The memory of the Holocaust has become an indelible part of Western culture, now functioning as an important moral compass for both European countries and, in particular, Israel and the United States. In the first decades after the Second World War, there was little space in the public culture of remembrance for the persecution of the Jews, nor for the other victims of the racist mass murder. Both in Israel and the Netherlands, the main emphasis was on the resistance to the persecution. The Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto thereby provided an important source of inspiration for the founders of Israel, and this quickly became part of the young state’s memory discourse. In the Netherlands, by contrast, it was the non-Jewish resistance that was commemorated, the central event being the February Strike of 1941, which constituted the largest public general protest against the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. In the United States, the war was mainly celebrated as a victory for democracy; little attention was paid to the actual impact and meaning of the catastrophe.

Only in the 1960s would this change, partly as a result of the Eichmann trial in Israel; the success of the diary of Anne Frank as a publication, play, and film; and the first major historical studies. The victims of the persecution slowly acquired a face and the barbarous scale of the genocide became clear to the general public. The influence of popular media cannot be underestimated; although the term ‘Holocaust’ had been used in the English-speaking world for some time, it only became a truly global term with the popular NBC miniseries of 1978. In the 1990s, memorial museums were built or renovated in various places, including in Washington, Berlin, and Jerusalem; likewise in Amsterdam, where, in 1993, a small exhibition opened at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the former site of deportation where more than 46,000 Jews had been registered and detained during the German occupation.

That this building in particular would become a memorial museum was by no means obvious. Shortly after the liberation, the building's owners wanted to reopen it as a theatre, but this plan met fierce opposition in local and national newspapers: no entertainment in this place of suffering.