#Vught concentration camp

[dirjoh-blog]

The Holocaust in Three objects

The Flag Flags often evoke strong emotions and can symbolize a variety of sentiments and ideals. Here are some common emotions and concepts connected to flags: Patriotism: National flags often inspire a deep sense of pride and loyalty towards one’s country. They symbolize national identity and unity. Sacrifice: Many flags are associated with the sacrifices made by individuals for their…

[girlactionfigure]

Jan Kasper Klein was a Dutch gym teacher who hid seventeen Jews in his small home during the German occupation of Holland. 

Jan was born in the picturesque town of Delft, Holland in 1912 to a Christian family. Naturally athletic, Jan excelled in multiple sports as a child and as he grew older began to coach. After he completed his schooling, Jan became a high school gym teacher and gymnastics coach. He was longtime friends with Bob Denneboom, a Jewish diver who became Dutch champion of platform diving from the three meter springboard.

As Bob settled into Jan’s humble cottage, the Nazi deportation of Dutch Jews intensified. Bob had a large extended family who were in imminent danger of arrest. Despite the small size of Jan’s home, he invited Bob’s entire family to take refuge there. The Denneboom clan included Jan’s parents, sister and brother-in-law, and various cousins, fifteen people in all. Including Bob and Mischa, Jan was harboring seventeen Jews in a very quiet neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else’s business. He managed to prevent his neighbors from finding out what was going on by making sure his Jewish guests maintained complete silence. Some of them huddled in the house behind drawn curtains; others stayed in the attic and an additional secret hiding spot underneath the roof. The one giveaway was the large amount of bread people saw Jan carrying, so he told his neighbors that he was starting a breadcrumb business.

It was exceedingly difficult for eighteen people to live together in the small cottage, and Jan’s mother offered her home in a bombed-out section of the Hague as a second sanctuary. Several of the Jews traveled there in the dead of night and Mrs. Klein fed them and provided for their needs, as did Jan for the Jews he was hiding in Amsterdam. Jan forged relationships with members of the Dutch Resistance movement, and was able to obtain extra food ration cards to feed all the people in his care. 

Somehow, the Germans found out about the Dutch mother and son who were secretly sheltering Jews. On February 16, 1944, the Gestapo raided both Klein households. They arrested all seventeen Jews, as well as Jan and Mrs. Klein. In the chaos of the raid Bob Denneboom managed to escape, perhaps using his exceptional physical prowess to outrun the Nazis. Everybody else was taken to concentration camps. 

Bob’s parents, sister and brother-in-law, and other relatives were murdered in Auschwitz. Jan Klein was sent to Dachau, and his 65 year old mother went to a work camp in Vught, Holland. Thankfully, both Jan and his mother survived the war and returned to their homes. Of the seventeen Jews who were hidden by the Kleins, only three came back alive, including Roza Vos-Rijksman, who later married Bob Denneboom.

After the war, Jan went back to his quiet life as a gym teacher, and didn’t talk much about his heroic actions during the Nazi occupation. Bob and the other Jews saved by Jan told everyone they met about the generous Dutchman who opened his home and his heart to seventeen Jews, most of whom had been complete strangers to him before they moved into his small cottage. 

Jan Kasper Klein was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in 1974.

For hiding seventeen Jews, at great personal sacrifice, we honor Jan Kasper Klein – and his mother – as this week’s Thursday Heroes.

[feckcops]

The hidden racism that turned a Nazi concentration camp into a detention centre for Muslims

“Today, a national memorial exists at the site of the Vught concentration camp. The main building is a museum with exhibits on the history of the camp and Nazism in Europe. Outside are life-size reconstructions of the camp’s living quarters, watchtowers, and barbed-wire fences. Various components of the memorial commemorate those killed at Vught or murdered after passing through it. The final part of the memorial is a reflection room where several short films convey the message that you should not be a bystander when you see others needing help ...

“It is impossible not to notice that alongside one of the memorial’s walls is a much taller wall, topped with barbed wire and closed-circuit TV cameras. On the other side of that wall are prison buildings, their arrangement mirroring that of the memorial’s reconstructed camp buildings. The memorial, in fact, takes up only a small part of the original concentration camp site. A larger part is occupied by a functioning prison. If you look left from the memorial’s main entrance, the tall metal doors of the prison entrance are visible, flanked by lines of people waiting to visit inmates. Many are women wearing hijabs and niqabs, a result of the fact that the Vught prison includes a high-security unit where anyone suspected or convicted of being a terrorist or ‘Islamic radicaliser’ is automatically separated from other prisoners and held under especially punitive conditions. Because almost all of those imprisoned there are Muslims, the unit has come to be known informally as a ‘Muslim detention centre’.

