HP De Tijd, Peter Plasman: 'Every person is potentially a crook'
Peter Plasman (72) is a criminal lawyer. In his spare time, he enjoys listening to music and collecting art. What else does he read, listen to and see?
"I read a lot about World War II, with the underlying question: how on earth was this possible? I was born seven years after the end of the war. My parents' generation, as well as my generation, were steeped in the thought: once but never again. Slowly that thought is changing. The further away the war is in history, you notice that it is less alive among people. A simple example: I taught high school for a while in the 1980s. In those days you were still allowed to choose the topics you wanted to talk about in class. I wanted to tell my class about the Holocaust. Within five minutes someone raised his finger: "Sir, we don't need to hear anything more about that, we're not interested in that at all. So this was back in the 1980s. Historical awareness has only diminished over the years: almost a quarter of Dutch young people today question the seriousness of the persecution of the Jews. I find that unimaginable.
