Westerbork
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Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929. As we all know her story through her diary, I will not go into Anne’s story, but instead, I will look at a few other children who were also born on that day and who, like Anne, were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Levy Spanjer…
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The picture is of a vacant building in the town center of Geleen in the Netherlands. The building wasn’t always empty. It used to be a clothes shop called “Modehuis” or Fashion House. It was a shop that catered more for the older ladies, my mother liked to shop there A few doors next to…
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Johnny & Jones refers to the Amsterdam-based jazz duo consisting of Nol (Arnold Siméon) van Wesel (Johnny) (August 3, 1918 – April 15, 1945) and Max (Salomon Meyer) Kannewasser (Jones) (September 24, 1916 – March 20, 1945). Van Wesel and Kannewasser first met while working at the De Bijenkorf department store. In 1934, they were…
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Nowadays, people often complain when a train is running late, me included, by the way. However, recently, I have changed my way of thinking about that. Throughout Europe during World War II, the military used the railways to accommodate an industrialized scale of murder. It could only work if the trains ran on time. The…
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Sometimes I struggle with finding a suitable title for a post. As it was for this post, but then he thought using just the raw data as the title is probably the best tribute for this family. The Family is the Chaim family Julius Chaim moved to Nijmegen on 15 October 1940, from Amsterdam. He…
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According to the Joods Monument-Jewish Monument, seven Dutch Jews were tragically murdered at Bergen-Belsen on this day, 81 years ago. Today, I am remembering one of them: Naatje Morpurgo-van Wijnbergen. Naatje was born in The Hague on March 11, 1874, and was murdered in Bergen-Belsen on January 30, 1945, at the age of 70. She…
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Westerbork may not have been an extermination camp, but that didn’t mean it was less evil. In a way, it may have been eviler because it created an illusion that life wasn’t that bad and gave the people a false hope that their endurance of camp life would be temporary. The 261 couples married at…
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Anyone familiar with my blog knows that the murder of children during the Holocaust touches me deeply. I know one of the excuses for murdering children was to avoid that they would take revenge. It always puzzled me. The only reason why you’d want to kill someone to avoid revenge is because—you knew what you…
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Albert Konrad Gemmeker (1907–1982) was a German SS officer who served as the commandant of the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands during World War II. Born on September 27, 1907, in Düsseldorf, Germany, Gemmeker pursued a career in law enforcement, joining the police force in Duisburg in 1933. By 1935, he held an administrative…
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Statistics often make me uneasy. Stripped of context, they can be twisted to tell a misleading story—and it frequently is. Yet, there are moments when numbers, stark and raw, help us grasp the scale of events too vast for words alone. It is one of those moments. Between July 15, 1942, and September 13, 1944,…
History of Sorts 