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In the Netherlands, until the years mid eighty of the previous century, in accordance with the so called 'breaking bonds' paradigm at the time, children who had died around birth, were immediately separated from the parents. There and above, Roman Catholic rules dictated that children who had not been baptized before they died, would be buried anonymously in hideaway, and in the unconsecrated grounds of the graveyard. This article discusses these parents and their stillborn children. Their loss and grief remained for a long time unacknowledged, resulting in feelings of disenfranchised grief. These feelings increased as a result of the shift of paradigm into continuing bonds with a deceased, developing into the nowadays empathic and intimate contact between parents and stillborn children. With the emergence as of the year 2000 of monuments to stillborn children (in the Netherlands around 160 in total),monuments have become a strategy to cope with feelings of disenfranchised grief. This article concludes that parents of stillborn children benefit from an honourable place to commemorate and pay respect to their long-time publicly neglected child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands went online in 2005. This monument has been dedicated to preserve the memory of “all the men, women and children who were persecuted as Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and did not survive the Shoah”. In 2010 the Jewish Monument Community was linked to this virtual monument, this website Community offers the possibility to contribute additional information about individual victims remembered in the Digital Monument. The results of this research show that in comparison with commemoration at a traditional material monument, in particular the individual features of this new concept regarding commemoration are valued. Each individual victim may be commemorated and remembered in a very personal manner by telling who the victim was, and how he or she lived on the eve of deportation. The conclusion is that cyberspace may offer a significant and relevant place for, in this case, commemoration practices. Both Digital Monument and Community offer a meaningful place of commemoration of Dutch victims of the Shoah. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]