And that image doesn’t lie. After the war, chaos reigned in the camp. Dozens of detainees who had been in the camp since May 1945 stated that they were beaten with clubs, kicked in the head, that the beatings sometimes continued for hours, and that people had to watch their relatives being beaten.
“In the first three months it was unclear who was responsible, morally speaking, the right people were not in charge. And there was arbitrariness in arresting people, everyone who was suspicious in some way got stuck,” Abuys explains. “But from September onwards, authority was normalized and the abuses stopped.”
Watch the second part of the documentary about the Westerbork internment camp here, which RTV Drenthe made in collaboration with the Remembrance Center.
