of adults and children over six. They were manufactured in different languages depending on the country of origin. In Dutch, it was Jood.

This is one story I don't relish having to share with you. But I will.

Love,

Dear Mama