“More than 34,000 Jews from the Netherlands were murdered in Sobibor.” Bertien Minco, director of the Camp Westerbork Remembrance Center, reads the text on the monument The Signs of Westerbork.
Saturday marks eighty years since an uprising broke out among about six hundred prisoners in the Polish Sobibor extermination camp. It was the only time that prisoners in a Nazi camp rebelled.
“Sobibor, together with a few other camps in the area, was really the worst of the worst. There was no escape. It was only aimed at destruction. Of the 34,000 Dutch people who were deported from Westerbork, only 18 of them made it survived,” Minco explains the horrors.
An estimated between 170,000 and 250,000 people died in Sobibor between the end of April 1942 and October 1943. 19 transports left Westerbork for the Polish extermination camp. “Like the Nazis did, they needed staff to clear people of their belongings, collect the prisoners and burn them. That had to be done by the other prisoners. But they also knew that if no new transports came, they would would be the next to go to the gas chambers.”
With the courage of desperation, an uprising was therefore planned. The Dutchman Jozeph Jacobs played an important role in this. “He was a captain in the army,” Minco said. He was also deported from Camp Westerbork to Sobibor and put to work there. He devised an initial plan for the uprising with the Polish prisoners. “But that came true. During the interrogations, Jacobs stepped forward and said ‘It was me, I prepared it and no one else’. He was immediately murdered, together with 70 other Dutch people. But with his action he gave the Poles the life saved.”
The story of Jacobs’ heroic role is described in the book The darkest dark by investigative journalist Rosanne Kropman. She found out who this Dutchman was.
“Jacobs’ plans were a precursor to the uprising of October 14, 1943, where he already collaborated with the Polish Aleksander Peczerski and Leon Feldhendler. During that second uprising, the Polish Jews, who were spared thanks to Jacobs’ silence, were able to escape .”
After the uprising, which was survived by only dozens of prisoners, the Nazis razed the camp to the ground in an attempt to erase its existence. “And that makes it so important that we commemorate that. Those people thought: ‘If we die now, there will be no one who could ever testify about this.'”
That is why a private commemoration took place today at the Remembrance Center. “Remembrance is important because you need to know what happened. In addition, stories need to be told and we need to honor the people who were deported. If you want it to never happen again, we need to ensure that together,” Minco concludes.