Roses From the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank by Carol Ann Lee

Author:Carol Ann Lee [Lee, Carol Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, History, Europe, Military, World War II
ISBN: 9780140276282
Google: gYr_OmZQWnoC
Amazon: 0140276289
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2000-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

‘I am afraid of prison cells and concentration camps…’

Anne Frank, Diary, 12 March 1944

Whilst the Frank family were in hiding, the expulsion of the Netherlands’ Jewish population gathered pace.

On 6 August 1942 (‘Black Thursday’) 2,000 Jews in Amsterdam were arrested, beaten, and sent to Westerbork to await the trains for Auschwitz. The following day various parts of Amsterdam were raided and 600 Jews driven to Westerbork. Two days later, in another massive razzia, hundreds of Jews were seized in Amsterdam-Zuid. On 5 September 714 Dutch Jews arrived in Auschwitz; 651 were gassed. October 1942 saw the start of three weeks of violent raids in which almost 5,000 Jews were captured. The Hollandse Schouwburg, a theatre in Amsterdam’s Plantage region, replaced the Zentralstelle as the main departure point for the camps. Below its ornate ceiling, hostages lay slumped on the floor for days, dying of thirst and hunger. There was no fresh air and only dull, artificial light. Dr Jacob Presser recounts, ‘There were screaming children everywhere, in the corridors, in the halls, the foyers, the balconies, the pit, the staircases, the stalls. Then there were those who could not lie still and kept walking about the building. On top of it all there was the gnawing agony of uncertainty.’1

As rumours of what was happening in the camps began to spread, Jews throughout the Netherlands descended on the Jewish Council offices, pleading in vain for the coveted ‘Bolle’ exemption stamps which enabled them to remain at home a little longer. Lists of Jews eligible for the stamps were drawn up with great care, but only half of those listed actually received them.

Despite the increase in activity and membership of Jewish and non-Jewish Resistance groups,2 the enforced exile continued. On 18 October 1942 1,594 Dutch Jews from a transport of 1,710 entered the gas-chambers of Auschwitz. Jewish rest homes in the Netherlands were targeted in raids in early November, and 450 people were taken to Westerbork, from where 1,610 people were shipped to the east a few days later.

At the beginning of 1943 there were further attacks on Jewish rest homes, Jewish hospitals and Jewish orphanages. Apeldoorn’s Jewish Mental Hospital was emptied on 21 January, along with many houses in the town centre. The transports that arrived in Auschwitz from Apeldoorn were gassed, and the nurses who had insisted on travelling with their charges were thrown into a pit and burned alive. On 8 February 1,000 Jews from Westerbork, including every child in the camp hospital, were deported to Auschwitz. The children, most of whom had scarlet fever or diphtheria, were gassed, together with over 500 others. On 10 February all Jews still living in the provinces were ordered into Amsterdam. A new decree passed that month instructed Germans to consider displaced children as Jewish and to ‘treat them accordingly’. Amsterdam’s Joodse Invalide Hospital was emptied on 1 March. The Jewish Council had warned staff there would be a raid and most officials had fled, leaving only a handful of nurses to calm the patients.

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