“Dutch prison authorities opened the high-security unit in 2006. Prisoners held there are isolated and confined for up to 22 hours per day. One woman imprisoned there, who was eventually acquitted of all charges, spent two full stretches – one for ten consecutive weeks and the other for three – cut off from anyone else. This kind of isolation has been a focus of research for Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who writes that prisoners held in long-term solitary confinement suffer effects that ‘are analogous to the acute reactions suffered by torture and trauma victims’. Former United Nations special rapporteur on torture Juan E. Méndez has said that, based on the medical evidence, solitary confinement for longer than 15 days can amount to torture ...

“What happened at Vught in 1943 and 1944 and what happens there today are, of course, not equivalent. Yet neither are the uses to which the camp has been put in these two periods entirely separable. The Nazis sought the complete elimination of European Jewry; incarceration was a means to this end. The European and US governments that implemented a global ‘war on terror’ have a different aim. Their goal is the integration of Muslims into what they call ‘liberal’ society. What is regarded as the cultural identity of moderate Muslims is celebrated within a framework of diversity and inclusion. Extremist Muslims, on the other hand, have their mosques and community organisations closed down, their speech criminalised, their bank accounts frozen, their clothing regulated (as with the Dutch ban on wearing a niqab or burka in certain public spaces, introduced in 2019), even their citizenship cancelled. In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, entire countries were invaded, occupied, and destroyed.”

[valkyries-things]

SELMA VAN DE PERRE // RESISTANCE FIGHTER

“She is a Dutch-British resistance fighter. During WWII, she worked as a courier, a term that at the time acquired a specific connotation as “messenger of the resistance”. When her father was arrested in 1942 and taken to Camp Westerbork, Selma helped her mother and sister go into hiding in Eindhoven. Despite this, they were arrested in 1943 and Selma joined the “TD Group”, a Dutch resistance organisation. In June 1944, she was betrayed and arrested. She was interned as a political prisoner because officials did not known about her Jewish heritage. She was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp via Camp Vught. While interned, she was severely beaten. After her recovery, she applied for work in the production hall of Siemens and Halske AG. She was liberated in Ravensbruck, however she learned her parents and sister were murdered in Auschwitz and Sobibor.”

[msfbgraves]

Yeah, that's what the Dutch police said when rounding up Jewish (and other) people in hiding from those Nazis. And Dutch Rail when driving them to the first 'transit' concentration camps Vught, Amersfoort, Westerbork (next stop Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Dachau, Buchenwald...)

[convertgrapeling]

"A site built by the Nazis to carry out the genocide of Jews now serves as a “Muslim detention centre” where people are, in effect, tortured. The visitors to the memorial at Vught are literally bystanders to racist oppression taking place on another part of the site."

[realhist]

Jannetje Johanna Schaft was a Dutch resistance fighter during WW2. Born in 1920 in Haarlem, she was strongly influenced by her politically and religiously active parents.

In 1938, Schaft began studying law at the University of Amsterdam.

Despite the country’s neutrality in the growing war in Europe, German forces invaded and occupied the Netherlands in 1940.

For the first few years, the occupation was not especially oppressive. However, as the war dragged n, German control began to tighten.

In 1943, university students were required to swear allegiance to the occupation regime. Schaft, like many others, refused to do so and was forced to abandon her studies as a result.

Not long after leaving university she joined the Council of Resistance, one of the largest resistance organisations in the country.

Typically, female members of the resistance were given ‘less dangerous’ tasks such as acting as couriers. For Schaft, this was not enough. She demanded to be involved in the dirty work, the real stuff. She wanted to work with weapons.

Schaft frequently worked with Freddie and Truus Oversteegen to blow up railroad tracks and bridges with dynamite. The trio also got their hands really dirty, carrying out assassination operations on German soldiers. Perhaps most famously, they were not above using their feminine wiles to get to their targets. They would go to bars and taverns frequented by German soldiers, approach prospective targets and ask them if they wanted to go for a ‘stroll in the woods.’ Having lured the soldier out into the forest with the promise of sex, they then killed them.

At some point, Schaft was seen at the site of an assassination, with witnesses describing a ‘girl with red hair.’ This moniker was listed among the occupation’s most wanted.

In 1944, Schaft’s identity was inadvertently revealed by a fellow resistance fighter to Nazi agents posing as nurses. Her parents were sent to Vught concentration camp, but Schaft refused to surrender herself to the authorities, though she did cease resistance work for a time.

