Posts Tagged ‘Holocaust’

The following is from Holocaust survivor Anita Dittman’s book Trapped in Hitler’s Hell. Anita was a young Christian Jew in Germany when World War II began. It was her faith in Christ, and the Lord’s mercy, that sustained her during the war years, but she (along with all other Jews in Germany at that time) was stripped of something that most North Americans have always had … freedom.

From Trapped in Hitler’s Hell

“They’re here!” I gasped as I burst through the door. “The passports and visas are here.”

“Oh, thank You, Jesus,” Mother exclaimed softly. Even my sister, Hella, showed unusual emotion. Mother tore open the envelope and looked at the enclosed official forms, but her wonderful anticipation diminished as she read them. Her joy turned to a painful realization that only one of us had received a visa and a passport.

“Only Hella’s papers are here,” Mother sighed. “But they insist that your’s and mine will be here by the end of August. At least Hella can go free, Anita. We must rejoice for her and trust God some more for you and me. We can meet Hella in London.”

“Mother, Jesus won’t let us down,” I replied. “Pastor Hornig says we please Him the most when we have faith in Him. See what an opportunity we have to have faith in Jesus, Mother?”

The corners of her mouth smiled weakly as she set Hella’s paper aside. “I’m learning to trust Him, Anita.”

Since Hella would leave on August 31st, we frantically made preparations for her departure. Pastor Hornig gave her some money, surely taking food away from his family’s table. We wondered if God was delivering Hella first because her faith was so small that she could not endure any more waiting.

A faint signal on our radio from an underground station told us Hitler was on the move and might invade Poland any day. During the week, we’d been having mock blackouts in Breslau, which according to Mother spelled war. Without a doubt there would be a countdown from freedom for us before the war began. Only our trust in Jesus kept us calm.

August was slipping away so quickly, with no word yet. Each day’s mail brought only disappointment. Thus, the day of Hella’s departure produced a mixture of emotions: We were happy for her, but also conscious that our own papers had not arrived. As we bid her farewell, our tears of joy for Hella were mingled with tears of fear and confusion.

“Hella, you must thank Jesus for your freedom,” I insisted. “He has worked a miracle for you.” Hella nodded, but her heart had not mellowed toward Christ.

“We will meet you in London soon,” Mother said as she embraced Hella, “and our prayers will be with you every day. Pastor Hornig’s contact in London can be trusted. You do whatever they say, but don’t send any mail to us here in Germany. We’ll probably meet you within a month.”

The antiquated train gave a sharp whistle. Our goodbyes were short, for we were sure we would soon be reunited. Pushing forward to board the train were hundreds of frightened, fleeing people–people thankful for a new lease on life, but riddled with fear for loved ones being left behind–sometimes their whereabouts being unknown.

We all embraced one more time, and Hella turned and boarded, waving an enthusiastic goodbye to us. I took Mother’s hand as we watched the rest of the crowd board. A few minutes later the train jerked forward, then it chugged away until it was out of sight, but we could see its thick, black smoke dotting the horizon.

The next day Germany invaded Poland. Also on that day the German borders were closed, and Germany thereafter refused all mail from England. Our visas and passports were to come from England; they were in the mail but never made it to us. Two days later, on September 3, 1939, England and France declared war on Germany.

Mother and I were trapped in Hitler’s hell. But the trap had begun to close for us six years earlier, when I was a small child. . . .

The dance was beautifully performed by six-year-old Anita Dittman. Her skill and grace at ballet far exceed her years. Nevertheless, we Germans no longer wish to be entertained by a Jew.

Mother read the review to me from a morning paper she had found lying on the street. Her words, though spoken in hushed tones, reverberated throughout the house. They fell on my unbelieving ears and caused an instant flood of tears–tears of a child too young to grasp the meaning of such a word as anti-Semitism. All I knew was that my dream of growing up to become the world’s best ballet dancer had just been shattered. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand why we were being persecuted. Jews, along with communists and other anti-Nazis, were not allowed to question it. Soon we would have only one freedom: to die. (taken from chapter one, Trapped in Hitler’s Hell)

Today, Anita (83 year old) lives in Minnesota and still speaks to groups about her experience during WWII.

