70th Anniversary of the Camp’s Liberation

One of my dreams in life is to follow my Opa’s footsteps from the time of his capture, to when he escaped the work camp, to his march to Lubeck Bay and finally to where he was found in a German field hospitals mop closet and I promise myself that this WILL happen….. Maybe not this year but hopefully by the time the camp has their 75th anniversary.

Recently my father received a letter from Neuengamme regarding the camp’s 70th anniversary of it’s liberation and here is the letter in it’s entirety…..

Save The Date!

May 2015: 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation

The Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial is planning an extensive programme of events for the 70th anniversary of the Neuengamme camp’s liberation in May 2015. We would be very pleased if you could attend and would therefore ask you to note the dates in your diaries. More detailed information on the planned events will follow in September 2014.

Conference: “Victims and sites of German ‘reprisals’ in the occupied territories of Europe”, 29 April – 1 May 2015

This academic conference will approach the respective backgrounds and aftereffects of German ‘reprisals’ in occupied Europe from a comparative international perspective. In addition, we will ask how the respective societies dealt with and commemorated these crimes and will examine the different memorial cultures by looking at specific historical sites and memorials. The exhibition “Deported to Neuengamme. Wehrmacht and SS Reprisals in Occupied Europe”, which deals with the same subject, will be shown at the Neuengamme Memorial from 23 April to 14 June 2015.

Workshop for members of the second and third generation, 2 May 2015

2015 will see a second two-hour workshop for children and grandchildren of concentration camp prisoners. The aim is to give them the opportunity to exchange personal perspectives and ideas at the beginning of their visit to Neuengamme and Hamburg. Participation will be by invitation only.

Commemorative ceremony, 3 May 2015

The commemorative ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the ships in Lübeck Bay will be held on Sunday, 3 May 2015, 10.00 a.m. in Neustadt/Holstein.

Talks with survivors and commemorative ceremony, 4 May 2015

On Monday, 4 May 2015, the Neuengamme Memorial will be putting on three parallel talks with survivors of Neuengamme and its satellite camps both at 10.00 a.m. and at noon. These talks will be aimed at secondary school students. The International Commemorative Ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation will be held at 5.00 p.m. at the Memorial.

“Forum for the Future of Memory”, 5/6 May 2015

On the morning of Tuesday, 5 May 2015, the Memorial will be holding public talks with former concentration camp prisoners. This will be followed by a two-day “Forum for the Future of Memory”, which will end in the early afternoon of 6 May. This workshop, which is open to children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors, members of survivors’ associations, staff members from the Neuengamme Memorial and organisations associated with the Memorial as well as interested parties of all ages, will try to address the following issues:

– How are experiences of deportation and imprisonment passed on within different societies and within individual families, and how can we ensure these memories are kept alive for the future?

– What are the personal perspectives that family members of former concentration camp prisoners bring to a historical examination of Nazi Germany? What do they expect from the Neuengamme Memorial, and in what way do they want to contribute to its work?

– How can we strengthen the survivors’ associations, and in what way can they contribute to the Memorial’s work?

Please if you can attend because there are people who would love to but just can’t…..

Something New…..

So as many of you know Opa’s story (in his own words) has come to an end. What many of you may not know is I have had a pretty rough year. I recently decided to completly turn/change my life around when I was offered something pretty amazing……. If you’d like to read more/follow that story here it is —–> http://aaronstransformation.wordpress.com/about/ .

Thank you for all your support and I am currently looking for an editor to go through all the information we have on Opa so I can keep updating this site.

September Of 1949…..

“I still had not returned to work. As my father was the only bread-winner in the home and there was no social support system to speak of I went to the small ship yard where I had worked before the war. They were only too eager to have me back regardless of whether or not I was physically or psychologically ready.”

“I had only been back to work for three or four months when in the spring of 1946 I was drafted for military service in the Dutch Army. I was assigned to a technical corps and spent the first few months training in gun fitting and the care and maintenance of artillery pieces.I was finally assigned to an infantry unit. My responsibilities included maintaining the 6″ anti-tank guns assigned to the unit. We were shipped by cruiser to Indonesia.”

“By October or November 1947 I became very ill with kidney stones. I was ordered back to Europe. But as Dutch Military Personal we were forbidden from travelling through British territories or protectorates. I had to travel incognito as a civilian using a civilian passport.”

“I was finally discharged from my military obligations in September of 1949.”

 

Bram And Dad…..

“About two weeks after I got home I went to see Bram Donker’s parents. I told them I had known Bram prior to the war and that we had worked together in Neuengamme. It was a difficult thing to do but I told them he had come down with dysentery and died in the camp. His father became very angry and told me his son was a strong healthy young man and they accused me of lying to them. They “physically” threw me out of their home. Some time later his father came to visit me at home.”

“He had received a letter from the Dutch Red Cross indicating the date he had been arrested and the date of his death. He apologized for the way they had treated me.”

“In the evening sometime in December of 1945 we received a knock at the door. It was a cab driver who indicated my father was drunk and passed out in the back of his cab. He asked us to come down and get him. After we got him upstairs we realized he was dead. It appears he had asphyxiated. He was only forty-two years old.”

To Be Continued……….

I Finally Went Home…..

“I was moved by train to Oudenbosch in Holland. There were military police there to question camp survivors and take statements as to who they may have known to have died, what they may have witnessed, where they were, those kind of things. The Red Cross also interviewed me. I do not remember a great deal of my time there.”

