Word: westerbork
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...Vogelaar, referring to the 28 paintings returned to the Katz family in the 1940s. They include Rembrandt's Portrait of a Man, which is thought to have been bartered by Nathan in exchange for visas for his extended family and his mother's release from the Dutch concentration camp, Westerbork...
Anne, her sister Margot, and her father and mother were first taken to Westerbork prison in The Netherlands, then shipped by cattle car to Auschwitz. Recalls a woman fellow prisoner: "The doors of the cars were opened violently, and the first thing we saw at Auschwitz was the garish light of the searchlights trained on the cars . . . The voice of a loudspeaker dominated all others; it bellowed: 'Women to the left, men to the right!' I saw them go away: Mr. Van Daan, Mr. Dussel, Peter, Mr. Frank." The men never saw the women again. The women were...
...bear to inflict on his fellow men before his conscience calls a halt? The answer to this question is the substance of a harrowing little novel from Holland that combines the impact of a documentary film with the prodding of a remorseless sermon. The scene is Westerbork, a concentration camp in occupied Holland, from which Jews were sent on to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other extermination centers in Eastern Europe. The book's real heroes and villains are Jews, while the Nazis are seen only as almost impersonal agents of evil...
Jacques Henriques, the narrator, goes to Westerbork before he has to. A high-school teacher, he goes because he has the offer of a job with the "Disposition Service," the Jewish organization within the camp that really runs the grisly show for the Germans in charge. His boss is Siegfried Israel Cohn, a German Jew with years in concentration camps behind him, whose sense of self-preservation is so strong that he is prepared to outdo his masters in brutality. Carefully he explains to his new young "adjutant" that though all the Jews will reach Auschwitz...
Though indifferent to religion, Henriques is finally done in through his regard for a gentle religion teacher. Jeremiah Hirsch endures his fate better than most because he believes that even in Westerbork he walks with God. He reads his Bible, forces hatred from his heart and mind, achieves the near-impossible article of faith that even the Nazis are his brothers. Cynically at work saving his own skin, Henriques is yet fascinated by Hirsch's stubborn spiritual strength. On the day Hirsch and his family are led to the train, all the suppressed guilt in Henriques boils...
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