The Diary Keepers, page 14
Drenthe’s landscape is both surprisingly stunning and deeply dreary. Evergreens stand tall and lofty, and there is a lush, forested underbrush. The sky is wide, by turns slate blue and granite gray, as the weather continuously changes. The earth under our feet was mossy, muddy, and sodden. When we were there, in December, it was dark nearly all of the time. Sunset came at around 4 p.m., but it hardly made a difference because of a nearly omnipresent blanket of dark clouds.
To get to the camp from the parking lot was a two-mile hike; we took the circuitous paved path through the woods, which were largely serene and unremarkable, until we suddenly came upon a sprawling Radio Observatory, a long row of monumental radio telescopes reminiscent of the first scene of the movie Contact with Jodie Foster. This surreal, space-aged feature to the landscape provided an unexpected twist to our journey, and we marveled for a moment, snapping photos with our phones, before we continued on to the camp.
At about the point that we could see the barbed wire from the distance, we encountered a series of five enormous stone, coffin-shaped blocks. Inscribed in each one was the name of a destination camp and the number of Dutch people murdered there. The memorial stone for Theresienstadt read 175; for Mauthausen, the death toll was 1,749; the number on the Bergen-Belsen stone read, “more than 1,700.” Curiously, the stones for the camps where most Westerbork detainees died were no larger, though the number of deaths they represented were vastly higher: Sobibor, 34,313; and Auschwitz-Birkenau, read 60,330, including 200 Sinti and Roma people.
Next, we passed the only preserved building on the site, the former residence of the German camp commander, a stately green country house that was fully encased in misted glass. Because of Corona restrictions, it was temporarily closed.
Then we entered the main gate, surrounded by barbed wire fencing, and stepped into a large open field where hundreds of barracks once stood. On either side were large fields, both the size of soccer pitches, with a path cutting between them. Grass was trying to grow, but only half-heartedly, and it was mostly coming up in brown, mangey patches.
I knew from my reading that Camp Westerbork once housed not only scores of sleeping barracks but also an operational hospital, factory buildings for everything from shoemaking to scrap metal production, as well as a school, outdoor recreational facilities, and even a restaurant. There was a weekly cabaret, which took place on a stage—suggesting there may have been a theater at the camp. None of these structures remained. After the war, Westerbork served many purposes, first as a prison for suspected Dutch collaborators, then a military camp, and later a “reception center” or internment camp for Moluccans and Indo-Dutch attempting to repatriate to Netherlands after Indonesian independence.* The last of the World War II camp barracks were demolished in 1971, long before the Remembrance Center was established in 1983 and apparently there have been scattered, desultory efforts to make monuments here since.
A half shell of one barrack had been restored to give a sense of the space hundreds of Jewish inmates inhabited, but it was perplexingly unfinished. There was only a small illustration of three-high bunks crammed up against each other, and the stoves on which dozens of people jostled to cook.
The camp itself was an inconceivable 119 acres when it was operational, I’d read. Walking around the memorial grounds, enclosed by barbed wire, it felt like it couldn’t be more than four or five acres. Where were all these other acres? Were they where the radio telescopes stood today? Where was the heath where they strolled in the summer, as I’d read about in the diaries, that had once been teeming with lupins in bloom?
The paved path cut right through the heart of the camp, known as the Boulevard des Misères, where the train once pulled in to collect its “cargo.” But here, too, only a fragment remained: two red box cars. In between them, a small video monitor, which might’ve told a story, was turned off.
To the right was another monument to the dead: a multitude of red bricks of various heights, scattered across the paved ground. My friend whispered in my ear that if I looked at it from above, I could see that these formed a map of the Netherlands, with each section revealing how many Jews from each province had perished. Each brick, topped with a Star of David, stood for a single Jewish victim, and those with metal flames on top represented Roma and Sinti.