News Reporting on the Flotilla incident:

  New York Times: “An Assault Cloaked in Peace”

Moriel:  “Moriel Response to Israeli Blockade Action

Honest Reporting: “Flotilla Battle Unleashes Anti-Israel Wave”

News 4 the Masses: “Netanyahu Speaks on Flotilla“

  From CrossTalk: “Dean of White House Press Corps says: Israel should get the H*** out of Palestine (go “home” to Germany)

16-yr old “Daniel” confronts lion’s den to stand for the honor of Israel

Flotilla Choir presents: We Con the World 

LTRP Note: To see why the Jews should not go “home” to Germany, read Trapped in Hitler’s Hell and Things We Couldn’t Say by two women who saw and lived to tell.

This week, Diet Eman turns 90. Seventy years ago, Diet was a young Christian woman living in Holland when Hitler invaded her country. She watched in horror as her fellow Jewish countrymen were increasingly persecuted by the occupying Nazis. Like many others in Holland, such as Corrie ten Boom, Diet knew she could not passively stand by and do nothing to help save the lives of the targeted Jews in Hitler’s final solution to annihilate millions. Diet joined with other Christians who were going underground – By the end of the war, Diet’s particular group, Group Hein, (consisting of a number of Diet’s young peers including her fiance) was responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of Jews. Sadly, many of her co-resistance workers did not survive the war. Diet did, and years later she wrote her story. Lighthouse Trails was privileged a couple years ago to publish our own edition of Things We Couldn’t Say, Diet’s amazing experience during the Holocaust. Today, we learned that Diet is turning 90 years old this week. Below is an excerpt from her book:

July 1941
Last night we walked past the synagogue. Horrible: on the doors was written with large letters “Jude Suss.” On the pillars a swastika and a large V and horribly drawn Jewish faces. In the street on the boarded-up shop windows, “Jew,” “Pest Jude.” How long still, O Lord?

September 16, 1941
Yesterday the paper had a “short” summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still allowed “in their homes and in the streets!”…

There came a day when my Jewish friend Herman, who worked with me in the bank in The Hague, began to understand that for him, as a Jew, life could not go on in the same way anymore. He thus became the first Jewish person that we helped during the Occupation.

First the Jews weren’t allowed on the trams anymore, or on the buses, in parks, or in shops. Rules like that were printed in the newspapers, and they were displayed on the trams and in shop windows. It was an enforced limitation of freedom for Jews in all kinds of ways. Next, Jews weren’t allowed to visit most places in the city anymore; they had to stick to their own Jewish areas and shops. And though Herman and his family did not live in the Jewish area of the city, they, like all Jews, were no longer allowed to visit non-Jewish people.

[from Diet's diary] May 6, 1942 Seventy-two Dutch men have been executed. From last Saturday till Tuesday, six-thousand people have been arrested. Ex-military, pastors, all people of the first and second chamber [the Dutch parliament], etc., etc.

The worst is, I remain so stone cold. Does this war make you an “alive-dead person”? Is it not possible to remain yourself in this chaos? How long still?…

The next law the Germans made was that non-Jews could have nothing at all to do with Jews. Even after that, my mother and father wouldn’t have minded Herman’s coming over, but at that point he did not want to endanger them. Actually, the Germans might have punished my family a little bit for breaking the rules; but Herman would have gotten into major trouble. My parents loved him, but suddenly he couldn’t come anymore.

Much of what had preceded the Jewish persecution had seemed an annoyance to most of us–no display of the royal colors, prohibitions against listening to the BBC–and for the most part we simply put up with it for a while. No one liked the restrictive laws, but in many people’s eyes these relatively trifling laws were something we could tolerate. But when signs and notices suddenly appeared saying that the Jews had to leave their homes and could not live near us because, as the signs said, they were “infectious” (the Germans called them lice and rats and all kinds of names), when they were told they had to leave their homes in the Netherlands completely, then we stopped putting up with the injustices.

The Germans explained to us that the Jews were to be transported to East Germany from all the other European countries. There they would live only with each other, and that way they could harm only each other. When it started to go into effect, we knew we could simply not tolerate this horrible plan. We knew we had to do something.

According to Hitler, we were the great ones–the people with blond hair and blue eyes, the Aryan race. The “Jewish scum,” as the Germans put it, had to be quarantined, rounded up, and separated from the decent, blue-eyed people of what he thought was the super race…. And they were beginning to implement this kind of policy.

