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BU rabbi returns to toddlerhood home Dutch concentration camp now a field of flowers By Michael B. Shavelson

By every available account, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Albert Gemmeker -- the man who ensured the weekly flow of thousands of Jews from the Westerbork transit camp in Holland to the death and labor camps in eastern Europe -- was a perfect gentleman. But as Rabbi Joseph Polak asked rhetorically last week, "Do you really want to be sent to your death by a perfect gentleman?"

Why is the woman at the right carrying a pocketbook? Part of the mad normalcy of life at the Westerbork concentration camp. Photo courtesy of Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentie, Amsterdam.

"Westerbork was the craziest place on the planet," Polak told his audience at Hillel House. "When you went to Auschwitz, they killed you outright. When you went to Treblinka, they killed you outright. When you went to Mathausen, they worked you to death. When you went to Westerbork, they took care of you." Quoting at length from diaries, letters, and interviews, and showing a series of slides and movie clips, Polak sewed together a description of life in this concentration/transit camp in northeast Holland, not far from the German border. Over the course of the German occupation, some 100,000 Dutch Jews were interred, treated decently by Nazi standards to make them cooperative -- and then sent by train to such camps as Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Bergen-Belsen. Only a small remnant survived the war. There was a bizarre normalcy to daily life at Westerbork, said Polak. In the early years of the camp, inmates had a well-equipped hospital, a cabaret, schools, religious services, and even an openly Zionist organization for teenagers. Polak several times referred to Philip Mechanicus, a distinguished Dutch journalist who spent a year and a half in Westerbork and left behind a richly observant and poetic daily log. (He was shot in Auschwitz.) Some entries could have been written at a rest cure: "In your free hours, which can be spent outside, you can enjoy the vastness of the sky. . . . The sunsets are enchanting. Flocks of seagulls with white bodies and black heads, perhaps a thousand of them together, spend their lives cavorting in the air. I can stand and look at the gulls for long periods on end. They are the symbol of true freedom. . . . "Anyone who can hold out at Westerbork and evade the transports can do more with this positive captivity than the Jew in Amsterdam with his relative freedom, or the Jew who has gone into hiding and sits behind four walls, and is every minute in terror of being picked up." Polak returned repeatedly to the incongruity of the daily routine in the way station to Auschwitz. "People got dressed in the morning," he said. "Men put on their suits and ties. And you ask yourself, what are they doing this for?" Projecting a slide of prisoners in city clothes and yellow stars walking along Westerbork's main road -- little more than a muddy path between the wooden barracks and railroad siding -- Polak asked the audience what struck them as odd about the image. Several people called out that a woman in the photo was carrying a pocketbook. "What do you need a pocketbook for there?" he agreed. "The point of this picture is the pointlessness. There was a labor brigade in Westerbork, but it wasn't real work. It wasn't real." What was real was the weekly departure of 1,000 to 2,000 prisoners to a death camp or work camp. "You don't really understand Westerbork until you understand the fact that every Tuesday morning at 8, a train left." Monday night was even more horrific. The barracks leader read the list of those who would be leaving. "People screamed, people fainted, and people attempted suicide," said Polak. "Throughout the night the train remained parked on a siding, in full view of the barracks. And at 7 or 8 in the morning, the Jews were escorted to the train. Some people went with enormous dignity." Overseeing the smooth departures was Commandant Gemmeker, who was said never to have laid a hand on a Jew. More chilling than the number of people whose deportation Gemmeker controlled was a single story told by an inmate nurse who had worked at the Jewish hospital. Interviewed for the film Camp of Hope and Despair by Willy Lindwer, the nurse described a pregnant woman who had been arrested, then forced to stand at attention "for 12 or 24 hours or some ridiculous time. So, she gave birth prematurely. She was only six months pregnant." She and her baby were then hustled off to Westerbork. The nurse described the loving care she and her colleagues gave to the tiny baby in the Westerbork maternity ward. "Gemmeker had a reputation of being fond of children," she said, "and he sent for an incubator from Amsterdam." He also sent for a Jewish pediatrician "to see what had to be done to keep the child alive. . . . Because it was so weak it was to be given a single drop of brandy after every [tube] feeding. You're not going to believe this, but Commandant Gemmeker actually had Hennessy cognac brought in to give to that baby. . . ." The mother, unable to nurse the weak baby, had been deported as "useless." "Gemmeker was dropping in daily to look after the child," continued the nurse. "He must have been interested. I don't know. That meant this child was worth fighting for; even Gemmeker our enemy is helping us. . . . That little bundle stayed alive, the flame grew stronger, and the time came when it could drink from a bottle. When it weighed seven pounds it was moved from the incubator to a crib. Gemmeker came to see it, and we thought we had made it. This is proof that some good still exists, that there is still hope in the future. But when the infant weighed eight pounds, he was deported to the 'work camp' Auschwitz." Netherworldly Netherlands Polak was born in October 1942 in the Hague, where his father's family had lived for generations. In 1939-40, with life for the Jews in neighboring Germany continuing to deteriorate under Hitler, Holland was an obvious destination. "They felt they might be safe there because it had remained neutral during World War I," Polak explained. "Some 34,000 German Jews came to Holland between 1939 and 1940. The Dutch government was not happy with this." Westerbork was initially set up for those German Jewish refugees and at first didn't even have a fence around it. But that changed after the German invasion on May 10, 1940, and the Dutch capitulation four days later. "Slowly," explained Polak, "so as not to create a panic, and to forestall pro-Jewish rallies, which were already taking place in Holland, the Jews were readied for their deportations." To that end, "Westerbork was transformed from a refugee camp for stateless Germans to a police transit camp." Polak and his parents were rounded up and sent to Westerbork some time in 1943. "We were there until the first of February 1944, when we were put on a train to Bergen-Belsen. We were in Bergen-Belsen until April 9, 1945, about a week before the camp was liberated." Polak and his parents were shipped by train farther east and were liberated near the Polish border on April 23. His father died a few days later and is buried there. Polak, who has studied and taught about the Holocaust for decades and has led groups of students and faculty to visit concentration camps, had nevertheless resisted returning to Westerbork until last month. "For whatever reason, I really was not ready to look at that part of my past. And then all of a sudden, I was ready." Earlier this year he learned about a gathering of Westerbork survivors, sponsored by the Westerbork Historic Center, a quasi-governmental organization. The occasion was the 55th anniversary of the camp's liberation on April 12, 1945.

