A ten-year-old boy with a bat
By Catrien Spijkerman
The camp where Jewish Eddy van Thijn is imprisoned, has been liberated. He is not allowed to go home though. In former concentration camps victims are being cared for while at the same time perpetrators are imprisoned; sometimes right alongside each other.
Every day, long lists of names are posted in the registration building of Camp Westerbork. And every day, along with all other prisoners of the concentration camp, Eddy van Thijn goes to check them. The war is over and the lists contain the names of the people who have been murdered in Auschwitz and other camps. Most of Eddy’s relatives did not survive. His grandparents’ names are also on the list. Only three days before they died in Auschwitz, they had written to him: ‘Hello darling, there will be a time when we shall go for walks and play together again.’
Westerbork might have been liberated, but Eddy and the 850 other released prisoners are not yet allowed to go home. Westerbork had functioned as a transit camp in the Netherlands from where prisoners were sent to extermination camps. This makes Eddy and the others ‘suspect’, because why hadn’t they been deported? An investigation is needed to make sure they hadn’t collaborated with the Nazis.
Still behind barbed wire
Eddy is a ten-year-old Jewish boy from Amsterdam. He has done anything but ‘consort with the Nazis’. During the war, he has been passed around like a parcel from one hiding place to another; eighteen in total. His barking asthmatic cough made it difficult to hide him though. Eventually, the resistance found him a suitable spot on a farm without any neighbours. But Eddy’s hiding place in a closet behind a closet was betrayed. That is how he ended up in Westerbork.
‘Dear father and mother,
I have been in Westerbork for three and a half months now. I am doing well. A few weeks ago we heard horrible shooting and that same afternoon the Canadians entered the camp. Later someone from the resistance came and told me that you were in Amsterdam and then I heard that Amsterdam and all of Holland had been liberated!!!!! Yesterday we had white bread for the first time.
Many kisses from Eddy, barrack 5’
All over Europe, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, who have ended up far from home because of deportation or forced labour, are stuck. Often they cannot return home because they no longer have one. They are labeled ‘displaced persons’ and the British and American Allies put them up in special camps where living conditions are mostly very poor. Quite often these are former concentration camps. After everything they have been through, Jewish people still find themselves behind barbed wire in overcrowded and filthy barracks. There is a lack of food, medical care and privacy. American envoy Earl G. Harrison, who is investigating the situation, concludes: ‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’
Shaved heads
While Eddy is waiting to be allowed to go home, the camp fills up with new residents: people who have collaborated with the enemy. They have been arrested on suspicion of committing war crimes for example, or for NSB membership. Nine thousand of them are to await their trials in Westerbork. Eddy sees the prisoners entering. Some of them are crying, some women have shaved heads. These are the actual people who betrayed him and all those other Jews. How many of the names on those lists in the registration building would be on their conscience?
Throughout Europe, concentration camps are rapidly being converted into internment camps for war criminals and traitors. But what happens in Westerbork is unique: the remaining Jews are to guard the new prisoners. There are simply not enough Domestic Armed Forces (former resistance fighters who help to maintain order after the liberation) to do the job.
Horrific memory
All of a sudden, the roles are reversed. On the very same spot where only a few days ago the Jews had to stand in line for roll call, are now the collaborators. Eddy witnesses how the new prisoners are bullied and spat on by their predecessors. The Jewish guards make them crawl long stretches while beating them and some prisoners are forced to eat their own excrement.
Due to lack of staff, ten-year-old Eddy is also handed a bat at some point. He is to gather wood with a small group of prisoners. ‘These people moved like shadows and begged me for food. I ignored it’, he would say years later. ‘I may have had a bat, but they could have easily overpowered me. It never even crossed my mind. It is a horrific memory.’
At least 89 detainees die during those first four months in Westerbork, officially due to diseases like dysentery. Three years later, the prime minister orders an investigation into the events. The conclusion is that the guards had tormented and abused defenceless people, sometimes using the very same methods as the Nazis did during the war.
Tireless
Eddy grows into Ed and becomes a prominent politician. He enters the House of Representatives for the social democrats, becomes party leader of the Labour Party (PvdA) and then Minister of the Interior. Eventually he ends up being the longest-serving postwar mayor of Amsterdam. Throughout his entire career, he remains committed to safeguarding equal opportunity and consolidating democracy. He tirelessly fights discrimination. His motivation for entering politics is to prevent people from ever being humiliated again. In an interview at the end of his career, he notes with tears in his eyes: ‘I have remained ten years old all my life.’ He passed away in 2021 at the age of 87.
