A Short History of Westerbork Transit Camp
The history of discrimination is long and detailed, and the Jewish population are no strangers to this act. When World War II started, discrimination was at what seemed like an all time high. The war started with the Germans blaming all of their debts on the Jewish population. The Germans, and all of the master race believers would spit at the Jews as they walked by, they stole things, and eventually killed them for nothing. The transit camp of Westerbork was no exception to this discrimination. The camp of Westerbork was originally constructed to house Jewish German refugees by the Dutch government in 1939. However, the camp was taken over by the German SS less than a year after it was built. It
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The reason for this would probably be that the Jewish overwatchers were way more sympathetic than the Germans. The camp was not extremely sanitary, but there was at least plenty of food. This is a big piece of information, because most camps had very little food, sometimes not enough for the prisoners. There wasn’t only the regular barracks in the camp, but instead there were two types of camps, the regular prisoners, and the “permanent” barracks which were for the higher thought of prisoners, mostly the people that were overseeing the camp (“Westerbork”). These people were safe for the most …show more content…
This camp being one of the better camps, it was fairly easy to make it through the camp. Eventually, the camp of Westerbork was liberated by Canadian Forces on April 12, 1945 (“Westerbork”). The Canadian were actually a very fierce army in the war. Only 5,200 people that had at any time set foot in Westerbork survived the whole of WWII (“Westerbork Transit Camp”). This is very significant, because there were more than 100,000 people to set foot in the camp, not counting the Germans, or in-charge-Jews. Some people wonder what Westerbork has become, and my answer is that it is now a memorial (“Westerbork”). The memorial of Westerbork Transit Camp, is one of the many memorials for camps, but one of the only camps that still has most of its buildings still