At first, the Jews would get notices at their homes that they had to report to such and such an address on a particular night, say, after curfew. They were to report to schools, for instance, where the Germans gathered all of them and took them away in trucks. Or the Jews were told they had to go to the railroad stations, and they would show up, very scared. The Germans always did it after the curfew hours so the rest of us wouldn’t see what was going on….

[A]t one point, my friend Herman’s family got their notice to report. Like everyone else, Herman was instructed to take only one suitcase, small enough to carry…. The Jews had to leave behind almost everything of sentimental value to them personally, not to mention goods of dollars-and-cents value. And they had no choice but to report; they couldn’t just throw away the summons.

July 21, 1942
A lot has happened again: the Jews are walking with their yellow stars on, are not allowed outside after 8 p.m., are not allowed to visit non-Jews, some streets are forbidden to them, etc., etc.

From Amsterdam many were sent to–??? Many are committing suicide!
O God, don’t You see that they are touching the apple of Your eye? Is it still not enough?
O let us, in the midst of all these things which drive us crazy, still remember that You are the ruler of everything and that the punishment You will give them for these things will be more just than all things we think of to punish them….

Please teach us Christians now to be true Christians and to put into practice what we confess, especially to these Jews. O Lord, make an end to all this, only You can do it. We know that You give strength according to our cross, but it is getting to be so very heavy, Lord.

Herman wasn’t working at the bank anymore at that time because he was not allowed to take the tram, the bus, or anything, and he was not allowed to enter that area of the city. So he asked me to come to meet him when he got his summons, because Jews were not allowed to visit non-Jews.

“If you were me, would you go?” Herman asked.

“I don’t think so,” I told him…

Herman’s parents were middle class; his father was a decent man with a good government job. His parents really believed that this whole thing would only last a year. They figured the Germans would place them somewhere in Eastern Europe for a little while, a place where they might have to live a little more simply than they were accustomed to living at home. And then, when it was over, they could come back. That’s what many people thought–Jews and non-Jews. Nobody thought they would be exterminated in gas chambers. Therefore, many of them went as meekly as sheep to their deaths.

German Jews who had lived from 1933 to 1937 or 1938 in Germany had seen how the Nazi system developed, had experienced Kristallnacht, and had fled to the Netherlands in the late 1930s. Many of those people had committed suicide during the German invasion of the Netherlands. The night Hitler invaded Holland–and in the five days of war after the invasion–there was no place left for them to run: Belgium was overrun, and Spain was pro-Nazi. There was no place for them to go but the North Sea….

Herman was only a year older than I, and we thought of the possibility that what was really happening was far worse than anyone had imagined. We thought about those suicides, and we considered Hitler capable of anything.

[T]hat evening when I saw Hein, I asked him, “What do you think, should Herman go?”
“You remember what the German Jews did,” he said “They committed suicide.” So I said to Hein [Diet's fiance'], “You say he shouldn’t report, but what can he do? If he shouldn’t go there, what else is there?”

And that moment was the real beginning of our Resistance work. Hein immediately said he knew plenty of Christian farmers around Holk–in the area of the Netherlands called The Veluwe.
“Any of those farmers I know around Nijkerk,” he said, “any of them we ask will take Herman. He can work there on the farm.”

The whole business grew so fast that within two or three weeks we had over sixty people who wanted places out in the country, in The Veluwe. Sixty Jews in two weeks, and that was just the beginning. Hein … placed many Jews on the farms around that little town. But the list of Jewish people who wanted to hide kept growing….

At first we thought that was all we had to do: simply help the Jews who wanted to be helped when they began to understand what might happen to them. But we immediately learned that if we were to move these Jewish people out to the country, we would have to get them false identification cards. It was simply too risky to put them on trains when they were carrying IDs which were all marked with that big “J” and which the Germans required, to indicate the holder was Jewish….

By 1943 the group we worked with needed over eight hundred cards every month. The men from the knokploeg did that work, and of course it was very dangerous. But they did it for good reason, not simply because it was high adventure. I went to a few of their planning meetings, and those men always got down on their knees first to ask God to protect and help them….

December 3, 1942
… Jewish people are put out of their homes and into the street–without any shelter. All of Scheveningen has to evacuate.All the beautiful buildings are being razed! The coal [used for heating] has to be left behind, and when they raze the buildings this ends up under the rubble, while thousands are sitting without heat. All the government departments have to leave.