Eventually, her parents were released from the camp and Schaft subsequently returned to the resistance.

Having resumed her assassination and sabotage operations, Jannetje Schaft was once again a wanted woman. Knowing this, Schaft dyed her distinctive hair black and wore glasses in an effort to conceal her identity.

For a time, it worked.

However, in 1945, she was arrested at a military checkpoint for having secret resistance documents in her possession. She was taken to a prison in Amsterdam, where she was brutally interrogated, including torture and left in solitary confined for an extended period of time. Though Schaft herself refused to turn on her comrades, another resistance fighter identified her by the red roots of her hair, which had begun to grow out.

In the last months of the war, the occupation regime and the Dutch resistance had agreed to cease executions and assassinations. Despite this, in April Schaft was taken to the dunes of Overveen, where she was shot dead.

She was 24 years old and the war ended just three weeks later.

According to legend, one of her two executioners shot but only wounded her, prompting Schaft to taunt “Ik schiet beter!” (“I shoot better!). The other executioner then fired the fatal shot. It is likely that this story is apocryphal but it does seem to capture her character.

[architectureofdoom]

The former concentration camp Vught (1942-44), adapted and renamed to Woonoord Lunetten in 1951. It was used to house Moluccan people that were evacuated from the former Dutch East Indies.

[theannecordeliashirley]

I’d like to take a moment to talk about one of the biggest role models in my life: Betsie ten Boom.

She is more obscure than her sister, Corrie ten Boom, Ravensbruck survivor turned evangelical. Yes, most Christians know of Corrie ten Boom, but nearly all of them forget about her older sister.

Betsie ten Boom was born with pernicious anemia which doctors said would kill her if she were to bear children; so, at a young age she decided never to marry and instead devoted her life to helping children from broken homes, children with mental illnesses, and spreading the Gospel. 

When WWII began, Betsie and Corrie lived with their watchmaker father “Haarlem’s Grand Old Man”. They utilized the unusual architecture of their home on the Barteljorisstraat to hide the Jews from the Nazis. There system worked successfully until a fellow Dutchman named Jan Vogel betrayed them to the Gestapo. The entire family was placed in a Dutch prison for many months. There, Haarlem’s Grand Old Man contracted pneumonia and died, leaving Corrie and Betsie wracked with grief. 

Shortly after their father’s death, the ten Boom sisters were transferred to Vught, a work camp in the Netherlands. They remained there for several months past there supposed release date. Then, one day, they were transferred again, this time to Ravensbruck where the motto was “Arbeit Macht Frei” *work makes free*. 

Betsie’s health caught up to her there. Months of malnourishment, no sleep and such close quarters with other ill women caused her to contract what experts believe may have been tuberculosis. But her sister writes that even then, Betsie was serving the other women before herself. 

It is evident that miracles were performed in Ravensbruck as a result of Betsie’s unwavering faith and selflessness. They had been able to smuggle in a Bible and medicine beneath Betsie’s sweater and the medicine lasted weeks longer than it should have.

Even as Corrie struggled with her faith during those hard months, Betsie never wavered, thanking God even for the lice in accordance with 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 where it says ,”Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” 

Sadly, Betsie passed away just days before Corrie was released due to a clerical error. In a way, Betsie’s early death was a blessing in disguise as the next week all women over the age of 50 were to be gassed. Before she died, Betsie had three visions about what would happen after their respective releases. 

1. They would be released before the New Year (1945)

2. They would make a home for former prisoners to recover

3. They would turn an old concentration camp into a place where they could teach people to love again

In short, Betsie ten Boom was a woman who trusted God completely in everything she did. She was a woman who knew that God’s plan is perfect and no matter how hard things get on earth, there is a perfect reason. And in addition, she was a servant. Even while her own suffering was great, she helped those around her first.

That is the woman I want to be. A woman truly after God’s own heart.

[historical-babes]

Hannie Schaft (1920-1945).

Dutch communist resistance fighter and martyr.

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From a young age, Schaft discussed politics and social justice with her family, which encouraged her to pursue law and become a human rights lawyer.

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Schaft's resistance work started with small acts. First, she would steal ID cards for Jewish residents (including her friends). Upon leaving university, she joined the Raad van Verzet or "Council of Resistance," a resistance movement that had close ties to the Communist Party of the Netherlands. Rather than act as a courier, Schaft wanted to work with weapons. She was responsible for sabotaging and assassinating various targets. She carried out attacks on Germans, Dutch Nazis, collaborators and traitors. She learned to speak German fluently and became involved with German soldiers.

