The image that the deportations from Camp Westerbork mainly took place in cattle wagons is incorrect. Dirk Mulder shows that in the new book Extraordinary transports about the removal of almost the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands in the Second World War. The book was published last Friday, when it was eighty years ago that the first transports left the camp.
The first transports did indeed take place in “animal wagons, locked and without a toilet,” he writes. But the population of Drenthe was displeased about it and camp commander Albert Gemmeker also thought that all this was really not possible. He had passenger carriages come and later, when they ran out, he had benches built in the freight cars.
It’s absurd, all this worrying about a seat on the way to an extermination camp. Later in the drive between Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, for example, people still piled on top of each other in dark cattle cars. But that’s not how it started. The Dutch often saw neat scenes. Gemmeker rested in the tent. His predecessors were the prototype war criminal, always drunk, screaming, beating and kicking the prisoners. Under Gemmeker there was cabaret, sports, dance, theatre, self-government, marriage and good health care in the camp.
At the registration in a lit and well-heated hall there was soup and bread and “friendly ladies behind typewriters.” It is all described in Eva Moraal’s thesis that was published as a book: If I don’t go on a transport tomorrow…
The predictable fuss about Mulder’s book followed almost immediately. Eighty years later, we use World War II as the last ultimate benchmark of evil. It doesn’t matter what debate exactly, about Covid, the farmers, about immigration, there is always someone who calls ‘Hitler’ or calls someone a brown shirt, fascist, neo-Nazi. Time and again we turn out to have a fairly one-dimensional axis of good and evil, and we can only calibrate that axis with the ultimate evil of the genocide of the Jews.
Passenger carriages do not fit into that picture. Mulder makes Westerbork more gentle than the Holocaust may be. It must be beastly. degrading. Violent. But what he actually shows is that these kinds of crimes happen in a civilization. The deportation of more than a hundred thousand Jews from the Netherlands was orderly and structured, even comfortably, thanks in part to the helpful Dutch police and railways. There was no chaos on the platforms, the trains departed on time. Doctor Eddy de Wind describes that the SS was “very reasonable” with the trains. They “even encouraged the people, because the Dutch were not allowed to find out how ‘their’ Jews were actually treated”. Everything was documented and administered. In Moraal’s book, former merchant Jozef Weisz actually calls the humane treatment of an inhumane deportation transport worse. “It was all about Gemmeker” ‘Cavalier-like’. […] Cold-blooded and with a smile on his face, he cheated people.”
Dirk Mulder, the author of this book and previously director of the Kamp Westerbork Memorial Center, has had to endure it time and again. The Jewish community in particular has been criticized almost continuously and he has been accused of squandering and desecrating the memory in Westerbork. The low point was just before his retirement in 2019, when he had the idea to invite the Night of the Refugee to start in Camp Westerbork. Logical and striking, because the Camp was previously set up as a refugee camp. But he was reviled. How dare he use the holy ground of Westerbork to draw attention to refugees from Syria or Afghanistan, Yemen or Myanmar?
Dirk Mulder is the man who has built and expanded the Remembrance Center since the 1980s. The former camp site is an impressive plain, where you can almost feel the horrors of what followed for the residents after Westerbork. He set up an impressive educational program where the busses with students not only come to Westerbork, but the survivors – including my grandparents – went into the classroom to sometimes tell their war story for the first time.
Dirk Mulder has never received the appreciation he deserves from the Jewish community. That’s embarrassing.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 16 July 2022