History and Memory: The Holocaust through the eyes of one family

From 7 March to 24 August 2025, Amsterdam’s National Holocaust Museum presents Between You and Me: Memory Boxes by Amos van Gelder and Amit Gur, an exhibition showing how different stories and perspectives on the Shoah can exist within a single family.

Stories about survival and betrayal

Amos van Gelder’s mother escaped certain death when double agent Anton van der Waals discovered where she was hiding in Zaandam. He decided not to betray her. Van der Waals was one of the country’s most notorious traitors during the Second World War, responsible for the deaths of countless resistors. He was sentenced to death after the war. Why this man decided to spare the life of a young Jewish child remains a mystery. It is one of twenty similar stories that the Van Gelder family has told and retold over the decades. Like that of David Cohen, Amos van Gelder’s great-uncle, who was chair of the Jewish Council, and his grandmother Flora, who survived the Experiment Block at Auschwitz thanks to Dr Joseph Mengele’s Dobermanns.

Connected by history

In Between You and Me artist Amos van Gelder portrays twenty individuals: members of his family, but also war criminals Ferdinand Aus der Fünten and Albert Gemmeker. They are all connected by what happened to the Van Gelder family in the Shoah and the artist’s own confrontation with that history. His work is his artistic and personal interpretation of those events. Almost every aspect of the Shoah finds its way into his family history: hiding, deportation, betrayal, murder, resistance, Jew hunters, collaboration, Jewish Council, survival and conversion. The portraits are displayed in what the artist calls Memory Boxes – the boxes in which we store the treasured reminders of our past. Van Gelder expresses his subjects’ experiences in Hebrew, painted in a halo. In the audio guide, voices recall brief moments and impressions, while the spoken words are accompanied by a composition by Amit Gur that links the various people through music. A diagram explains how each of the individuals is connected.

Texture

Amit Gur often draws inspiration from art when composing music, including work by Amos van Gelder. He finds the process of painting in itself inspirational, and sometimes he even comes up close to the painting to compose. Gur and Van Gelder share a fascination for what they refer to as texture. This is immediately recognisable and tangible in Van Gelder’s paintings, as in the relief letters. In Gur’s music, texture is conveyed by the passage of time.

About the artists

Amos van Gelder

Amos van Gelder (b. 1960, Haifa, Israel) studied art in the Netherlands and the United States. He draws inspiration from Israel, the Hebrew language, Jewish tradition and more recently also the Shoah. That’s why he likes to present his art in places with a Jewish context, like a former synagogue. Memory Boxes is his first work dealing with the Shoah in relation to his own family history.

Amit Gur

Amit Gur (b. 1987, Tel Aviv, Israel) studied composition in Jerusalem and Amsterdam and currently works at Conservatorium van Amsterdam as lecturere and researcher. He recently received a doctorate from Antwerp University for his research into composition and the perception of musical texture.

Information

Between You and Me: Memory Boxes by Amos van Gelder and Amit Gur, compiled by guest curator Birgitta van Blitterswijk, appears from 7 March to 24 August 2025 at the National Holocaust Museum. Catalogues are available for press representatives. For more information contact Doron Beuns.