A quiet victim

Paul Henderson writes about a quiet victim of the Nazi terror

by Paul Henderson 27th January 2017

I met Bart only once, more than forty years ago. He and his wife Jo were Dutch. He was my mother-in-law’s cousin and my wife’s godfather. I remember him, at their small house in Hengelo, as a quiet, kind man. During the second world war he was a prisoner in Buchenwald for four years.

Like most concentration camp survivors, Bart never talked about his experiences. However, soon after I met him, he sat down at a typewriter and recorded the experiences of his imprisonment. It was a closely typed sixty-page memoir, all the more moving because of the care with which it is written. Bart died two years after he had finished the memoir.