Dutch Water, Dutch Memory

A Golden Age city, the dam that erased a sea, and the bridge that was held too long

Six places where the Netherlands made and remembered itself in water and war: the canal ring Amsterdam dug with Golden Age wealth, the bookcase on the Prinsengracht that hid Anne Frank, the railway cathedral floating on 8,687 piles, the 32-kilometre dam that wiped the Zuiderzee off the map, and the Oosterbeek hotel and Arnhem bridge where the British 1st Airborne held out for nine days in 1944.

Itinerary

1. Amsterdam — Beginning in 1613, Amsterdam dug three concentric canals around its medieval core -- over a hundred kilometres of water and more than 1,500 bridges -- and financed it with the spice profits of the Dutch East India Company. The Golden Age that built the grachtengordel was also built on roughly 1.7 million enslaved people, a reckoning the city is still working through today.
2. Anne Frank House — At Prinsengracht 263, behind a bookcase Johannes Voskuijl built in 1942, eight people hid in roughly 50 square metres for two years and one month. After the raid on 4 August 1944, only Otto Frank survived the camps -- but Miep Gies had rescued his daughter's diary from the ransacked annex, and it became one of the most-read books of the century.
3. Amsterdam Centraal Station — Pierre Cuypers had to build the ground before he could build the station: three artificial islands dredged from the IJ and 8,687 wooden piles driven to firm clay. On that floating foundation he raised a Neo-Renaissance cathedral of rail that physically cut Amsterdam off from its harbour for the first time in seven centuries. Today 192,000 passengers a day pass through it.
4. Afsluitdijk — On 28 May 1932 a dredger dropped a single last bucket of clay into the Vlieter channel and the Zuiderzee -- an inland sea that had shaped a thousand years of Dutch trade and drowning -- simply ceased to exist. Ten thousand men and five years of work closed a 32-kilometre line across open water, two years ahead of schedule, turning the deadliest sea in the Netherlands into a freshwater lake.
5. Airborne Museum 'Hartenstein' — An elegant 1865 villa on the Utrechtseweg in Oosterbeek became Major-General Roy Urquhart's headquarters when Operation Market Garden fell apart in September 1944. Roughly 7,000 British soldiers held a perimeter of a few city blocks around it for nine days; of the 10,000 men who jumped or glided in, only about 2,400 made it back across the Rhine. In 1978 Urquhart returned to open the museum that now keeps their story.
6. Battle of Arnhem — Dropped eight miles from their objective and ordered to hold for two days, about 740 of John Frost's lightly armed paratroopers reached the northern ramp of the Arnhem road bridge and held it for four against German armor. The relief column was still 11 miles south when the last radio message came: out of ammunition, God save the King. The structure was rebuilt after the war as the John Frost Bridge.