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Schaft did not, however, accept every job. When asked to kidnap the children of a Nazi official she refused. If the plan had failed, the children would have to be killed, and Schaft felt that was too similar to the Nazis' acts of terror. When seen at the location of a particular assassination, Schaft was identified as "the girl with the red hair." Her involvement led "the girl with the red hair" to be placed on the Nazis' most wanted list.

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When one of Schaft's friends and fellow Resistance workers was injured in an attempted assassination effort, he mistakenly gave her name to Dutch Nazi nurses disguised as Resistance workers. To force Schaft to confess, German authorities arrested her parents and sent them to the Vught concentration camp. The distress of this situation forced Schaft to cease resistance work temporarily; her parents were eventually released.

Upon recovery, Schaft dyed her hair black to hide her identity and returned to Resistance work. She once again contributed to assassinations and sabotage, as well as courier work, and the transportation of illegal weapons and the dissemination of illegal newspapers.

.

She was eventually arrested at a military checkpoint in Haarlem on 21 March 1945, while distributing the illegal communist newspaper de Waarheid, which was a cover story. She was transporting secret documentation for the Resistance. After much interrogation, torture, and solitary confinement, Schaft was identified by the roots of her red hair by her former colleague Anna Wijnhoff.

Schaft was murdered by Dutch Nazi officials on April 17, 1945.

[arc-hus]

Concentration Camp Museum, Lunettenlaan, Vught - Felix Claus

https://www.felixclaus.com/en/projects/

[dirjoh-blog]

Murdered in Vught

Vught Concentration Camp, also known as Kamp Vught or Herzogenbusch Concentration Camp, was a Nazi concentration camp located near the town of Vught in the Netherlands. It was the only SS concentration camp in occupied Northwest Europe. In total, approximately 32,000 people were imprisoned in the camp for a short or longer period between January 1943 and September 1944. At least 749 children,…

[girlactionfigure]

Heroic Dutch Gym Teacher: Jan Klein

Saved Champion Diver

Jan Klein was a Dutch gym teacher who hid seventeen Jews in his small home during the German occupation of Holland. 

Jan was born in the picturesque town of Delft, Holland in 1912. Naturally athletic, Jan excelled in multiple sports as a child and as he grew older began to coach. After he completed his schooling, Jan became a high school gym teacher and gymnastics coach. He was longtime friends with Bob Denneboom, a Jewish diver who became Dutch champion of platform diving from the three meter springboard.

After the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Bob went into hiding at his family’s cottage in a remote area of North Holland. After safely avoiding detection for two years, Bob’s safe haven became safe no more after the Nazis began evacuating the entire area. Desperate to avoid deportation, Bob contacted his old friend Jan Klein, who invited Bob to move into his small home in Amsterdam. Jan was already sheltering another Jew, Mischa Elkan, originally from Latvia. 

Bob Denneboom

As Bob settled into Jan’s home, the Nazi deportation of Dutch Jews intensified. Bob had a large extended family who were in imminent danger of arrest. Despite the small size of Jan’s home, he invited Bob’s entire family to take refuge there. The Denneboom clan included Jan’s parents, sister and brother-in-law, and various cousins, fifteen people in all. Including Bob and Mischa, Jan was harboring seventeen Jews in a very quiet neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else’s business. He managed to prevent his neighbors from finding out what was going on by making sure his Jewish guests maintained complete silence. Some of them huddled in the house behind drawn curtains; others stayed in the attic and an additional secret hiding spot underneath the roof. The one giveaway was the large amount of bread people saw him carrying, so he told people that he was starting a breadcrumb business. 

It was exceedingly difficult for eighteen people to live together in the humble cottage, and Jan’s mother offered her home in a bombed-out section of the Hague as a second sanctuary. Several of the Jews traveled there in the dead of night and Mrs. Klein fed them and provided for their needs, as did Jan for the Jews he was hiding in Amsterdam. Jan forged relationships with members of the Dutch Resistance movement, and was able to obtain extra food ration cards to feed all the people in his care. 

Somehow, the Germans found out about the Dutch mother and son who were secretly sheltering Jews. On February 16, 1944, the Gestapo raided both Klein households. They arrested all seventeen Jews, as well as Jan and Mrs. Klein. In the chaos of the raid Bob Denneboom managed to escape, perhaps using his exceptional physical prowess to outrun the Nazis. Everybody else was taken to concentration camps. 

