Camp Westerbork, also known as Westerbork transit camp, was a Nazi transit camp in the province of Drenthe in the Northeastern Netherlands, during World War II. It was located in the municipality of Westerbork, current-day Midden-Drenthe. Camp Westerbork was used as a staging location for sending Jews to concentration camps elsewhere.
Esther (Etty) Hillesum was the Dutch author of confessional letters and diaries which describe both her religious awakening and the persecutions of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In 1943, she was deported and murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp.
Ellen Burka was a Canadian-Dutch figure skater and coach. She became Member of the Order of Canada in 1978 and was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1996.
They Were Not Silent is a documentary about the Jewish Labor Committee's anti-Nazi movement in the United States before, during and after World War II. The film features rare archival footage and photographs along with interviews with labor veterans, Holocaust survivors and scholars. It explores how international Jewry worked to help Jews and non-Jews in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe.
The JLC's role has changed over the years. A trade unionist who has focused on JLC history, Kenneth Burt, says he hopes that the documentary will encourage new interest in the organization.
Paradise Camp is a 1986 documentary film about Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, written and directed by Australians Paul Rea and Frank Heimans, respectively. Czechoslovakian Jews were first told that Theresienstadt was a community established for their safety. They quickly recognized it as a ghetto and concentration camp.
Marianne "Janny" Brandes-Brilleslijper was a Dutch Holocaust survivor and one of the last people to see Anne Frank. She is the sister of singer Lin Jaldati. Both Brandes-Brilleslijper and Jaldati were in the Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with Anne and Anne's older sister Margot Frank.
Selma Engel-Wijnberg was one of only two Dutch Jewish Holocaust survivors of the Sobibor extermination camp. She escaped during the 1943 uprising, hid in Poland, and survived the war. Engel-Wijnberg immigrated to the United States from Israel with her family in 1957, settling in Branford, Connecticut. She returned to Europe again only to testify against the war criminals of Sobibor. In 2010 she was in the Netherlands to receive the governmental honor of Knight in the Order of Oranje-Nassau.
Johan Willem van Hulst was a Dutch school director, university professor, author, politician, chess player and centenarian. In 1943, with the help of the Dutch resistance and students of the nearby University of Amsterdam, he was instrumental in saving over 600 Jewish children from the nursery of the Hollandsche Schouwburg who were destined for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. For his humanitarian actions he received the Yad Vashem distinction Righteous Among the Nations from the State of Israel in 1973.
Martinus (Tinus) Tels was a Dutch physicist and chemical engineer. He was a professor of chemical engineering, dean of the department of chemical engineering and the ninth rector magnificus of the Eindhoven University of Technology.
The Westerweel Group was a small resistance group with non-Jewish and Jewish members that operated during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Led by a Dutch Christian Joop Westerweel and Jewish German refugee Joachim Simon, the group was initiated in August 1942 and its first objective was to hide a Jewish youth group of "Palestine pioneers" whose members were ordered to be deported to the Nazi Westerbork transit camp. They were mostly young Jews from Germany and Austria who had fled to the Netherlands after 1933 where they followed an agricultural training to settle in Palestine. When threatened with deportation, the resistance group helped them to find hiding places and some of them were brought to Spain via Belgium and France.
Bloeme Evers-Emden was a Dutch Jewish lecturer and child psychologist who extensively researched the phenomenon of "hidden children" during World War II and wrote four books on the subject in the 1990s. Her interest in the topic grew out of her own experiences during World War II, when she was forced to go into hiding from the Nazis and was subsequently arrested and deported to Auschwitz on the last transport leaving the Westerbork transit camp on 3 September 1944. Together with her on the train were Anne Frank and her family, whom she had known in Amsterdam. She was liberated on 8 May 1945.
Jules Schelvis was a Dutch Jewish historian, writer, printer, and Holocaust survivor. Schelvis was the sole survivor among the 3,005 people on the 14th transport from Westerbork to Sobibor extermination camp, having been selected to work at nearby Dorohucza labour camp. He is known for his memoirs and historical research about Sobibor, for which he earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam, Officier in the Order of Orange-Nassau, and Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Walter Süskind was a German Jew who helped about 600 Jewish children escape the Holocaust. He was a member of the Jewish Council of Amsterdam during the Second World War.
Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer was a Dutch resistance fighter who brought Jewish children and adults into safety before and during the Second World War. Together with other people involved in the pre-war Kindertransport, she saved the lives of more than 10,000 Jewish children, fleeing anti-Semitism. She was honored as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. After the war she served on the Amsterdam city council.
The Holocaust in the Netherlands was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in the German-occupied Netherlands. In 1939, there were some 140,000 Dutch Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 24,000 to 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany in the 1930s..
The Committee for Jewish Refugees was a Dutch charitable organization. It operated from 1933–1941. At first, it managed the thousands of Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany. These refugees were crossing the border from Germany into the Netherlands. The Committee largely decided which of the refugees could remain in the Netherlands. The others generally returned to Germany. For the refugees permitted to stay, it provided support in several ways. These included direct financial aid and assistance with employment and with further emigration.
Henriëtte Henriquez Pimentel was a Dutch teacher and trained nurse who during the Second World War headed a crèche in Amsterdam which cared for small children while their parents were otherwise occupied. Together with Walter Süskind and Johan van Hulst, from around October 1942 she helped to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish infants by smuggling them into the homes of sympathetic host families. After being arrested by the Nazis in April 1943, she was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp the following September.
Max Windmüller was a German member of the Dutch resistance. He was forced to flee from the National Socialists to the Netherlands with his parents because of their Jewish faith. He joined the Westerweel Group there and saved the lives of many Jewish children and young people. The members of the Westerweel group organized identification papers, hiding places and escape opportunities, especially for German-Jewish children and young people who had fled from Germany. In this group, Jews and members of other faiths worked together to save the Jews from persecution. Such cooperation was not a matter of course in the Netherlands. Windmüller personally saved around 100 young Jews, and the entire Westerweel group saved 393 Jews. In July 1944, the Gestapo stormed a secret meeting of the Resistance group in Paris in which Windmüller and other members of the Jewish resistance were arrested. They were then taken to Gestapo headquarters where they were interrogated and tortured. When the liberation of the camp by Allied troops was imminent, Windmüller was deported from occupied France with the last transport. On 21 April 1945, he was shot by a Schutzstaffel member.
Camp Barneveld was an internment camp consisting of two buildings for Dutch Jews near the town of Barneveld, the Netherlands during the German occupation in World War II. Dutch civil servant Karel Frederiks had made an arrangement, later called Plan Frederiks, with the occupiers to keep a small group of Dutch Jews in the Netherlands and exclude them from deportation to the labour, concentration, or extermination camps abroad. At first, in December 1942, a castle called De Schaffelaar was used to house the interned Jews. When De Schaffelaar was full, a nearby large villa called De Biezen and its barracks were added. Although the Nazis did eventually, in September 1943, deport the group of around 650 Jews from Camp Barneveld to Westerbork transit camp and then on to concentration camp Theresienstadt in Bohemia, almost all survived.
Irene Hasenberg Butter, is a German-American Professor Emeritus in Economic Sciences at the University of Michigan and a Holocaust survivor.
