In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER THREE From the Burght to Vught— and Auschwitz in the burght, the nsb police questioned yettie, rika, and me— the kind of questioning that left me bleeding and bruised all over. In no way was I going to tell them how and where I had gotten my fake ID card. I insisted that it was mine. They decided to send Yettie and me to a concentration camp. Because I had been seen making a false identity card, the Nazis concluded that I must have been connected to the underground. But Rika’s false identity card was in the name of a lady of the night (Hoer) in Amsterdam, and when the police checked out her card by phone, they found that the descriptions matched. Both women had blond curly hair and, as I mentioned earlier, Rika had made herself look the part. So Rika was escorted to the train station and put on the train to Amsterdam, with the words, “We don’t need your kind in Breda. In Amsterdam you could do much more business.” Yettie and I were put on an army truck with guards and taken to the concentration camp in Vught, Holland, to be dehumanized. We had no idea where we were. The fences that divided the women’s and men’s barracks were electrically charged on both sides. Touching them would be instant death. The women’s and men’s barracks were divided by a fence with a walkway in between for the guards. Yettie was put in a women’s barracks located on one side of the fence,and I was put in a barracks on the other side with nonJewish prisoners. The Vught camp in Holland should have been a warning of things to come. Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners were kept completely separate,and because of my false identity card,the camp author26 ities did not realize that I was Jewish, and I was in no hurry to tell them otherwise. Non-Jewish prisoners were more likely to have been arrested for political or criminal reasons and, in general, they were treated less harshly than the Jewish prisoners. Since the police who had sent me to Vught believed that I was part of the underground, they put me in the non-Jewish section of the camp. In those barracks, I was entitled to receive a parcel from the Red Cross that contained cookies, sugar, and cigarettes. The parcels were handed out about once a month to non-Jewish prisoners only. As far as Jewish concentration camp prisoners were concerned, the Red Cross might as well have been under Hitler’s command. The Jews never received any parcels from the Red Cross. By this time, the Allied forces had taken a number of German prisoners , who were being held in special prisoner-of-war camps in England, Canada, and the United States. By using the German prisoners as leverage, the International Red Cross could have declared the Jews to be prisoners of war. If Hitler had been forced to accept this declaration, the Nazis would have had to treat the Jews in the concentration camps as prisoners of war, according to international law. Instead, once we were inside the concentration camps, the Nazis treated us as lower than animals. Even a dog has a name. Jews had only numbers. We were in a constant state of hunger and terror. We never knew what would happen next. When I got my first Red Cross parcel in Vught, I decided to throw it over the fence to the women’s side, in the hope that I could get it to my wife. I saw a woman walking on the other side and asked her to give the parcel to Yettie. She promised to do so, but just as I threw the parcel over the fence, a guard spotted me. He took me to the guardhouse and told the other guards what I had done. They all decided that I should be punished. While they were deciding what form that punishment should take, another prisoner, who was also the camp carpenter, walked in with a new contraption that he had been ordered to build. Any prisoner who had skills that were useful to the Nazis was forced to use those skills to provide various services to the camp authorities. In this case, the camp carpenter, who also was a prisoner, had been ordered to construct an instrument of torture known as der bock (rack), a...

Share