Much of what he learned during his two days in Holland was not on the official program.

A boxcar awaits its human cargo for the one-way trip to the east. This watercolor was made by interred artist Leo Kok, probably from the window of his barracks. From the privately published Westerbork Drawings: The Life and Work of Leo Kok, 1923-45.

"As I sat on the train from the Amsterdam airport to Assen, the city near Westerbork where I was staying, people looked at me as if I were from Mars," he said. Polak, who has the full beard and broad-brimmed hat of many orthodox Jewish men, realized that none of the Dutch he encountered had ever seen a religious Jew. "They don't know what Jews look like, and it was very scary," he said. The prewar Jewish community of 120,000 Jews was "not just wiped out and off the map, but also out of memory." A strange reunion Before and during his arrival at Westerbork, Polak had unsettling experiences with the commemorative gathering. For one thing, the organizers wouldn't answer his e-mails asking for an invitation. Then there was Westerbork itself. The camp buildings had been knocked down in 1971, said Polak, and the site is now covered with flowers and descriptive markers. It wasn't a Westerbork that could trigger further understanding. Finally there was the ceremony, which drew gentiles who had helped Jews during the war, Jewish survivors, and Dutch schoolchildren who read their own poems and placed flowers on the railroad line that once led out of the camp. "It was touching," said Polak, "but it was interesting that there were rabbis there and no rabbi was asked to speak. "I started talking to some of the people who worked in the center and it was clear that they didn't know what to do with me. They looked at my hat, they looked at my beard. They'd never seen a creature like this before." That evening, waiting for the bus back to Assen, Polak commiserated with a newfound Dutch friend, Leo van Oosten, a wartime resistance fighter still living in Holland who had been arrested, incarcerated at Westerbork, and politely interrogated by Gemmeker. "I said, 'Leo, there's nothing here. It's heartbreaking. Why did they take everything away?'" Van Oosten pointed to a pretty cottage with lace curtains just beyond the tracks. "Gemmeker's cottage," he smirked.

Polak was nonplussed. "There's a little old lady living in it now," he told his BU audience. "I went to the head of the Westerbork Historical Society and asked him why the house isn't a museum. He said, 'What house?' I said, 'Gemmeker's house.' 'Oh,' he answered, 'that's impossible. It's private property.'"

1 June 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations