KAMP Landweer in WWII
How Dutch people were conned into becoming guards in a temporary concentration camp
KAMP LANDWEER
They were in their early twenties, two farmers' sons. Both were studying agriculture and were helping their parents on the family farm in the South of Friesland. Times were not easy, the farm was only small, and wheat, rye, and potatoes didn't fetch very high prices. So, when they saw an advertisement in the local paper for young men to work at a remote rehabilitation camp for petty criminals, both applied for the job. The two men were young and idealistic and the proposition sounded perfect: at the camp, they would help people who had committed only minor crimes to reform. The inmates worked in the fields, digging peat and planting trees. And the job would count as work experience for their studies while their parents managed the farm.
Yes, it couldn't be better, they thought. Until they reported for work and found themselves guards in a concentration camp. No petty criminals either, who were being rehabilitated there, but Jews. Only Jews. Hundreds of Jews were being kept in that temporary camp, waiting to be transported to Poland or Germany.
Too late to back out; they would have ended up as prisoners themselves, and above all, it would have endangered their parents, their Heit and Mem as they said in Friesian. Instead, the two brothers, Eb and Freerk, began to smuggle in food, as if that were not dangerous. And they made friends with some of the inmates they had to guard, with Dries Wijzenbeek and Dries's cousin Mauk Cappèl.
Slowly the conditions got worse. Most of the Jews came from Amsterdam: tailors, shopkeepers, and musicians. Not people who were used to heavy physical labour. If a Jew fell ill he would not get any food until he was better. And if he did not get better? Plenty more Jews where they came from.
Mauk Cappèl was transferred to a prison in Amsterdam, Dries, and two other inmates escaped.
Eb and Freerk too were transferred, to another temporary concentration camp, where they were again forced to act as guards and once more made friends with the Jewish inmates.
Then, on Friday night, 2 October 1942, on Yom Kippur, the holiest of the Jewish festivals, the Grüne Polizei moved in. All the Jews, the entire camp, were made to march to the nearest railway station to be transported. East. On the same night, the Grüne Polizei emptied out the other temporary concentration camps in the district.
There were no survivors.
No survivors at all, except for the three who had escaped and Mauk Cappèl in his prison cell in Amsterdam. No other survivors out of more than eleven hundred Jews.
Eb and Freerk were free again, but they had changed. Permanently.
'Anyway, Dad survived. How? I'll tell you some other time.
Dad's cousin Dries didn't.