Westerbork transit camp

Map of Camp Westerbork

Camp Westerbork was utilized as a staging ground for the deportation of Jews.[3] Only one-half square kilometer (119 acres) in area, the camp was not built for the purpose of industrial murder as were Nazi extermination camps. Westerbork was considered by Nazi standards as “humane”.[3] Jewish inmates with families were housed in 200 interconnected cottages that contained two rooms, a toilet, a hot plate for cooking, and a small yard. Single inmates were placed in oblong barracks which contained a bathroom for each sex.[2][3]

Transport trains arrived at Westerbork every Tuesday from July 1942 to September 1944, and deported an estimated 97,776 Jews during the period.[1] Jewish inmates were deported in waves to Auschwitz concentration camp (65 train-loads totaling 60,330 people), Sobibor (19 train-loads; 34,313 people), Theresienstadt ghetto, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (9 train-loads; 4,894 people).[2][1] Almost all of the 94,643 persons deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor in German-occupied Poland were killed upon arrival.[1]

Camp Westerbork also had a school, orchestra, hairdresser, and even restaurants designed by SS officials to give inmates a false sense of hope for survival and to aid in avoiding problems during transportation.[2] Cultural activities provided by the Nazis for designated deportees included metalwork, jobs in health services, and other cultural activities.[2] A special, separate work cadre of 2,000 “permanent” Jewish inmates was used as a camp labor force.[1] Within this group was a sub-group constituting a camp police force which was required to assist with transports and keep order.[1] The SS actually had very little to do with selecting transferees; this job fell to another class of inmates that made up a sort of security service.[2] Most of these 2,000 "permanent" inmates were eventually sent to concentration or death camps themselves.[1]

Class photo from the school within Westerbork

Notable prisoners

Notable prisoners in Westerbork included Anne Frank, who was transported to Camp Westerbork on August 4, 1944[4] and Etty Hillesum, each of whom wrote of their experiences in diaries discovered after the war.[5] Anne remained at the camp in a small hut until September 3, when she was deported to Auschwitz.[4]

Parts of a rebuilt hut at Westerbork, which once held Anne Frank

Etty Hillesum was able to avoid the Nazi dragnet that identified Jews until April 1942.[6] Even after being labeled a Jew, Hillesum began to report on antisemitic policies. She took a job with Judenrat for two weeks and then volunteered to accompany the first group of Jews sent to Westerbork.[5][6] Hillesum stayed at Westerbork until September 7, 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz. She died there three months later.[6]

Camp Westerbork also housed German film actress and cabaret singer Dora Gerson, who was interned there with her family before being sent to Auschwitz, and Professor Sir William Asscher, who survived the camp when his mother secured his family's release by fabricating English ancestry. Jona Oberski wrote of his experience as a small child at Westerbork in his book, Kinderjaren ("Childhood"), published in the Netherlands in 1978 and later made into the film, Jonah Who Lived in the Whale.

Maurice Frankenhuis chronicled his family's experiences while interned in Westerbork and in 1948 conducted an interview with its Commander Albert Gemmeker while awaiting trial.[7] The published interview in Dutch and English became the basis for a docudrama created in September 2019.[8] The film features colorization of original video of transports from Westerbork by photographer Rudolf Breslauer.

Another prisoner at Camp Westerbork from 9 March 1944 to 23 March 1944 was Hans Mossel (1905-1944), a Jewish-Dutch clarinetist and saxophonist, before he was sent to the Auschwitz III camp.[9]

Jacques Schol, a Dutchman, was commander of the camp from July 16 1940 and until January 1943. He was known for his brutality against Jewish inmates, kicking inmates to death.[10]

German authorities took control of Westerbork from the Dutch government on July 1, 1942.[1] Deportations began under the orders of Gestapo sub-Department IV-B4, which was headed by Adolf Eichmann.[3] Within the confines of the camp, German SS commanders were in charge of inmates, but squads of Jewish police and security were used to keep order and aid in transport, as noted above.[11]

