Once again, two people from the Westerbork film have been identified. It concerns the couple Marcus Pels and Hendrika Brandon. That Westerbork film was made in 1944 by the Jewish photographer Rudolf Breslauer. He filmed the departure of a transport and daily life in the camp.
The couple was identified by amateur researcher Koen Hulsbos. To get an idea of who appears in the film, he collects photos of the people who were certain that they were transported on the day the Westerbork film was made. “I have now collected 258 photos of the 446 Jewish prisoners,” he explains to a reporter from Radio 1. The names of about twenty people in the film are now known.
“I had a photo of Marcus Pels and Hendrika Brandon, a couple living in Amsterdam for a long time,” Hulsbos explains. “I have seen the film many times. But at one point I thought… hey, this couple appears twice. I never realized that before actually. And then I started looking at external characteristics. Yes, and when you put images from the film and the photos next to each other, you think yes, you can’t miss that.”
Marcus Pels is immediately gassed in Auschwitz. Hendrika Brandon survives the war, just like their daughter and son. At the beginning of the war they sent their two children into hiding. As a result, they survived and are still alive. They live in Canada.
Lisa Kaufman is a granddaughter of Marcus Pels and Hendrika Brandon. “It was very special to see my grandmother, with whom I grew up,” she said in a video call with the Radio 1 reporter. “Seeing my grandfather move on screen was extremely impressive.”
It was also very special for her mother and her uncle, she says. “They don’t remember their father. So to actually see images of him, just see him walking alive, there are no words.” She is grateful to Hulsbos for figuring this out.
Not all people from the Westerbork film have been identified yet. Hulsbos: “It still has to be possible to identify people. Anyway, a lot of images are also of very poor quality, of course, so it is difficult.”
Hulsbos is not the only one investigating the identities of the people in the film. Photographer Sake Elzinga from Assen recognized two children from the film at the beginning of March this year. Camp Westerbork Memorial Center held an exhibition about Breslauer’s film in 2023, after which Elzinga came into contact with his (great) grandchildren.
Elzinga then received photo albums from the family. When he was looking through them during an investigation, he came across photos of the children of Rudolf Breslauer and his wife Bella. Elzinga recognized them from the Westerbork film. The two children can be seen there for a few seconds.
And in previous years, people from the Westerbork film were identified more often. For example, the couple Ludwig Dannheisser (1868-1944) and Johanna Dannheiser-Blocht (1879-1944) were discovered in 2023. A few years earlier, thirteen people had already been recognized, including the then 3-year-old Marcus Degen.