“There was a cloister nearby that was run by a Christian Order Of Brothers. There was a man there named brother Christopher who used to come to the rail station or centre to see if there was anything he could do to help. He saw me lying on the floor. I was apathetic and no longer cared what happened to me. The Brother had me examined by a civilian doctor. They moved me and another man to the cloister. Brother Christopher was assigned to our personal care. There were only two of us ex-prisoners there at the time. There were two nurses assigned to us as well. There were also local boy scouts who came around to help. The other ex-prisoner was all swollen for malnutrition. If you stuck a finger on his face and then took it away the indentation remained there. Both of us slowly began to recover our health and put on weight. Brother Christopher notified my family where I was and sometime in June 1945 my father came for me and I finally went home.”

To Be Continued……….

The British Moved…..

“The British moved me by ambulance to one of their military hospitals in Lubeck. They burned my new cloths there because they were infested with lice. I remember being angry with that. I do not remember how long I was there. I still could not walk or retain food. I was then flown by plane to Brussels where they established a reception center for Jews and other ex-prisoners. I had started to be able to walk using a cane but I still had trouble retaining food and I was afraid to eat. I was not there for very long.”

“One time while in Brussels they told me to take the cane and go for a walk. I had not gone very far and lost my balance on a step and fell. Two Belgians helped me up and took me to a cafe where they bought me liquor. They took me to see Manneken-Pis and bought me a postcard of the fountain. They were good to me.”

To Be Continued……….

Many Of The Men…..

“Many of the men had no cloths because they had lost them in the water. I remember a clothing store in a small town. We broke into the store and helped ourselves to the new cloths. I exchanged my filthy camp issue for a new set of cloths and a hat. We must have been a sight to see.”

“Men were eating anything they could find and getting sick from the food because they hadn’t eaten in so long. I got the “shits” and a guy with a bag of sugar told me it was good for the “shits”. I ate it but it didn’t help. The next thing I remember I was in a German field hospital, which was located in a country house. I was in a room with a Belgian man. I think the staff in the hospital were just waiting for us to die. They had moved us into a storage room. I do not remember how long I was there. The Belgian could still walk and slipped out of the field hospital and told some British troops where I was. A British soldier came there and picked me up and carried me outside. He put a blanket on a garbage can and sat me there. He told me to wait for an ambulance. Two British Military doctors came in an ambulance and picked me up. I could not walk anymore. I weighed seventy-two pounds.”

To Be Continued……….

When The Bombs Hit…..

“When the bombs hit we could hear them and feel the concussion of the impact. We banged on the door but no one came to open it. We finally banged it hard enough for it to open. The ship was burning and everyone was trying to get on the deck. We could not get to the deck because all the stairways were engulfed in flames. In the confusion I searched the cabins deserted by SS guards looking for food. I found some cigarettes and a piece of bread. I ate the bread right away and put the cigarettes in my shirt. They were the same ones we had received in our Red Cross parcels. The SS must have kept some of the parcels. I went back to our cabin and some of us broke out the porthole. We crawled out the porthole and dropped into the water. I don`t know how long I had been in the water when I saw a life raft with two men in it. I swam over to it and they pulled me on. They must have been searching cabins too because they had a tub of butter. The water was very cold and I was shivering uncontrollably so they smeared butter all over me to keep me warm. Shortly after that I passed out. I don`t remember coming ashore.”

“I remember almost nothing once we were ashore. We were rounded up but I do not know by whom. They took us to a building of some kind with straw on the floor. I think it may have been an old theatre. I don’t know how long we stayed there. I do remember that I still had the cigarettes and they were still dry because of the wrap.”

To Be Continued……….

I Don’t Know…..

“I Don’t know how long we were on the train, I don’t remember much from that time. We were forced marched from the train to the harbor. I don’t remember if we went through a town. I remember though anyone who fell behind or could not make it was shot. We were taken down to the docks and loaded onto a freighter. I don’t know how long we were on the freighter, maybe two days?”

“I was put to work moving the bodies of the dead from the holds of the ships into nets so they could be hoisted on to the deck. We then piled them on the deck of the ship. We used to feel for the fresh ones because they were easier to handle. It was hard to tell how long some of them had been in the hold. We were hoisting a net load of corpses out of the hold and the load shifted. One of the bodies in the net had really started to decompose and when the weight shifted fluids poured from his mouth hitting me in the face. I remember being disgusted by that.”

“The freighter took us out to the Cap Arcona which was too big to get into the harbor. The ship was an old luxury liner. I don’t really remember much about it. We could see much because everything was Schnell (Quickly!) Schnell (Quickly!) Schnell (Quickly!). We had to run everywhere we went. I was locked into a cabin with seven or eight other men. We were all different nationalities. We were in there for a number of days. It could have been two or three maybe four days? You lose track of time.”

To Be Continued……….

On The 27th Of March…..

“On the 27th of Marth it was my twentieth birthday and I celebrated by trading my food ration for a cigarette. It was wonderful.”

“I was still in Block 14 when my old friend Bram Donker got the “shits”. He died there. If you got the “shits” you were finished. I knew another man from Putten who died there but I can’t recall his name.”

Sometime in early to mid April of 1945 my Opa and the rest of the Neuengamme survivors were loaded onto a train and transferred to the German town of Lubeck. The prisoners were then marched to Lubeck Bay, loaded onto a freighter and then a ship. The Cap Arcona.

To Be Continued………