At irregular intervals, a photograph stuck out from the brick, with an image of the victim, or a family of victims. The heights of the bricks varied, from about an inch off the ground to about a half a foot. I grasped that these heights depended on the age of the victim: the older the victim, the taller the brick.
But none of these bricks were very tall, and I found it very uncomfortable that they were all lying on the ground, as if discarded materials from a construction project. As I gazed upon them from above, I wondered if other visitors to this site also felt the urge to step on them, to walk across them, as if they were mere stepping stones. How had so many people been reduced to stepping stones under foot?
We continued walking through the endless downpour, each of us separately, and silently, lost in our own thoughts. I tried to imagine what it might have felt like to be an inmate here, with the damp and the cold and the raw elements—but mostly the horrifying uncertainty. Eventually, at the end of the boulevard of misery, under a black wooden guard tower, we stood before the rusted steel remnants of railway track, with its ends bent unaccountably skyward. This monument was built in 1992 by a Jewish survivor, I read later, who’d boarded one of the departing trains from here as an infant. Yet another fragment.
“WESTERBORK WASN’T REALLY a concentration camp,” one of the Dutch men on the trip tried to explain to me, before we visited. “It was just a kind of gathering place, collection point, before people were sent on.”
This is correct, in a sense, as far as it goes. Westerbork certainly wasn’t a killing center or a place of terrible hardship. Inmates at this camp were often shocked when they witnessed the degradation of prisoners transferred in from other Dutch concentration camps, such as Amersfoort and Vught, where torture and abuse were more common.
In fact, there are a surprising number of surviving photographs1 from Westerbork in which people appear to be having fun. We see images of men playing soccer in their sports clothes, smiling women carrying baskets across a farm, a violinist playing for a group of rapt children, and a crowd gathered around a menorah, lighting candles for a Hanukkah celebration. The camp cabaret produced enough songs that someone, more recently, made an entire CD of them (which I once received as a gift) and someone else compiled a small book of fairytales for children, also composed at Westerbork.
No one wore striped pajamas, but instead went about in their own street clothes. Their faces in the photos were not gaunt, and their bodies were not skeletal. If these were not black-and-white photos, one would be sure that the people strolling down the camp paths or doing calisthenics in the yard would be ruddy-cheeked. There is one photograph of a dentist’s office, in which several people are having their teeth checked and cleaned.
Who can make sense of any of this? Why would people be having dental work done when they’re about to be shipped off to be murdered? I found the incongruity rather perverse. But I was reminded of Ralph Polak and Miep Krant striding across Dam Square with the yellow stars on their coats, and Judith Cohen’s caveat: “We have to be careful not to read history backwards.”
While these images conveyed a misleading narrative about Westerbork, diaries revealed another: The Nazis had created a simulacrum of normalcy undergirded by the false hope that, with a little luck of the draw, one could live out the war under poor but adequate conditions. However, for anyone who watched the trains depart again and again, the terror the deportations instilled must have been tantamount to psychological torture.
What can we make of the happy pictures of Westerbork, then? Are they propaganda shots similar to the staged documentary film that was made at Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ “model camp” in German-occupied Czechoslovakia? Were the inmates forced to look joyful? Or did these pictures reflect peoples’ last-gasp efforts to enjoy what there was in life? Could they have been glad only that, at least, they were still on Dutch soil, and had not yet been added to a list? Or did they show that people were utterly unaware?
In March 1944, Westerbork’s German SS commander, Albert Konrad Gemmeker, decided that he wanted to make a documentary film about Westerbork. His plan was to share it with top Nazi officials in Berlin, to convince them that he was running the Dutch project efficiently and that the camp was still useful for its industrial output. By that point in the war, 90,000 Dutch Jews had already been transported East, and Gemmeker was concerned that the camp would soon be closed because it had lost its primary purpose. If it was closed, he would likely be sent to the Eastern Front, a future he did not relish.