I think that Hitler is fulfilling his prophesy that if he goes under, he will drag all of Europe along with him….

(From chapter six of Things We Couldn’t Sayby Diet Eman)

  LTRP Note: The following is from Diet Eman’s book, Things We Couldn’t Say. In Holland, during WW II, Diet was a young Christian girl who joined the Christian resistance in the Netherlands. While many of her fellow-resisters died before the war ended, Diet lived to tell this story of courage and faith.

Invasion (from chapter 2)  by Diet Eman

It was May 9, 1940, when some friends were visiting my family in our home. We had the radio on and were listening to Hitler give one of his fine speeches. There were quite a few people in our house that night, and we all knew German. We heard Hitler say that the Netherlands did not have to fear because the Dutch had been neutral during the First World War, and he would respect our neutrality. We were not important to his campaign, so we didn’t have to worry.

After our guests had left, we all went to bed. But only a few hours later, I awoke to what I recognized as a familiar sound. It was the staccato sound of someone beating a rug. In the Netherlands of that era, housewives kept a regular weekly schedule: Monday was laundry day; Tuesday was for ironing; Wednesday you cleaned the living room; Thursday, perhaps another room; and on Friday you cleaned the rugs with mattenkloppers, rugbeaters.

When I awoke very early that Friday morning, I immediately thought, “This is crazy! Some idiot is beating rugs right now, and it’s pitch dark outside.” What I heard was the “pop-pop-pop” as if someone were spanking rugs—only much faster. It was the first sound of the war.

Father and Mother were up too. They had gone into the street in front of the house, so I joined them. There in the dark sky above us we could see an air battle—planes and shooting. We could hear it too, of course, and we could see what was being shot at the planes from the ground, what they call flak. We all ran back into the house and turned the radio on. The broadcaster sounded very nervous; he told us we were at war and that German paratroops had landed.

This happened only hours after Hitler had assured us that we in the Netherlands needn’t worry! I don’t think that I had ever been lied to by a government leader before that time, and I was furious that this liar had told us not to be worried at the very moment he was sending troops onto our soil.

And our Dutch army, what were they? Our government did not believe in having a real standing army, and they certainly hadn’t planned on this war. Our soldiers were on bicycles—can you imagine?—with their aging rifles slung over their shoulders. Against the Germans they were powerless. On top of that, many Germans came into the Netherlands that night wearing Dutch army uniforms. It had been reported from time to time in our papers that many Dutch uniforms had been missing, but no one had put two and two together. Not, at least, until those first Germans came over our borders looking so much like our soldiers that our boys didn’t even know whom to shoot at. Some Germans even invaded our country wearing priests’ habits!

We didn’t sleep at all that night. After going back inside and listening to the radio reports, we talked and made tea. We were very nervous. Finally, we went back to bed to try to get an hour or so of rest. But there was no rest. We were at war.

Yet, the next day, what was there to do but go back to work? I had been working for some time at the Twentsche Bank, a very good bank in the center of The Hague. So that morning I got on my bike as usual, I didn’t worry about air bombardment or any kind of danger; I just went to work. My regular route was via Vondelstraat, a main artery into the city. At one point I was stopped on that street by the Dutch police, who commanded me to say the words Scheveningen and Schapenscheerder, to pronounce them slowly. It was a shibboleth. If you were a native speaker of Dutch, you could pronounce those words perfectly. Germans, however, could not. It was just hours after the initial attack, but there had already been so much infiltration into the country that those precautions had to be taken.

There had been fighting on the outskirts of The Hague that morning, and paratroopers were all around the airports. Adriaan, a young man who was then dating my sister Fanny, was in the service like Hein. He had taken a job that required a certain amount of time in the army. The deal he had signed up for was this: if he agreed to go into the military service, he would get a good government job once he got out. And his time in the service was almost over. Fanny and Adriaan were planning to get married in September, four months from the time of the invasion.

