Maliebaan Station
Maliebaanstation 16
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More than 1,200 Utrecht Jews did not survive the Second World War. They were persecuted and deported; most of the arrested Jews from Utrecht were transported from the Maliebaan Station to transit camp Westerbork. During the war, Maliebaan Station was mainly used for deportations. The national Dutch Railways (NS) played a major role in the deportations of Dutch Jews. Between July 1942 and September 1944, 102,000 Jews and several hundred Roma and Sinti were taken by train from the Netherlands, via Westerbork, to the death camps in Eastern Europe and Germany. The NS drew up the schedules for the transports, and Dutch personnel drove the trains to the German border. The costs were declared by the NS to the German occupier. So the NS collaborated on a large scale, and Jews were also transported in Utrecht. At the same time, there was also resistance from railroad personnel and there was a nationwide railroad strike in September 1944, which lasted until the Liberation. A little further down this street, in the Johan van Oldenbarneveltlaan, is a monument to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Utrecht. In front of the memorial wall with the 1239 names of the perished victims is a bronze artwork. It is a Minyan with a Shofar, a ram's horn. A Minyan is a group of ten men, needed to make a Jewish gathering or celebration possible. The front man reads to the others from a Torah. Shofar is Hebrew for ram's horn, the symbol of hope in hard times. The monument was created by Jewish-Georgian artist Amiran Djanashvili.
