A quiet victim

Paul Henderson writes about a quiet victim of the Nazi terror

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.

Nazi atrocities

A few years later my mother-in-law, Maria Bruce, who had moved to live in England when she married, translated the memoir into English. She typed it out with three carbon copies and these were passed round her immediate family. Two years ago, in order that the document could be made available to more relatives, my wife Barbara and I decided to word process the memoir and add photographs.

Like millions of other people, I have always sought to understand the mentality of the Nazis who designed the policy of extermination and cruelty. My father, who was involved in improving Anglo-German understanding in the immediate post-war period, wrote his doctorate on the German educationalist Adolf Reichwein, a member of the underground resistance movement who was executed in 1944. From an early age, therefore, I was aware of the Nazi atrocities and their implications for Germany. Reading KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann, which was recently published, reawakened my interest. It sets out with authority and empathy the institutionalisation of Nazi cruelty.

At one level Bart’s story was not unusual. An engineering student, he joined the Ordedienst (OD), which was part of the resistance movement. He was arrested on trumped-up charges, but probably because the Dutch police and their German masters got to know about his membership of the OD. In his memoir Bart draws attention to the naivety and carelessness of Dutch resisters.

Acts of generosity

Bart, to begin with, was kept in Holland. He was taken first to the German prison in Scheveningen, nicknamed Orange Hotel: ‘On arrival we experienced for the first time the German methods of intimidating – by shouting, hitting and kicking.’ In March 1942 Bart and ninety-four other members of OD were transferred to the concentration camp in Amersfoort. Here the treatment of prisoners was of a different order, albeit not comparable to that in the German camps.

Many prisoners died in the severe winter of 1941-42. Bart witnessed acts of generosity by one prisoner to another, notably the sharing of the meagre bread ration. He also observed hardship and suffering: ‘The Russian prisoners of war, about a hundred, were by far the worst off… They were skeletons, some still with a comrade on their backs. All had disappeared by the end of March.’

Most of the OD prisoners were executed. Bart and fifteen other ‘separated ones’ were spared and driven to Buchenwald. He had to get used to a tough regime immediately, which was ruthlessly overseen by SS guards supported by Kapos (prisoners who were given positions of responsibility such as being in charge of a block or hut). Almost all the work units were controlled by communists. Bart quickly realised that ‘a rigid, self-governing society was created in which the guards left practically everything to the prisoners themselves’.

Friendships

Allocation to the work units was a crucial factor in enabling a prisoner to survive. Bart started off badly because he was put in the bricklaying gang, which was nearly as bad as the stone breaking and digging units: up at 4.45am for morning exercises and standing on the parade ground by 6am.

The outdoor work units were hard and relentless. Bart recalls that they were working soon after 6.30am: ‘Suddenly, when I was fetching bricks from a pile a little further on, I discovered that one could see the clock in the tower above the porch. It was 7.30am. Since we started our morning exercises, I felt as if I had been on the go for a whole day.’ There were roll calls morning and evening and all too often the prisoners had to watch vicious beatings and ‘the black smoke from the chimney of the crematorium’.

One thing that helped Bart retain his morale were the friendships he made. This is something noted by other survivors (see, for example, Viktor Frankls’ account of his time in Auschwitz – Man’s Search For Meaning). You sense Bart’s joy when he meets up with someone he had known in Scheveningen or Amersfoort, and in Buchenwald he became close friends with several other Dutch prisoners and one or two French ones.

Survival

Exceptionally, he received a food parcel that had been sent by his parents to the Dutch ambassador in Stockholm, who arranged for it to go to the Swedish embassy in Berlin. ‘As far as I know, this was the first food parcel for a Dutchman and possibly for any non-German prisoner. On the Sunday about ten of us made a feast of the cheese, tinned fish and other highly-valued foodstuffs.’ Later, prisoners were allowed to receive parcels – some were stolen on arrival by the high status prisoners, or by the SS.

It was good if a prisoner could have spells in the camp’s infirmary. The food was slightly better and it was a chance to rest. Bart was in the infirmary three times, usually for a week, but in 1944 he was there for six weeks being treated for scarlet fever.

Bart also had short spells in one or other of the sub-camps, Dora and Laura. He wrote: ‘The words “Dora” and “Laura” had the same ring in Buchenwald as “plague” and “cholera” had in the Middle Ages.’ Bart was moved around for work reasons. The SS realised that his engineering skills and knowledge could be put to use and he was made to work in factories.

Much of the work was linked, directly or indirectly, with the production of armaments and Bart was alert to the dilemma this presented. ‘The conclusion that everyone came to was that one’s chance of survival was to seize one’s opportunity to work inside a factory with a roof over one’s head instead of to perish in building new factories.’ The prisoners worked twelve hour shifts, day and night. When working on electrical apparatus, Bart and another prisoner had the job of inspecting pieces of the apparatus. They became inventive at saying that some of the pieces were defective. These pieces had to be returned to a factory elsewhere in Germany. As a result, production was delayed. It was small, undramatic sabotage.

Memories

As the end of the war approached conditions in the camp worsened, as did discipline. The machine guns of the watchtowers were now trained on the camp itself. The water supply had been damaged as a result of Allied bombing. Bart and other prisoners were sent for a short time to Ravensbrück. When he eventually reached home one senses that the memory of his time in Buchenwald was still too searing: the writing of his homecoming takes up only two pages of the memoir.

The experience of Buchenwald affected Bart profoundly for the rest of his life. He begins his memoir by explaining why he had decided to write it: ‘There are still so many memories, never spoken of, which haunt me, some in minute detail… To talk about them after so many years is, obviously, not really possible.’ The memoir is proof that eventually he was able to speak of the memories.

Many people’s values are close to those held by Quakers. I think Bart was one of them. He had what Stephen Allott describes in Quaker faith & practice as the ‘still small voice barely audible amid the turbulence of earthquake, wind and fire’ (26.74).

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