They rerouted via Leeuwarden and tried to reach the Afsluitdijk, but the 700 people didn’t make it further than the Frisian capital. Levisson “travelled to Westerbork and helped the refugees into a train headed west, but a rail bridge near Zwolle had been destroyed”, Hartog Beem writes in “The Jews of Leeuwarden: History of a Jewish cultural centre”. On, German forces crossed the lightly defended Dutch border. As reports came in of German forces drawing closer to the Netherlands, he informed the camp inhabitants, unnerved by Westerbork being a mere 30 kilometers from the border, of an escape plan: if the Germans entered Drenthe, he would help them to escape to the unoccupied provinces in the south and west. Rabbi Levisson regularly visited the camp to provide moral support and spiritual guidance to the refugees living there. The winters during the first years of the Nazi occupation in the camp were extraordinarily cold: in a jarring sign of how life continued largely as normal for many non-Jewish Dutch citizens during the war, there was even an Elfstedentocht ice skating race held in 1940, 19. But the Drenthe terrain remained rough: muddy and flecked with puddles in the winter and susceptible to sand storms in the summertime. The facilities were decent – lodgings were comfortable and food was fairly readily available – and there was talk of eventually building a school and a hospital. By April of 1940, there were 749 refugees living at Westerbork. In August 1939, construction began on the camp, and the first Jewish refugees moved in on 9 October 1939. Scan of the initial blue print for Westerbork, which began as a refugee camp in 1939, from “Westerbork 1939 – 1945: The story of refugee and deportation camp Westerbork” “Isolated, wild, desolate and empty… ideal for the Central Refugee Camp”, Van Der Veen mirthlessly notes.

The government finally settled on a stretch of land owned by the Dutch forestry service in Drenthe.

Another idea was to open a camp 12 kilometres away from ‘t Loo palace, but Queen Wilhelmina (via a secretary) personally wrote to the minister of the interior to protest such a facility so close to the royal residence. The first potential location was Elspeet in the Veluwe, but the ANWB – Royal Dutch Touring Club, a travellers’ association which still exists today – objected on the grounds that a refugee camp would drive tourists away. But finding a location for the camp proved challenging due to local objections. The limited numbers of refugees who were allowed in were placed into rotating camps that would open and close unpredictably – many of which were privately funded by Dutch Jewish citizens – and eventually, the Dutch government decided to open a central refugee camp. “The only people who were allowed in were those who could prove that their lives were in immediate peril.” Refugee camps “But the doors were closed to them”, writes Harm van der Veen, author of “Westerbork 1939 – 1945: The story of refugee and deportation camp Westerbork”. Photo courtesy of “The Jews of Leeuwarden” by Hartog BeemĪfter the Kristallnacht, the German campaign which destroyed synagogues and Jewish shops and left scores of Jewish people dead in 1938, another wave of refugees sought shelter in the Netherlands. Chief Rabbi of Friesland and Drenthe Abraham Salomon. As more and more Jews fled Germany, Rabbi Levisson’s responsibilities shifted and he became very active in refugee relief efforts. “The Groningen Jews feared that other Jews would somehow jeopardize their own position in society, and they often kept them at arm’s length”, Van Der Poel writes.īut Jewish religious life continued more or less as normal throughout the ‘30s: in 1935, Abraham Salomon Levisson was appointed the Chief Rabbi of Friesland, and his rabbinical duties also covered Drenthe. That fear and resistance informed the initial standoffish reception that some German Jews faced when seeking refuge in the Netherlands. “The arrival of the German Jews made the threat in Germany all too real for many Groningen Jews, evoking feelings of fear, disbelief, resistance and recognition because these were ‘civilized’ Jews who were similar to them”, professor Stefan van der Poel writes in “Jewish Life in Groningen”. But when the first German refugees began making the short journey across the border to Groningen, the Jewish men and women of the north grew increasingly alarmed. After Adolf Hitler became the leader of Germany in 1933, Dutch Jews still continued to lead normal lives that were increasingly indistinguishable from their fellow city dwellers throughout much of the 1930s.

Eva beem holocaust