Westerbork
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Before I go into the story of the men, who were put on slave labour by the Nazi regime, I will have to explain what ‘Limburg’ is .Limburg is a province in the southeast of the Netherlands and the northeast of Belgium. I was born and grew up in the Dutch side of Limburg. The…
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500 Jews responded to the German appeal and registered for departure to Camp Westerbork. They waited hours for the special train to transport them from Muiderpoort Station in Amsterdam to Westerbork. Of the 7,000 Jews who had to report to the Polderweg in Amsterdam that day for deportation to Westerbork, only 500 appeared that day,…
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I wish I could write a biography of these 3 murdered children, but I can’t. They didn’t live long enough to have a whole lot of details. In fact most of their lives could be written down on a small registration card.The one thing they have in common they were all murdered on May 20,1943.…
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The definition of ‘one in a million’ is : a person or thing that is very unusual, special, or admired. Herman Wertheim was certainly that. However, sadly he was also one in six million. He was one of the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. Herman Wertheim was born on February 17,…
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When Westerbork was built in 1939 as a refugee center for Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, it also included a hospital. The hospital grounds were originally known as Centraal Vluchtelingenkamp Westerbork, a camp for refugees arriving mainly from the neighboring country, Germany. It was those refugees themselves who in 1939 built Barrack No.12 and…
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The 4th of May is the date when all deaths from World War 2( and the last few years also from other conflicts) are remembered. At 8pm a 2 minutes silence is observed nationwide. There were 7,900 military death, 198,000 civilian deaths, of which 20,000 died between late September 1944 and early May 1945 due…
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There were 4 concentration camps in the Netherlands. The best known was Westerbork, the other 3 were Vught,Amersfoort and Ommen. A relatively unknown fact is that there were also an estimated 42 work/labour camps. Between January 1942 and October 1942 , the Jewish work camps in the Netherlands spread across the countrie from which unemployed…
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All stories of children murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust are enormously sad on many levels. The story of Helga Renate Sara Zons is particularly heartbreaking. There are no pictures of her, just a death certificate to remember her. The certificate was issued ten years after the Nazis murdered her. What makes it very…
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Geleen is a small former mining town in the province of Limburg, in the south east of the Netherlands. It is not a particular famous place, although it is the place where the first professional football was played in the Netherlands, and it used to host one of the world’s biggest rock festivals’PinkPop’ It is…
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Westerbork was liberated on April 12, 1945, by Canadian forces. At the time there were still 876 inmates there. Something which isn’t widely known is that this liberation nearly was a destruction. The Canadians thought the camp was a Germany military base. They had plans for shelling Weseterbork. This was published in de Telegraaf on…
History of Sorts 