Bob’s parents, sister and brother-in-law, and other relatives were murdered in Auschwitz. Jan Klein was sent to Dachau, and his 65 year old mother went to a work camp in Vught, Holland. Thankfully, both Jan and his mother survived the war and returned to their homes. Of the seventeen Jews who were hidden by the Kleins, only three came back alive, including Roza Vos-Rijksman, who later married Bob Denneboom.

After the war, Jan went back to his quiet life as a gym teacher, and didn’t talk much about his heroic actions during the Nazi occupation. Bob and the other Jews saved by Jan told everyone they met about the generous Dutchman who opened his home and his heart to seventeen Jews, most of whom had been complete strangers to him before they moved into his small cottage. 

Jan Kasper Klein was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in 1974.

For hiding seventeen Jews, at great personal sacrifice, we honor Jan Klein – and his mother – as this week’s Thursday Heroes.

[victorysp]

 King Willem-Alexander during the opening of the renewed remembrance center of "Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch", the National Monument Camp Vught. The Museum of National Monument Camp Vught has been renovated and Willem-Alexander was given a tour of the new exhibition. He also spoke with former prisoners and volunteers. Nov. 27, 2019.

Camp Vught was a concentration camp of the German occupier during the Second World War.

Queen Beatrix opened the National Monument in 1990 and Prince Bernhard was in 2002 at the opening of the new remembrance center and the refurbished site.

📷 Vorsten

[valiantarcher]

When my friend Freddie heard [that Diet had been summoned by a soldier], she knew I was going to my hearing. The two of us had this spiritual tie, and we had confided some things to each other. We knew and trusted each other so much that as soon as she heard that call, she pretended that she had diarrhea and flew toward me on her way to the toilet. While she was passing me, she whispered, "Willie, I'm going to storm the gates of heaven for you." And off she went to the bathroom. I followed that officer, but what she'd said hit me very hard. "I'm going to storm the gates of heaven for you." It was such a great comfort to me that she wasn't going to be merely praying — she was storming!

Diet Eman, Things We Couldn’t Say.

Diet (under the name Willie Laarman) was imprisoned in Vught Concentration Camp during the summer of 1944 for having a false ID. Diet was heavily involved with the Dutch Resistance and was wanted under her real name for her work. Diet met Freddie Ponger (a young Catholic woman, imprisoned for unstated reasons) at Vught and she became one of the very few people Diet trusted there.

[spiritualdirections]

Remarkable Catholic scientist turns 100 today

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From Stephen Barr, President, Society of Catholic Scientists

On August 29, 2018, the eminent physicist, Clemens C. J. Roothaan, who is a member of the Society of Catholic Scientists, will celebrate his 100th birthday.  As a physicist he is most famous for developing a method for calculating atomic and molecular wave functions that leads to the so-called “Hartree-Fock-Roothaan equations.”  He also played an important part in the development of supercomputers. 

   Clemens C. J. Roothaan was born in Nijmegen, Holland. His studies in electrical engineering at  Delft University of Technology were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He and his brother were sent by the Nazis to the Vught concentration camp for involvement with the Dutch Resistance. Later they were transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. Near the end of the war the inmates of that camp, including the Roothaan brothers, were sent on a “death march” which his brother did not survive. 

   After the war, Clemens emigrated to the United States and studied with Prof. Robert S. Mulliken, receiving his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1950. He remained at the University of Chicago, where for many years he held the position of Louis Block Professor of Chemistry and Physics, retiring in 1988.  From 1962 to 1968 he was also Director of the University of Chicago Computation Center. After his retirement from University of Chicago in 1988, he worked for two decades for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, contributing to the development of the mathematical coprocessor routines for the Itanium chip. 

   Prof. Roothaan is a man of deep Catholic faith.  He returned to the practice of his faith after 67 years on November 23th, 2014.  November 23th is a special day for Prof. Roothaan for two other reasons as well.  It is the feast day of his patron St. Clement of Rome, and the birthday of his great-great-great uncle, Jan Philipp Roothaan, who was the Superior General of the Jesuit order from 1829 to 1853.  A year after Prof. Roothaan’s return to the Church, his beloved wife of more than six decades, Judith, who was Jewish but not a believer, came to faith and was received into the Catholic Church.  Prof. Roothaan is a parishioner at the Shrine of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest, which worships in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. 

   On August 27th, the president of the Society of Catholic Scientists visited Prof. Roothaan at his home near the University of Chicago and presented him with a letter from the Society congratulating him on his 100th birthday and informing him that his intentions will be prayed for by members of the Society on his birthday and at all the Gold Masses that will be celebrated this coming November.  Please remember Clemens Roothaan and his intentions in your prayers on August 29th.