Westerbork

He saw that my father and uncle’s IDs were signed with the letter “S”, which stood for “Strafe” (punishment), and he immediately tore them into small pieces and put them in his pocket. This saved us. Holders of an ID with an “S” on it were sent on the first train to an extermination camp. The stamp was put in my father’s and uncle’s cards because the Nazi manager who replaced my uncle in the business wanted to get rid of him. 

I was 13 at the time and lived with my father. The bunk beds were three levels high. The food was decent, but not like at home, of course. Father had to work in an old battery recycling workshop for the German war effort. That meant that from morning to evening he sat in a workshop at a table, with many others like him, dismantling old batteries so that their components could be reused. At the end of the day, he came back tired and with hands filthy and black from the materials he had handled. A wound in his right thumb, which he got from the hard work, became severely inflamed at the base of the nail and later spread to the bone. 

Mother worked part-time as a housekeeper and caretaker and stayed with my sisters.

I remember visiting a children’s home. Someone had drawn pictures on the wall there. It looked very cute. We also participated in the “art” class: they let us paint wooden toys – I don’t know who these toys were for – I remember painting a small white dog and adding hairy black spots to it by putting the brush perpendicular to the dog. I was told to do this, and I was very pleased with the method. 

Anyone who could, used favouritism to postpone being included in the next transport to Poland, obviously at the expense of someone else. It was a surreal camp. 

On the one hand, there was a hospital and a clinic in the camp, and a school that operated intermittently. There was an orchestra, a choir and a cabaret. 

On the other hand, and this is the worst thing I can remember, there was the cattle train, which slowly and defiantly rolled into the camp every Monday evening. I can still feel the silent terror that prevailed. The next day, the train set off with another 1,000 victims.

Clearly, the people who came to Westerbork were very talented. I still remember one song from the cabaret, in German: “Immer langsam, immer langsam, immer mit Gemütlichkeit, wir haben alle Zeit, es ist noch nicht so weit.” - “Always slowly, always slowly, always at your ease, we have all the time, the hour has not yet arrived.” The connection to bitter reality is still clear. Such was the surreal reality that dominated Westerbork, unbelievable contrasts. A fairly mundane lifestyle, until Monday night, when the gruesome cattle train slowly entered the camp.

That same night, about 1,000 names of victims were read out, who were taken by train to Auschwitz or Sobibor the next morning. This included people who the previous evening had played in the orchestra, performed cabaret, and children who had sung in the choir. 

We had to prepare for the upcoming transport, which was supposed to leave in the early morning. A good friend of my parents, Curt Blüth, was influential in the camp management and managed to get us off the list; our departure was postponed for now! 

To this day, I think about the four unknown people who were sent in our place. It can be said that “the death of one is the life of the other.”

Only after I saw what a relief it was for our parents.... did I realise how great their anxiety about transport to a “Labour Camp” had been. 

During the three months we stayed in Westerbork, the pace of transports had slowed: in October and November, there were only two transports. 

I don’t remember much of the horror from the nights before the transports. In my memory, both nights became one night full of tension and excitement. The light in the hut remained on. That memory faded over the next two months. During this period, no more transports took place until the day we were sent. 

I woke up in a clean bed. It was awful to wake up to a world where I knew Father was no longer.

Lying in bed in the hospital hut, I tried to imagine how he could have been saved, perhaps if he’d run towards the Moes family farm or towards Nieuwlande. Every time, I would awaken to the bitter and uncompromising reality of loss. Father made a sacrifice that made me admire him but also made me feel a sense of debt that I could never repay. The fact that I was shot and injured my leg made me a symbolic partner in his deed and this relieved, to some extent, my conscience. 

Despite this, our fear that they could resume persisted. We knew Aunt Eva had not been there since May 1943, but we did not know she was no longer alive... We received packages from the Red Cross. I was not hungry, and at my request, one of the nurses passed on my package to Mother and Sol. I was not hungry for food, but I was hungry for family. 

The camp commander, Gemmeker, would walk around the camp with a stern and threatening expression. But on Passover he gave us permission to bake matzah and perform the seder until ten o’clock. There were people who knew when Passover was and knew the Haggadah by heart. I tasted the matzah, said “Pesach-Matzah-Maror” and fulfilled my Passover duty.

It was not a happy day. I was almost 16, and I knew I had lost my father.  He who knew how to make decisions for all of us, to take care of us all. 

I knew that now nothing would be as it was. Father would no longer come to hold my hand. As long as Father was with us, I could argue with him. Conduct an all-knowing teenage struggle. Once I lost him, I realised how central he had been in my life. How good, smart and protective Father was. 

The Canadian and Polish soldiers liberated the camp, but following the liberation, Father was not resurrected; no one was resurrected. The liberation only sharpened the recognition of the magnitude of our disaster.

The Nazis who discovered the hiding place went to Jan, who was working in the field, and asked him: “Who do you have in your home?” Jan started running away. He was chased by one of the Nazis, someone from the village whom he knew and had worked with in the past, and shot dead.

Jan paid with his life and Jo was widowed because they insisted on hiding us. Because they did not let fear outweigh their commitment to others. Jo continued to care for our well-being. Continued to be Jo. 

I think their actions were done out of an inner conviction. I asked Jo years later why she did what she did, “It’s quite simple, you cannot leave people in distress without help,” she said. The heavy price she paid did not make her regret the deed she did. Her personality was strong, special and inspiring. 

Father and Jan van der Helm were buried in Hollandscheveld in a plot where pilots from the West whose planes were shot down near the village were buried. On Jan’s tombstone is written: “Here rests until the youngest day the remains of our beloved husband and father Jan van der Helm”.