Dockworker
Jonas Daniel Meijerplein
On Jonas Daniel Meyer Square you see the statue of
the Dockworker, or Longshoreman, made by Mari Andriessen. It
commemorates the strike held in 1941, and was unveiled by Queen
Juliana of the Netherlands in 1952.
The so-called February Strike was the first major protest from the Dutch against what was happening in their country under Nazi occupation. Anti-Semitic measures were being passed and an atmosphere of terror was being created. The strike was called in reaction to German round-ups of Jews that took place in Amsterdam on 22 and 23 February 1941. On those two days 425 young Jewish men were arrested, and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, where almost all of them died.
The round-ups were in part a Nazi reprisal for what had just happened in an ice-cream parlour in Amsterdam. The shop was run by two German-Jewish refugees, named Cahn and Kohn. The Nazi police, the Grüne Polizei, raided Koco's ice-cream parlour and were greeted with ammonia sprayed at them. The strike was organized by the underground Dutch Communist Party. The party, later known as the CPN, wrote the famous manifesto calling upon the Dutch to 'Strike, strike, strike!' which was circulated among many Amsterdam businesses early on the morning of 25 February.
Throughout the city, firms went on strike: public transport, municipal work, shipbuilding and the metal industries in North Amsterdam, all came to a standstill. Large department stores, like De Bijenkorf on Dam Square, remained closed for business.
The next day the strike spread to neighbouring towns and centres. The Nazi occupiers broke the strike with harsh measures. A remembrance of the strike is observed in Amsterdam on 25 February each year in the square beside the statue of the Docker.
