Family vacation

Most of the exhibits were described in the Dutch language, so we missed out on a lot. I didn't complain--then or now, thirty years later. I had known ahead of time what the memorial at Westerbork transit camp commemorated, even a bit of how the place operated and looked--especially these twisted prongs of a railroad track, meant thereby to memorialize what happened and to signify that death trains operate no more.

Westerbork was a station and a camp. Originally a place for displaced Jews escaping from Germany or wherever they felt suddenly conscious of being Jewish and at great risk. Westerbork was a refugee camp, a safe place.  

But two years after the German invasion of the Netherlands, two years after the occupation began, Westerbork was transitioned to something else altogether. The Nazi SS took the place over, and on July 15, 1942, a passenger train--eventually cattle cars--left these tracks for a place on the German/Poland border, a place called Auschwitz. More than 55,000 Dutch Jews would take that trip, most all of them never to return. 

Our family visited Westerbork in 1991. I'd taken on the job of helping a Holocaust survivor write her story, and I wanted to see for myself some of the places that were most important to her during the German Occupation, when she and her fiancé operated in great danger as members of the Dutch Resistance. One of those places, a final destination, was a camp close to the German border and far from major cities, a transit camp named Westerbork. 

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and even if the descriptions were written in the Dutch language, the experience of the place was stunning--well, chilling. No occupied country lost as high a percentage of its Jewish population during the war, as did the Netherlands. Almost 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children left Westerbork on a track to death. Pictures like this don't require description.

We must have been there in the morning because later that day, just outside of Arnhem, we stopped as planned at the Dutch National Open-Air Museum, a sprawling community all its own, full of Dutch history--barns and bridges, shops and open houses where docents, dressed in the clothing of their time, were working at tasks, like blacksmithing, long departed from everyday Holland.

We'd separated for some unknown reason--mom and daughter were off somewhere on their own, as were our son and I. Seems to me we were in some kind of general merchandise store, the kind of place that just about every burg in northwest Iowa had until the necessary horsepower came in gasoline engines. Seems to me the place looked like the Newkirk Store. 

The plump docent wore an all-encompassing apron and a beard, as I remember. His shirt looked much like what I'd seen on men at Tulip Festival. The two of us wandered slowly, didn't beg attention or conversation until he opened it up with a question that surprised me. "You're Dutch, aren't you?" he said, pointing a bit with a wave of his hand.

"Well, yes," I told him, "but we're fifth generation Dutch-American." I was amazed that he'd called me out the way he did--I don't think I was conscious of "looking" Dutch. 

"And your name?" he said.

"Skkkhhhaap," I said, trying my best to wiggle my epiglottis into creating that unique lingual marker.

"That right?" he said. "You're Jewish."

I shook my head. 

"Schaap, in Holland, is a Jewish name." 

He explained it this way. When Jewish people immigrated to the Netherlands--which they did and had done for hundreds of years, the Dutch being more permissive than other countries--they were accepted as citizens if they would jump two hurdles: first, join the Dutch Reformed Church; and second, take a Dutch name.  "In the Netherlands, Jewish people often have very simple names--like Schaap, from 'sheep,' or Van Rotterdam or Van Amsterdam."

I don't think my son had quite made it to middle school back then. He was just a kid, and I may well be creating a story that wasn't there. But when I looked at him just then, when the Dutchman in the old general store told me we were Jewish, something of the reality of the transit camp at Westerbork, something of its horror and its shame, something of all of that, I think I saw in his eyes.

Some family vacation moments are blessedly memorable. I hope that is true for him in the story in the Newkirk Store.