By Gert-Jan Segers on 4 February 2020 at 09:29Apologies and duty to the good (ND column)On Sunday morning I am always in the church.

Except last week. I was at the impressive National Holocaust Commemoration in the Wertheim Park in Amsterdam, exactly 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. It was the commemoration with the impressive and moving moment when Prime Minister Rutte apologised to the Jewish community on behalf of the government. Finally.Prime Minister Rutte acknowledged in his speech last week that there have been good and brave Dutch people and spoke of 'the hope of hiding, the courage of resistance, the collective rise during the February strike'. He did not want to raise himself morally over others who had done nothing in their survival at the time or had even cooperated as wrongly loyal officials with deportations. But he then said what had to be said and what should have been said for a long time. That the good had been too little, that we failed. "Too little protection, too little help, too little recognition." When Prime Minister Rutte apologized, a wave of emotion went through the rows of attendees. Afterwards and in the last week I heard from many sides what these excuses have loosened. It also moved me, also because the run-up to these excuses has also been special to myself. But I'll tell you again later. What still concerns me is the probing question that Prime Minister Rutte raised: what would have done? When we think about our answer, we should not think too quickly that we would have obviously played a hero role. That we would have been brave. I now also hear from different sides how the tragedy for Jews after the war was far from over. I received an e-mail last week from someone who told me the story of a Jewish boy from a Frisian village, who had survived the concentration camps with his mother and returned to the village as the only ones of the 14 Jews. They arrived in their camp rags and got new clothes. So much for civilization. Afterwards they were kindly but urgently asked to meet all arrears made by the SS'er who had lived in their home. They end up in a form of debt restructuring and ended up paying all the bills. In 1955, another bill for the clothing they had received on their return ten years earlier came. And when compensation to victims was paid in 1965, this Frisian Jew received nothing because his mother had died two years earlier. The man left the Netherlands with misery and left for the Us.. The moral appeal that this embarrassing episode does on us is not to say now that we are better people than our parents and grandparents. After prime minister Rutte's more than justified, but also belated apologies, I hope for further reconciliation between our country and the Jewish community, for forgiveness and a new coexistence in which we are already sounding the alarm at the slightest or slightest path of anti-Semitism. But I also hope that this makes us ask ourselves the probing question every day: what is my blind, moral stain? What injustice in my own and us do and let me not see? Where do I fall short of charity and standing up for justice and justice? The Jewish boy, his mother and thousands of other Jewish Dutch people have fallen victim to a thinking in which the letter of the law was more important than the need of that one man who stands before you. They were crushed by letterhands who no longer saw them standing and no longer heard what kind of tragedy they had experienced. The only thing that applies to letterhands is the rule and its merciless application. To this day, there are new victims of that thinking in our society, our bureaucracy, our churches, our families and in myself. May God forgive us. And may God convert us into a thinking in which no one is more important than that one man who stands before us, in which we feel no duty other than to warmly love our neighbor and in which we do the good thing that one human being needs.