That night of May 9^th, Adriaan was standing guard with his buddy at Ypenburg, the little airfield just outside The Hague, where the Germans dropped hundreds of paratroopers. He and his buddy were killed guarding that little airfield; they were among the very first Dutch soldiers to die. (from Things We Couldn’t Say – click here to read this entire chapter in pdf format.)

by Kevin Reeves

History is filled with stories of those who have stood for truth, many of whom gave their lives to defend the faith God had put in their hearts. History is also filled with those who tried to squelch that truth. In his riveting account of the Nazi empire, historian William L. Shirer meticulously documents the internal workings of a system that once threatened to take over the world. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a chilling account of the effects of mind-numbing propaganda.1 The endless barrage of misinformation, incredibly, molded a once-beaten and fragmented people into the icon of elitism, which culminated in grisly death camps and the cold-blooded murder of those deemed lesser humans. A firsthand witness and opponent of the Nazi regime, Shirer recounted instances of conversation with German people, when he dared contradict the ludicrous governmental and media declarations of ethnic, cultural, and military superiority. He was met with shocked silence or an amazed stare. He noted that to question the Nazi machine’s view of anything was considered blasphemy of the highest order. It dawned on him that the minds of many of the people had become so warped that they were no longer able to think for themselves or evaluate anything by a higher standard. Shirer observed that with the rise of the new German empire, the truth had become whatever Hitler and Goebbels said it was; they were the final arbiters of reality— spiritual and otherwise.

Some may think it is extreme to compare the spiritual deception and control tactics within the church today to that of the Nazi regime and the death camps, but we should remember that the church in Germany in the 1930s was very much like the church is today—having a head in the sand mentality about spiritual deception and turning religious leaders into super-human heroes who can do no wrong. Perhaps we are not all that different than Christians in Germany back then. We should not fool ourselves and think we would never be duped like that. The apostle Paul issued a warning to Christians:

Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. (I Cor. 10:11,12)

Despite all of this, there is hope in the Lord; He is “Faithful and True” (Rev. 19:11). And He promised to preserve His church, that true body of believers whom He calls the Bride of Christ. Praise His name—there is hope. When truth is challenged, mocked, and thrown against the wind, we can be sure, it will never be altered. And that Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.

The Lord is calling His people out from the midst of the false, to adhere to His truth, no matter what the cost. Let us respond with joy and thankfulness, knowing His grace is sufficient to strengthen us and give us courage.

Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come. (Hebrews 13:13-14)

(Excerpt from The Other Side of the River by Kevin Reeves, pp.214-215)

Notes:
1. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1959).

LTRP Note: The following is an excerpt from Diet Eman’s autobiography, Things We Couldn’t Say. Diet was in her early 20s when Holland was invaded by Hitler. Soon, she became part of the Christian resistance movement with her fiance and other young people. In this excerpt, Diet crosses paths with Corrie and Betsy ten Boom on a train heading toward the Vught Concentration Camp.

“Barracks No. 4, Vught Concentration Camp”

by Diet Eman (author of Things We Couldn’t Say)

June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy Invasion, came. That  afternoon, all of the prisoners at Scheveningen, sixteen hundred of us, were told to gather all the belongings we had because we were going to be moved right away. We had no belongings, of course, so I was ready in a moment. We were called out, cell by cell, and we had to line up in long rows and be loaded onto those trucks, some of which were covered with canvas. The soldiers were standing all around us, bayonets on their rifles. They moved us first to a railroad station, and then they put us on a train.

Even while they moved us that night, the Germans were very nervous. The invasion had begun, and they were scared. None of us really knew about the invasion, but I suspected it because of what Trix had told me. And I heard the Germans, while they piled us on the buses and the trucks, talking about it themselves.

I knew this area, and I knew that if we left the Scheveningen prison through the side door, as we did, we would be on the street at the very end of the city of The Hague, the van Alkemadelaan. On the left were the dunes, with all those German fortifications that the Allied planes had been bombarding; then there was the coastal strip with its big, expensive hotels. But there was nothing else around the prison—nothing other than the strip of dunes where Hein and I had often biked together, the place I could never forget because the little trees had their peculiar honey smell in the spring—the meidoorn trees. The place was called Meyendel. I had even biked there as a child with my friends Rie and Jet, and played cops and robbers.

When we left the prison, therefore, I thought we would go to the right because the city had two railway stations: one to the south, the Hollandse spoor, and the other to Utrecht and the heart of the country, the Staats spoor. The stations were only twenty minutes from my parents’ house. I told myself that we should be going to the right because there was nothing to the left except the forbidden territory of the dunes.

