Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 in Westerbork
I had never visited a concentration camp. We arrived at Westerbork without any preconceived notions, open to almost everything. To almost everything except for what I found. I expected, perhaps, a scream, a wound, a smell, a different silence. There are spaces of memory where it seems you can still hear the heartbeat of those who lived there. In Westerbork, I did not feel any of that. Trees, grass, paths, silence. A space so clean and pleasant that it seemed like a bucolic place to go with children to spend a Sunday evening.
Westerbork is in the north of the Netherlands, on the way to Groningen, far from the big cities, in a territory that was sparsely populated at the time. The Dutch government had established there in 1939 a camp for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The following year, the occupation arrived. The place, remote and discreet, would end up converted into the Judendurchgangslager Westerbork: transit camp for Jews. A bureaucratic expression, almost innocent. In reality, a waiting room for death.
One day in August 1942, fifty-year-old Edith Stein arrived there. Born in 1891 into a Jewish family in Breslau, she had studied philosophy and had been a student of Edmund Husserl, one of the great figures of phenomenology. Being a woman had hindered her academic career; Nazi antisemitism would eventually make it impossible. She had studied consciousness, empathy, the human being. The reading of Teresa of Ávila was decisive in her conversion to Catholicism. She entered the Carmel and adopted the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
I tried to imagine Edith Stein walking around there. It was not easy. The barracks had disappeared. The last one was demolished in 1971. Vegetation occupied the space and the camp gradually faded away until, in 1992, the traces of what no longer existed were marked on the ground. They wanted to preserve the silence and prevent a reconstruction from turning memory into scenography. But perhaps they cleaned the wound so much that they ended up erasing the scar.
Edith Stein and her sister Rosa had sought refuge in the Netherlands. They were arrested and taken to Westerbork. From there they departed for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered. John Paul II would canonize Edith in 1998. The consideration of her martyrdom sparked debate: she was a Catholic nun, but the Nazis had arrested and deported her because she was Jewish.
Two years later, another life was walking towards the same place. On August 4, 1944, they discovered in Amsterdam the hiding place of Anne Frank, her sister Margot, her parents and four other people. Anne was fifteen years old. For two years she had written down her thoughts, fears, arguments, dreams and that extraordinary adolescent discovery of the world and of herself.
Four days later she was in Westerbork. Since she had been arrested while hiding, she was considered a punishment case and locked in the penal barracks number 67.
The machinery that had led her there did not speak only German. Dutch police participated in the arrests of Jews; civil servants administered records; marechaussees participated in the surveillance, and the Dutch railways, in the transports. The occupiers directed the deportation. The train ended up entering the camp itself. It was no longer necessary to lead the deportees to an outside station. The bureaucracy had perfected the journey. On September 3, 1944, the last transport to Auschwitz left from Westerbork. 1,019 people were traveling on it. Anne, Margot, and their parents were among them.
Today an interrupted track reminds us of those trains. But what can a teenager arriving at Westerbork today understand without knowing this history? Trees, grass, open spaces, shapes that indicate disappeared barracks. Survivors could look at that empty meadow and see the camp there because they carried it within them. We cannot. The north wind has erased its traces.
A theatrical reconstruction of the horror is not necessary. Neither reproduced screams, nor figures, nor a scenography of death. But an authentic barrack was a document. A fence, a latrine, a bunk, a watchtower were documents. When they disappear, a plaque can hardly restore what the eyes could have understood. More than one hundred thousand Jews, Sinti and Roma were deported from Westerbork.
Days later I walked through the streets of Zwolle. On the sidewalks I found –numerous– small brass plaques: the Stolpersteine. “Here lived…”. A name. A date of birth. A deportation. Auschwitz. Sobibor. To read them you have to stop and bow your head. There are no screams. There is no scenery. There is the memory and dignity of a person.
Westerbork is now facing a new transformation. This could be the opportunity to return to the camp what it has lost. Not to manufacture a darker landscape, but to make visible the people, the spaces, the distances, the overcrowding, the barracks, the barbed wire, and the train. To make it understood that Anne slept here, that Edith Stein passed through here, and that tens of thousands of men, women, and children waited here for their name on a list.
I found a green landscape beaten by the north wind, a disguised landscape. I went there with my daughter Marta and it was she who chose the title of this text. She told me: On September 1, 1939, Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 was playing on the Polish radio, when the first German bombs fell on Warsaw, the war had just begun. Now, I wonder what piece will play on the radio when the bombs start falling on us again.
