Qualla: Westerbork Transit Camp

Westerbork Transit Camp: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Blacknight, Public domain. On 3 September 1944, a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank boarded a train at this place. She had been here just under a month, kept in a small hut at the eastern edge of the camp with her parents and her sister Margot. The train she boarded was the last transport ever sent from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Of the 1,019 people on it, most were dead within weeks. She and Margot reached Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in early 1945, weeks before liberation. There is no monument here that singles her out, because to single her out would be to dishonor the more than 100,000 others who walked the same path. But she was here. They all were.

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Image: Blacknight | Public domain

Westerbork Transit Camp: What This Place Was Built For

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Westerbork was never an extermination camp. The Dutch government built it in 1939, before the war reached the Netherlands, to house Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. Fifty hectares of land. Wooden barracks. A clinic, a school, even a stage for cabaret performances. When the German...

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Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westerbork Transit Camp: The Voices We Have

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. Etty Hillesum was a 28-year-old Jewish writer from Amsterdam who arrived at Westerbork voluntarily. She had taken a job with the Judenrat - the Jewish Council the Germans forced their victims to organize - for two weeks, and when the first transports began, she chose to accompany...

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Image: FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

Westerbork Transit Camp: A Clarinet, a Family, a Film

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wutsje / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hans Mossel was a Jewish-Dutch clarinetist and saxophonist who arrived at Westerbork on 9 March 1944. He played in dance bands in Amsterdam before the war. He was held for exactly two weeks before being sent to the Monowitz section of Auschwitz, where he was murdered later that y...

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Image: Wutsje / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 3.0 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Westerbork Transit Camp: The Numbers and the Names

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rudolf Breslauer, Public domain. Approximately 107,000 Jews and several thousand Sinti and Roma passed through Westerbork between 1942 and September 1944. Most went to Auschwitz, many to Sobibor, others to Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. Fewer than 5,000 are believed to have survived the war. Anne Frank was on...

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Image: Rudolf Breslauer | Public domain

Westerbork Transit Camp: What Stands Now

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kris Roderburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. The camp was dismantled in the 1960s. Where the barracks stood, there is now grass. Where the deportation track once led east into the woods, there is a sculpture: a section of railroad torn from the ground, twisted upward, broken in the middle, set in place so the tracks can nev...

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Image: Kris Roderburg | CC BY-SA 4.0