Transports came to a halt at Camp Westerbork in September 1944.[2] Allied troops neared Westerbork in early April, 1945 after German officials abandoned the camp. Westerbork was liberated by Canadian forces on April 12, 1945. A total of 876 inmates were found.[2] The War Diary of the South Saskatchewan Regiment referenced the camp in its entry for April 12, 1945:

At 0930 hrs Lt-Col V Stott, DSO, accompanied by the I(ntelligence)O(fficer), Lt JD Cade, visited the Jewish Concentration Camp at (map reference) 2480. It was a rather startling sight as you approached the camp to see what is normally the appearance of a penitentiary. It was completely surrounded with barbed wire and had four lookout towers. Approximately 900 people were being held in this camp. The CO visited the officers kitchens and medical room and found the food and medical supplies to be in fairly good condition. While in the kitchen a number of A Co(mpan)y boys were observed helping the girls peel potatoes. It's surprising the influence girls, especially pretty ones, have with soldiers. It's a pity our cooks are unable to apply the same methods. Visiting a camp like this brings home to us the reality of what we are fighting for. It makes the average Canadian indignant and he asks "Who do the Germans think they are that they enclose other humans behind barbed wire simply because they are born Jews!"[12]

Following the war, Westerbork was first used as a remand prison for alleged and accused Nazi collaborators, and later housed Dutch nationals who fled the former Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).

Westerbork was completely disassembled in the 1960s by the Dutch government.[2] Later, the Dutch built the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, a large radio telescope, on the site. Only the former camp commander’s house has been preserved, in a glass container.[2]

Historiography

Model of the Westerbork concentration camp.

In 1950, the Dutch government appointed Jewish historian Jacques Presser to investigate the events connected with the mass deportation of Dutch Jewry and the extent of the collaboration by the non-Jewish Dutch population. The results were published fifteen years later in The Catastrophe (De Ondergang). Presser also published a novel, The Night of the Girondins, which was set in Westerbork.

Memorials

"The 102,000 stones" monument at Westerbork. Each individual stone represents a single person that stayed at Westerbork and died in Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

A museum was created two miles from Westerbork to keep the memories of those imprisoned in the camp alive.[2] As a tribute to those inmates who had died after deportation, a memorial was commissioned;[2] it consists of 102,000 stones, representing each person who was deported from Westerbork and never returned. The National Westerbork Memorial was unveiled at the site by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands on 4 May 1970.[14][15] Also, a monument of a broken railroad track torn from the ground is displayed near the camp to symbolize the destruction the camp, as well as others, wrought on the European Jewish population, and the determination that the tracks would never again carry people to their deaths.[15]

In 2017, films commissioned by the German camp commander Albert Gemmeker from a Jewish prisoner, Rudolf Breslauer, to document everyday life in the Westerbork transit camp, were submitted by the Netherlands and included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.[16]

• Herbstrith, W. (1983). Edith Stein: A biography (5th rev. ed.) (Trans. B. Bonowitz). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers.

• Jonathan Gardiner: One-Way Ticket from Westerbork. Oegstgeest, The Netherlands: Amsterdam Publishers, 2021, ISBN 9789493056756
• Hans-Dieter Arntz: Der letzte Judenälteste von Bergen-Belsen. Josef Weiss - würdig in einer unwürdigen Umgebung. Aachen 2012.
• Jacob Boas, Boulevard des Misères: the Story of the Transit Camp Westerbork. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1985 ISBN 0-208-01977-4
• Etty Hillesum, Letters from Westerbork. New York: Pantheon, 1986 ISBN 0-394-55350-0 (originally published in the Netherlands as Het denkende hart van de barak, 1982)
• Cecil Law, Kamp Westerbork, transit camp to eternity : the liberation story. Clementsport, N.S. : Canadian Peacekeeping Press, 2000 ISBN 1896551351
• Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven. Penguin Press, 1992, ISBN 0-1402-3937-5
• Jacob Presser, The Destruction of the Dutch Jews New York: Dutton, 1969, translated by A. Pomerans.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kamp Westerbork.

• Memorial Center Camp Westerbork, official website
• Cabaret Behind Barbed Wire: Max Ehrlich & the Westerbork Theater Group
• Netherlands: Westerbork