Gemmeker assigned the filmmaking project to Rudolf Werner Breslauer, a German Jewish camp inmate from Leipzig who’d worked as an art photographer and lithographer before the war. He had moved his family to the Netherlands, as refugees from the Reich in 1937, and had worked for printers in Utrecht, until 1942, when German officials came to the door and said they would be requisitioning his house. Then he and his wife, Bella Weissmann, and their three children, Ursula, Mischa, and Stephan, were put on the train to Westerbork.
By the time Gemmeker commissioned the film in 1944, Breslauer had already worked for some time as the camp’s official photographer, responsible for identity-card portraits, and also pictures of official camp functions, such as SS parties for German officials at the Commander’s mansion. He also took snapshots of the camp’s shop and check-ups at the very modern dentist’s office.
Breslauer was not paid for his photography or filmmaking work, but Gemmeker must have promised that he and his family would not be put on a transport list while the film was in production. All materials needed for the film would be supplied and paid for by the SS.2
Over the next two months, Breslauer managed to shoot more than two hours of raw documentary footage. He captured inmates engaged in all manner of labor, in a carpentry workshop, making furniture, in an aircraft scrap yard, taking apart fallen jets, and in a leather studio, making shoes and bags—even researchers working in a scientific laboratory. All of this footage might have worked as marketing material for Gemmeker.
But, Breslauer took an extraordinary risk: he filmed eight minutes of footage of the trains transporting Jews, two in March and one in May. Two were incoming trains, bringing Jews from Amsterdam and Camp Vught, and one was an outgoing train, rather atypically headed for two different destinations. Third-class passenger cars in the front of the train were headed for Bergen-Belsen; freight boxcars at the back were destined for Auschwitz. Whether Gemmeker knew at the time that Breslauer was shooting that day, May 19, has never been established.
Researcher Koert Broersma interviewed Breslauer’s daughter in the 1990s, and she said the footage was made without the commander’s approval, and Gemmeker was unhappy about it.
“She told us that her father was determined to leave an eyewitness account on film,” Broersma told me. “He was eager to shoot images of these transports because they were a definite proof of the Holocaust.”3
The film reels, smuggled out, and later preserved at NIOD, have provided posterity with some of the only surviving moving-image documentation of Nazi transports. “The Westerbork Film,” as it has become known, was never really edited, but pieces were spliced together to create an eighty-minute piece of film material. The transport section has been used in countless films about World War II, and it has come to represent the Holocaust itself. It is one of the most-requested items from the collection of the Dutch national film archives, which preserves the original film material. It was featured in Alain Resnais’ famous 1955 war documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), one of the most important Holocaust documentaries.
Breslauer’s camera showed people walking confusedly to the trains carrying luggage, and stepping into train cars, waving to people standing nearby. It includes an unforgettable image of a terrified young Sinti girl wearing a headscarf, who has since been identified as Settela Steinbach, peering out from a gap between the nearly closed doors of a cattle car. Settela, along with her mother, two brothers, and a sister, also died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The camera follows a large contraption that looks like a wheelbarrow, bringing sixty-one-year old invalid Frouwke Kroon to the train. She was killed three days later in Auschwitz.
In 2021, the Dutch media archive, Sound and Vision, completed a restoration of the footage Breslauer shot in 1944, adding some recently discovered footage to the original, and setting the film to the correct speed (so people walk at a normal pace, rather than that jaunty old-fashioned movement we’re used to in historical moving pictures).
Broersma and researcher Gerard Rossing took the initiative in the meantime to investigate everything they could find out about the film, and their research led to a number of new identifications. They were able to discover the identities of two toddlers filmed through the windows of a carriage bound for Bergen-Belsen:4 Three-year-old Marc Degen, and his one-year-old sister, Stella Degen, were deported in that train, along with their cousin, Marcus Simon Degen, who would soon turn four, and his parents. Miraculously, all three children survived the war.5
In Breslauer’s footage, we observe hundreds of other people, with their last remaining possessions in sacks thrown over their shoulders, clamoring into open compartments. An unidentified old woman tries to cover her face, as she sits on the train floor, amid straw and baggage. Gemmeker stands outside, with a group of other SS men in their intimidating uniforms and high boots; when he gives the sign, his officers press the massive iron cranks on the train doors, locking these passengers into the dark, stifling prison of the cabins.
