A remarkable event took place recently at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. For the first time in history, a Japanese firm publicly apologized to the few surviving former American prisoners of war whom they had used as forced labor during World War II. A senior executive of Mitsubishi Materials Corp. bowed deeply to 94-year-old James Murphy, who, during the war, barely survived his ordeal as a POW. Many of his American, Australian, British and Dutch comrades did not.

Does an apology, seven decades later, make a difference? It certainly did to these victims. It indicates that the successors of the persecutors agree with the persecuted on the historical interpretation of the injustice. It’s a lesson that warrants some reflection in Europe today.

And if there’s one country more than any others that needs to emulate the Japanese model, to learn the value of an apology, it’s the Netherlands.

By now, almost all the European countries that were occupied by the Germans during World War II have admitted to their collaboration with the Nazi regime. Most have apologized, including, most recently, Luxembourg. The one major exception is the Netherlands, which has consistently refused to admit the failure of its wartime government, then exiled to London, to express any interest in what was happening to Jewish citizens under the German occupation.

Within Western Europe, the Netherlands was the country with the highest percentage of Jewish citizens murdered during the Holocaust. When the Germans conquered the Netherlands in 1940, there were 140,000 Jews living there; 102,000 of them would be murdered during the war. Those who were deported to the death camps in Poland were arrested by Dutch policemen, transported by the Dutch railways and guarded by the Dutch military police. Most of these Jewish deportees came from families that had lived in the Netherlands for centuries.

The Dutch government only inquired about the fate of these Jews a year and half after the deportations to extermination camps in Poland had begun. This despite both the Dutch and Polish governments in exile being located in the same building in London. In 1943, Henri Dentz, a Dutch employee of the Dutch government, was tasked to write a report on the deportations. He estimated that 90% of those deported had already been murdered. But, as he would later declare before a Dutch postwar Parliamentary commission, no one in the government was even willing to read the report.

Occasionally, the modern Dutch government’s failure to apologize to its Jewish community returns to the spotlight. Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been asked twice by members of Parliament to admit to the Netherlands’ past failures and express the government’s apologies. In February he referred to a speech Queen Beatrix delivered to the Knesset in 1995, in which she said the Dutch people hadn’t been able to prevent the destruction of their Jewish fellow citizens, and in which she didn’t refer to the government in exile at all. Mr. Rutte’s answer makes it clear: The Netherlands just doesn’t want to admit its collaboration or its government’s disinterest in its Jewish citizens during the war.

This isn’t a result of some Dutch cultural resistance to apologies. In 2011, the Netherlands apologized to the Indonesian widows of the village of Rawagede, on the island of Java, where in 1947 during the country’s colonial war all the village’s male inhabitants were shot to death by Dutch soldiers, without any process of law.

In 2014 the Dutch Minister of Defense Jeanine Hennis apologized on behalf of the government to the families of three Bosnian Muslims who, after having been expelled from the Dutch military compound in Srebrenica in 1995, were killed by Bosnian Serbs who were occupying the town. These apologies were made public earlier this year after an agreement was reached about a payment to the three families.

The government also has apologized for murders in which it played no direct role at all. Deputy Prime Minister Els Borst was murdered in her home in 2014, and another woman was killed in January of this year. Prosecutors have apologized to the victims’ families for not having better supervised the brother of the second victim, a man allegedly suffering mental illness with violent tendencies who has admitted to killing his sister and will soon stand trial for Borst’s murder, which he denies.

All of which makes the refusal to apologize to Dutch Jews and their families more puzzling. One can only speculate why Mr. Rutte refuses to apologize, especially when other Dutch politicians have said over the years that the government should. Borst herself declared years ago that she would support such apologies. Another former deputy prime minister, Gerrit Zalm, who had been a leader of Mr. Rutte’s liberal party, has said the same.

Whatever the reason for the delay, the time has come for the younger generations of Dutch people to demand a full accounting of the darkest period in the history of the Netherlands.