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Published: October 28th 2006
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Fence for the Prison Area
A reproduction of the double-fence around the prison area of the camp On October 15th, I went with the International Student Organization ('Wings') to Camp Westerbork, a Nazi camp in the northern Netherlands. It was a day trip by tour bus that was actually only 5 hours total, but it was really interesting, and I'm glad I went. There is actually basically nothing left from the camp at the location; in the 1970s, the Dutch government asked the jewish community what they wanted done with the site, and the jewish people didn't want to be reminded of what had happened, so they requested it be demolished. There are currently raised mounds where many of the buildings were, and a few have a reproduction wall at two of the corners, just to illustrate the scale. The only things left are a bunker where cabbage and potatoes were stored and a portion of the rail that has been turned into a monument.
From 1942 to 1945, 107,000 people passed through the camp. It was a transient work camp, and the gateway from the Netherlands to the Eastern camps where people only usually stayed a week or less before being sent to "work" in the East. Of the 107,000, only 5,000 survived. It
Kamp Westerbork
A scale model of Kamp Westerbork, in Hooghalen, NL is easy for such a large number to overwhelm the fact that these were individuals, but plaque in the information center read "102,000 times a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, a grandfather, a grandmother, an aunt, an uncle, a nephew, a niece, a friend was murdered." Reading that was a lot like seeing the room full of shoes at the Holocaust Museum in DC, in that it makes the vast number of people killed tangibly
people, just the same as the people I know and love. It was overwhelming and I had to take a minute for my eyes to stop welling up.
Only 7 people ever escaped from Westerbork: a group of young people smuggled a saw onto one of the east-bound trains, and sawed a hole
between two of the cars (a hole on either side would have been spotted by the Nazis watching the sides of the train). Each of them then slipped out of the whole and actually dropped onto the tracks while the train was moving. They all survived, but I believe one or two lost a hand or foot. The group was actually hidden until the
Reproduction of Barracks
Parts of walls and corners have been reproduced to give scale. end of the war by a member of a Dutch socialist political party related to the Nazis (showing that not all those affiliated with the Nazis were murderers). At first, it seems surprising that more could not escape, because at any given time there were only a half-dozen to a dozen Nazis at the camp; it was run almost entirely by the Jewish prisoners. People desperately wanted to get and keep a job at the camp, because they were the only ones who were granted permission to stay there and avoid being sent to "work" in the East. Although at any time a train could have empty spaces and
anyone could be sent away. Though few in number, the camp's Nazis controlled effectively through fear, for example, if someone escaped, their family remaining in the camp, or their friends or bunkmates, would be sent on the next train to the East, and this effectively deterred escaped attempts.
Anne Frank spent some time at the camp before being sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she died. She stayed in prison-area of the camp that held people who were found in hiding, and those who were discovered helping jews hide or escape.
Storage Bunker
This is the only original structure left at the camp. Here they stored potatoes and cabbage. There was a sculpture done with a piece of the remaining rail next to the potato bunker. The remaining track is less than 100 yards, and on one end has a barrier in front of a wall of spherical stones, made to represent a wall of skulls. The tracks proceed from the wall towards the center of the camp where passengers were loaded and unloaded (in an area referred to as a livestock loading zone by the Nazis). There are 93 railroad ties that are attached to the rail, representing the 93 trains that left Westerbork for the East. After the 93rd, the rails lift off the ties and aim up towards the sky and slightly away from each other, which shows that it will never happen again (a train can never again run on those rails), and for many of those who are religious, it symbolizes the trains running up to heaven.
All in all, it was a very humbling trip. On a lighter note, the 1.5+ mile walk from the information center to the grounds of the camp was through some beautiful woods.
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