Sixty years after the end of World War II, the Dutch national railway company apologised on Thursday for its role in deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Aad Veenman, chief executive of Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), acknowledged for the first time that his firm had collaborated with Nazi occupiers by deporting 107,000 Dutch Jews - 70 percent of the country's Jewish community - to death camps in Germany and Poland.
"On behalf of the company and from the bottom of my heart, I sincerely apologise for what happened during the war," Veenman said at a ceremony that launched an anti-racism poster campaign across 66 Dutch railway stations.
The apology, which comes at a time of increasing religious and racial tension in the Netherlands, was made at Muiderpoort station in Amsterdam, from where 11,000 Jews were deported.
One poster read: "Previously, the train to Auschwitz left from here. When will the world become wiser?"
Another said: "In 1940-45, the Jews had to go. Who is next... Isn't the hatred reviving?" Last year's murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, known for his outspoken criticism of Islam, sparked a wave of attacks on mosques, religious schools and churches in a country once renowned for its tolerance.
The NS decided to apologise and acknowledge its role in the Holocaust - a difficult subject it avoided for decades - after the Netherlands' main Jewish organisation, CJO, proposed the poster campaign.
"The idea is to warn against indifference," said CJO member Ronny Naftaniel. "During the Second World War thousands of Jews were deported with the help of railway workers. They knew what they were doing but kept going on." "We believe it's really important to warn against indifference especially after seeing increasing racism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the rest of the world today."
The Netherlands is still troubled by guilt over the wartime Nazi collaboration of its authorities and deportation of all but a fraction of its Jewish population, as well as hundreds of Gypsies and homosexuals.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende strongly condemned complicity in the Holocaust, saying the Netherlands had failed to show much compassion when Jews who survived death camps returned. The government apologised for that in 2000.
But Holocaust survivors say the apologies come too late.
"We have to accept them, although it's a bit too late," said Bloeme Evers Emden, who was deported from Rotterdam to Auschwitz by NS trains when she was 17.
"I fear that there is no lesson (from the Holocaust) because anti-Semitism is rising in Europe and even in the rest of the world. But maybe people who are travelling with NS will read the posters and think about it," Emden, 79, said at the ceremony.
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