The life of Tanja Wolterbeek (78) began in January 1945 behind barbed wire. She was born in the Vught internment camp, a place where Dutch people were punished who had collaborated with the Germans during the war. Her parents were members of the NSB. Due to the enormous taboo, Tanja knows little about that time. “Years later I heard that I was taken from the hospital barracks to my mother’s barracks in an orange box. Without any clothes on.”
Camp Vught was not only a prisoner camp during the Second World War. After the war, ‘wrong Dutchmen’ were locked up on that spot: NSB members. Two of them were the parents of Tanja Wolterbeek (78) from Eindhoven, who was born in Kamp Vught.
Since Tanja was only a few months old when she left the camp, she has no memory of life there. “My mother only said that it had snowed a lot in Vught,” says the Eindhoven resident. It was a big taboo. “When I asked relatives about the past, they said, ‘Let’s rest, it’s been so long’.”
In the 1980s, Tanja was allowed to look into her father’s archive for the first time. “Then it turned out that he was also being punished in Vught because he was a member of the Sicherheitsdienst. He helped the Germans find and pick up Jews in Eindhoven.”
“It was taboo to say you cooperated with the enemy.”
Marijke Verduijn has been researching this first and largest post-war internment camp since 2013. And she wrote a book about it. “At the time I came into contact with a man who had been here as a 16-year-old boy. His father was an NSB member and after Mad Tuesday he had put on an army uniform in Germany. After the war he was punished for this in Camp Vught,” she says.
When she went looking for more information about the internment camp, she couldn’t find much. “Collaborators, Dutch people who voluntarily cooperated with the Germans during the war, rarely talked about their past. It was taboo to say you cooperated with the enemy. When I heard this man’s story, I thought: that is not right. Those stories need to be told.”
“When I applied, the letters NSB were on my file.”
Thanks to Marijke’s book, there is now a better picture of how the prisoners, including Tanja’s parents, lived in the camp after the war. She obtained diaries and letters from the camp and spoke to internees, guards and their children.
“They said that the prisoners were beaten, that they were not allowed to have contact with the outside and they were hungry,” says Marijke. “But as the camp progressed, it was realized that those ‘wrong’ people had to go back into society. Then they were allowed to receive visitors, write letters and there was even a cinema and theater room.”
Tanja is happy that more is now known about that time. For all her childhood she was condemned for the choices of her parents. “At primary school I was not allowed to enter some classmates’ homes and when I applied for my nursing training, the letters NSB were on my file.” Tanja hopes that more people like her dare to talk about this. “It’s about time. I think it It is important that we pass on history, not just the right side, but also the wrong side.”
The book ‘De losers – Punishment and re-education in Camp Vught 1944-1949’ by Marijke Verduijn is for sale from 1 September in the museum of Nationaal Moment Kamp Vught and in bookshops.