Shooting ended abruptly, for unknown reasons. Breslauer, his wife, and three children were put on a train to Theresienstadt in September 1944, and later ended up in Auschwitz, where his wife and two sons were gassed. Rudolf died in an unknown location in February 1945; only his daughter, who was fourteen to sixteen years old in Westerbork, survived.
Breslauer’s moving-picture images of the camp conveyed more than what Gemmeker had asked for. The footage is a permanent record of the unfolding genocide. When viewed alongside written accounts of Westerbork experiences, such as the diaries of inmates Mirjam Levie and Philip Mechanicus, we can no longer see this camp as a mere transit station, or “gathering place” on Dutch soil. It was, quite clearly, a way station to death.
10
“Until at last the truck was full”
July 1942–December 1942
ELISABETH VAN LOHUIZEN, GENERAL STORE OWNER, EPE
FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1942—Our thoughts are consumed by the fate of the Jews, especially in Amsterdam. They say that 1,000 apartments in the city must be evacuated before July 15, and of course this rule applies only to Jewish homes. If the husband is under forty, he and his family are ordered to appear at the station at 1:30 in the morning, bringing everything, including children and babies. There, they are forced into train carriages, in which they must stand, packed together. They’re told to bring enough food for three days.
It seems the plan is to send them to Poland, but what happens to them there—we’ll have to see. There are heart-rending scenes. It is all so dehumanizing that it’s impossible to think of these practices as Christian. Why, oh why, do they bring such tremendous suffering to this group of God’s children? Sometimes you see no sense in it; they can’t be blamed for the war. A wave of hate has washed through our country again. There will be indescribable suffering. . . .
Miek is coming home tomorrow, and she may have more news about people who are able to get away and escape death. Houses in Amsterdam on the Stadionkade* and Donaurstraat have already been emptied out. It seems that area [of Zuid] is also not safe. They are also evacuating homes in IJmuiden. What’s next? It feels like we’re living on a volcano.
This afternoon, we collected a family (a wife and three children) from the train station and took them to three families on different farms. The husband left for England on April 22, 1940, and the wife lived through the bombardments; her nervous system was shot. Her face was like a mask when I saw her for the first time at the train station. When I took her out to the farm and she looked around at the bucolic surroundings, some life came back into her face. It made me realize how quiet things are in our village, and how little the local people have experienced so far.
SATURDAY, JULY 11, 1942—German Jewish families are being sent to Drenthe.* The pretty girls go to Berlin, and the rest . . . Here, there is increasing chaos and shortages of everything. Hardly any vegetables, little fruit, not to mention so many other items. We are not allowed to hand out ration cards for children’s shoes.
MONDAY, JULY 13, 1942—Again today, many men (you don’t hear anything about women yet) were arrested as hostages. The news traveled from village to village like wildfire. We don’t know any names yet, on day one, or how many. They may be doing this for fear of riots against the mass deportations of entire Jewish families to Poland. Everybody is full of outrage, but what can we do? Several people are trying to find ways to hide Jews. Someone showed up at G & S’s* house this morning, and another arrived this afternoon at half past four. The first one had an identity card without a J stamp.* The second was a woman, and she didn’t have anything.
Luckily, I was able to find a good hideout for one of them; the other is, for now, staying with Ger and Siny. We have so many guests at our house these days, it’s difficult to take someone in here. The regulations forbid them to even enter the homes of Christians, so that makes it dangerous to hide them. But their lives are just as valuable as ours; we must help, and not be afraid.
DOUWE BAKKER, POLICE DIVISION CHIEF, AMSTERDAM
