Zoo refuge: Amsterdam menagerie hid Jews from the Nazis
The Artis Zoo, built in the middle of the 19th century in the center of Amsterdam, was Europe's first.
But many visitors don't know about the role the zoo played during the World War II, when dozens or even hundreds of people, Dutch Jews among them, were thus saved from the Nazis by hiding in storerooms above the caged animals.
Roughly 140,000 Jews lived in Holland in the first half of the 20th century, and were joined by 30,000 who escaped Germany with the rise of the Nazis. When the extermination of Dutch Jewry began with the Nazi invasion in 1942, Martin Frankenhaus, the zoo's future manager, had just been born.
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