70 years since the evacuation of the Dutch concentration camp Vught. After this evacuation and executions, many Allied POWs were imprisoned here, among them S/Sgt Elton Southwell. From Holland Drop Zone: Chapter 12, Time for Reflections: According to Elton, the prisoners at Camp Vught left their cells only for limited exercise, to go to the bathroom or for questioning. Eventually, they were allowed to walk outside during the day and went back to their cells in the evening. While walking around the barracks, they found a lot of personal belongings. Elton: “Coins, toothbrushes, combs, shoestrings and all sorts of assorted things. This made us think that maybe we now were going to be eliminated, for this pile of stuff looked like things that had been taken from prisoners who had no future. Sidney, he being Jewish, thought that this was a sign of it for sure. He felt like we were all going to be searched and our belongings put in this pile along with the rest. Part of his thinking was right, for we were all searched and things taken from us, but I hid my watch and my rings and they never got them. I had picked up a few of the coins from the pile and they took them, but never found my rings and watch, as they concentrated on things in the pockets.” The belongings Elton found could have been from other prisoners of war, but also from executed camp prisoners. Every prisoner had to surrender his property upon arrival at the SS concentration camp. Items were sorted, stored, and transported to Germany. On July 30th 1944, Hitler ordered that resistance members were to be executed without trial. In August and September 1944, many prisoners from both Camp Vught and the Oranje Hotel, the prison in Scheveningen, were shot at the execution site in Camp Vught. On 5 and 6 September, the confusing days of Crazy Tuesday and the beginning of the evacuation of Camp Vught, over a hundred resistance fighters were executed. It is also possible the belongings Elton found were carelessly thrown aside because the Germans were in a hurry to evacuate. The prisoners evacuated in early September ended up in German concentration camps, the men in Sachsenhausen and the women in Ravensbrück. Many of them did not survive. A year earlier, on Sunday, June 6, 1943, all Jewish children under sixteen years were put on trains and transported via the Dutch transit camp, Westerbork, to the Polish extermination camp, Sobibor. Here, 1269 children were gassed. Elton and the other prisoners were permitted to turn the old barracks into a dormitory. They refurbished and cleaned it. Because anything was better than their small and oppressive cells, the prisoners worked hard and moved to the barracks. They did not enjoy that luxury very long. After the first night, they were told that they would be leaving. Vught railway station was a few miles away. It rained as they were loaded into a boxcar and the doors locked. There was dirty straw in the cramped car and only a small vent window at the top of one of the sidewalls. One of the English soldiers spoke German and shouted to the guards to unlock the door so they could relieve themselves. After much complaining, the train finally stopped and a small tin was thrown inside. The men used the can and emptied it through the vent window. Suddenly, they heard shouting and swearing outside the boxcar. A German soldier was found standing under the vent window, smoking a cigarette.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 13:28:32 +0000
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