An evening about the astonishing ease with which people succumbed to totalitarian temptation nearly a hundred years ago. About a grandfather who collaborated with the Germans throughout the war and never showed remorse for its horrific consequences. About small choices with large repercussions—about how one thing could happen because another already existed. About refuting excuses made after the fact, because everyone always has a choice to do what is right.

The Berlage Saxophone Quartet performs music by composers who faced that same choice: to collaborate or to resist.

Sheila Sitalsing is a journalist, writer, and economist. She writes essays and columns on politics and society. For eleven years, she wrote a widely read column every other day for de Volkskrant, for which she was awarded the Heldring Prize. In 2024, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Humanistic Studies. She wrote the political biography Mark and collected her columns on the pandemic year 2020 in Diary of a Mad Year.