Photo Roelof Kleis When WUR vacated the building, it took the plaque with it. Much to the annoyance of townsfolk. After long discussions, it has been decided the plaque with names belongs in the Aula. The commemorative plaque lists the names of 30 students and 5 members of staff of the then Agricultural College who were killed in the Second World War.
They include the Jewish student Bernhard van Gelder, who was seized and deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. The latest edition of Resource, which comes out on Thursday, has an article about this student and the house where he lived until shortly before his arrest. The house on Gravinnestraat is part of the annual Jewish Open Houses route.
The conversion of the Aula auditorium into a movie theatre is almost complete. Heerenstraat Theater’s newest film theatre has seating for 120 spectators. They will be a lot more comfortable in their armchairs than the generations of spectators who watched the thousands of PhD candidates defend their theses over the decades. But the average film also lasts longer than the one hour allowed for the PhD defence.
Visum Mundi
The film theatre is part of Visum Mundi (‘view of the world’), as the Aula is now called. In addition to the film theatre, the building comprises a spacious foyer with bar and — for the time being — an escape room. The idea is that eventually other cultural activities will take place in addition to film screenings.
The escape room location, which used to be the Small Auditorium, will in due course house the Wageningen Experience, an audio-visual tour of Wageningen past and present. The plan is for the Heerenstraat Theater cinema to move in its entirety to the Aula premises over the next few years.
