Student Tour Blog

Written by Nelaya Boyd

Today, we visited the memorial and interpretation centre for former Westerbork transit camp in Drenthe, Netherlands. This site began as a refugee camp in 1939 for those fleeing antisemitic politics, but was converted into a transit camp when it was taken over by Nazi occupying forces in 1942. During its time as a transit camp, more than 100 000 Jewish people, hundreds of Roma and Sinti, dozens of resistance fighters were imprisoned until their deportation to camps in Eastern Europe. It was on 12 April 1945 that the camp was liberated by Canadian forces. 

As a student last year, I had the opportunity to participate on an academic trip to Poland to explore the Holocaust and its memory. Included in this experience, I walked the grounds of former concentration and death camps – such as Auschwitz Camp Complex, Majdanek, and Krakow-Plaszow – and learnt of the people deported there and the atrocities committed against them. In some ways, our visit today to Camp Westerbork brought my own learning of the Holocaust full circle.

There are few physical remnants of the transit camp that remain today, many of the structures were dismantled or sold over time. The space is not restored in the way places like Auschwitz are. Instead, the former camp is shrouded in forest and covered in a blanket of lupin flowers, all planted through the years following liberation. Yet, the history is not erased. The tree line traces the perimeter of the former camp boundary and the flowers do not grow where the buildings once were, leaving parcels of the land empty. At the site, we are guided through the story of those imprisoned at Westerbork through audio devices, information placards, and symbolic representations or conserved infrastructure. This includes the infamous railway tracks and wagons that facilitated the deportation of more than 100 000 people from Camp Westerbork between 15 July 1942 and 13 September 1944 to concentration and death camps in the East.

The area of the former camp also functions as a space of memory and memorialization. On this land, three monuments were erected and together they tell a circular story of who the prisoners of Westerbork were and where they came from, where the deportation trains took them, and finally the legacy of survivors. One of these monuments are rail tracks that are lifted and warped. There are numerous symbolic meanings associated with the monument. Among them are the wooden planks representing each of the train departures and different toned rocks representing the lives of those imprisoned in the camp and those who looked in on it from the outside. This monument was designed and erected by a grassroots initiative led by the children of survivors of Camp Westerbork, who sought to ensure that their parents’ stories were not forgotten or lost to time.

Today we took up this torch of remembrance and will carry it with us – always to be reminded to act compassionately and to warn against the dangers of exclusion and extremism.