Remembrance Center Kamp Westerbork will soon open the new exhibition Emotion from the Bottom. Camp Westerbork 1939-1971 with special archaeological discoveries made in the past thirty years on the former camp site.
During the exhibition, memories of former prisoners and residents of the later residential area De Schattenberg, where Moluccans stayed, are discussed. In video fragments they tell the stories that archaeological finds – such as a piece of barbed wire, a machete, a children’s boot or a tube of ointment – evoke in them.
“We recorded their first reaction,” says curator Guido Abuys. “The objects evoke stories, for example after seeing a boot. ‘We wore that as a child, and we went to Assen to buy it’, you hear. A marble is reminiscent of games that Moluccan children play with each other. played.”
A piece of barbed wire is also a very concrete object, says Abuys. “We couldn’t go outside. We saw heathland and the sky, but that was inaccessible to us,” the curator quotes one of the reactions.
The discoveries of the exhibition were made in the early 1990s, at a time when parts of the camp grounds were being redesigned. Employees of the Remembrance Center came across objects on the spot where there were previously barracks where both Jewish prisoners and Moluccans stayed.
Later, in addition to research on the former camp site, excavations were carried out on the rubbish dump and in and around the camp commander’s house. The finds on the former garbage dump were numerous, according to the Remembrance Center. In addition to hundreds of shards, medicine bottles, shoes and glasses were found, for example.
Curator Abuys also wants to gauge the reactions of the visitors. “They get to see countless objects, and what do they evoke in them? With some finds we also don’t know what it actually is, and what it was used for. “Perhaps the visitor can help us with that.”
The exhibition, which opens on September 14, has been curated by the Groningen Institute for Archeology under the supervision of professor by special appointment Martijn Eickhoff of the University of Groningen. It is part of The Memory of Camp Westerbork, the exhibition that has been on display since July.