Back on the Biltstraat

You are back on the Biltstraat, where this walk began.

On the seventh of May 1945 the Polar Bears drove along here and the city emptied into the street. People waved flags they had kept hidden for five years and embraced soldiers they had never seen before.

That same morning, a few streets away, ten resistance fighters lay dead by the Rosarium. For their families this was not a day of celebration.

That is what this quarter shows. Within a few hundred metres sat the headquarters of the Dutch national socialist movement and the press that printed the illegal papers. The mayor who worked with the occupier had his bunker in the park, and the archbishop who condemned the movement lived around the corner. In a villa among German neighbours, a hundred and fifty children were hidden.

None of those people knew how it would end when they made their choice.