Today at 7:30 PM • Modified today at 8:02 PM
The infamous children’s transport of June 6 and 7, 1943, which took place 83 years ago this weekend, was commemorated in National Monument Camp Vught on Sunday. Nearly hundreds of children, often still young, were taken by train by the Nazis and gassed. “An event that still touches the hearts.”
“Frits Frank: 11 years old, Eva Frank: 10 years old, Meijer Frank: 2 years old” These are just three of the almost thirteen hundred names that are read softly by students in group 7 of the De Schalm primary school in Vught. By softly saying the names, the children seem to come to life again.
In groups of two, the students stand against the barbed wire of the fence that leads to the monument to the lost children at National Monument Camp Vught. On June 6 and 7, 1943, children up to sixteen years old were put on the train to Westerbork camp and from there to travel to the Sobibor extermination camp.
They were told they were going to a children’s camp. Upon arrival in Sobibor, Poland on June 11, they were gassed almost immediately. Only 22 children ultimately survived the Second World War.
Vught was the worst camp
The now 94-year-old Dolf Schaap and his brother Otto were two of those children who managed to escape the war alive. Their father worked as a doctor in Westerbork. He managed to get the brothers and their mother off the train there. What followed were two years during which the brothers ended up in various concentration camps.
“Vught was the worst,” Schaap says during the commemoration on Sunday afternoon. “During that time in the camp I went from being a child to being a human being.”
Omroep Brabant previously spoke to Dolf Schaap, who was born as Adolf in 1932, about his stay in camp Vught and the children’s transport. “I think if I had been born six months later, they wouldn’t have given me the name Adolf.”
In recent weeks, the students of De Schalm have been delving into the history of the children’s transports from Camp Vught at school and tell heartbreaking stories during the commemoration.
Linda (10) found a diary fragment and read it aloud. “I did say goodbye. I tied her red cloth. Then she left with hundreds of others in a cattle truck. I never saw her again.”
Philip and Marthe are allowed to lead the ceremony on behalf of the school and do so with verve. 10-year-old Philip found the stories he heard in the preparation for the commemoration ‘very intense’. The worst? “That they are killed by someone who doesn’t like them very much.”
Giving a face
At the end of the commemoration, the students attach butterflies to the monument, one for each year since the children’s transports of 1943. Ribbons with photos of the deported children flutter in the tree next to the monument.
Yet the vast majority of photos are missing. “We know the names, but we also like to give the children a face,” says Jeroen van den Eijnde, director of the Camp Vught National Monument. Proof that there are still many stories about the ‘lost children’ that have not been told.
According to him, it remains important to commemorate the children’s transport, because even today millions of children are victims of wars. “To commemorate is to think. That is exactly what we are doing here this afternoon.”