Instead, the buses took a turn to the left. The only destination to the left would have been Waalsdorp, in the dunes, and everybody was scared stiff of Waalsdorp. It was the place of executions, so I was terribly afraid too. The Hague prisoners all believed that if they were being taken to Waalsdorp, there would be nothing but silence for all of us. At the same time, though we didn’t know where the invasion might have happened, we knew that there was an invasion somewhere. And an invasion represented, for us, the end of all our misery. The Allies had landed. Everyone expected it sometime, of course, like the coming of Christ: we all believed that at some point, somewhere, our Allied friends would come and we’d be free again.

But when those buses turned to the left, the prisoners from The Hague knew what was going to happen. The trucks followed a road where the dunes are high on both sides, an open area full of dry grass called helm, to Waalsdorp, the place of execution in the dunes. Some people on those trucks were so desperate that they were nearly out of their minds with fear. I think that God gave me a very logical mind; sometimes that is good and sometimes not. But in this case I had already thought that there was no point in jumping out of that truck: you couldn’t really run in the sand, and soldiers were all around, so where could you go? Even if you didn’t break your leg or get a concussion jumping off the train or truck, you couldn’t run very fast up steep hills of dry sand in forbidden territory full of land mines.

But some were so desperate that they were jumping out. The buses kept right on going, so I never knew exactly what happened to them; but there were other vehicles full of soldiers right behind us.

At two in the afternoon we came to a tiny railway station that I had never known about. There, all sixteen hundred of us were crammed onto the platform, arranged in blocks, and again surrounded by armed soldiers. We stood there in deadly silence for hours, except for the Germans who were talking to each other. And it was during those silent hours of standing there that Corrie and Betsy ten Boom (whose story was told in The Hiding Place) first saw each other. They hadn’t seen each other for months, and their father had already died in our prison…

As we were standing there, the two sisters started worming their way toward each other, which you could do very slowly without being spotted in that mass of people surrounded by the Germans. Finally they stood beside each other and could whisper a few words when no one was looking. After several hours a train pulled up, and we were herded in. Corrie and Betsy were able to stick together, and once they were on the train they could actually sit next to each other. It was a passenger train with seats, not a cattle train. I happened to end up in the same compartment with them, and that’s when someone who may have been in Betsy’s Scheveningen cell told me the story of Corrie and Betsy. When I saw them sitting there for the first time, they were holding hands, tears streaming down their cheeks from happiness—and sadness too because their father had already died.

As we were being loaded onto the train, the Germans walked up and down very menacingly. For all those months, we had talked only to our cellmates; but here, all of a sudden, were sixteen hundred people on that train. It was maybe six or seven o’ clock by now, and getting dark. Every train at that time was equipped with blackout curtains inside, so that the whole train would appear perfectly dark from the sky—thus the Allied planes could not see them. As the train lurched forward, I was praying that we wouldn’t go to Germany, because I knew that if we crossed that border our chances for survival were not good. I’d been initially overwhelmed by the fear that we would go to Waalsdorp and be executed; now that fear was removed, and the longer we stayed on the train, the more I believed we were going to Germany. …

All of a sudden, the sound of the steel wheels beneath us changed. We couldn’t see outside, and there were guards walking up and down through the aisles the whole time. But when I heard the sound of that train change, I peeked out quickly and saw water. I knew that we had to be at the Moerdijk Bridge, a very long bridge over a long waterway, the Hollandse Diep. Again, I felt a sense of relief. I knew then that we were not heading east toward Germany, but instead probably south to Vught, the big concentration camp in a wooded, sandy, and infertile area near Den Bosch. Actually, I had held out hope that we would go to Vught. Of all the evil places, I believed, it was probably less bad because at least we would stay in the Netherlands. Vught did have a bad name—there were many executions there—but Amersfoort also had a bad name, and every camp had a bad name of its own. I knew it was not going to be any fun.

At one point on that train ride a woman got up to use the bathroom, and she stayed inside so long that I didn’t know what she was up to. But when the train took a little curve, and I saw that she had opened the window in that bathroom, I guessed she was going to try to escape. If the train had been going straight, I wouldn’t have seen that. I thought immediately about how I could help her. I knew she was going to need time, so I tried to make sure that nobody would enter the bathroom right at that moment. Nobody else was in line right then, so I stood there as if waiting for my turn; meanwhile, I could be sure that nobody else would come and force the door open.

Then I saw her jump off the train. That woman must have known that territory like I knew the area around Barneveld—like the inside of my pocket. She knew there was going to be a sharp curve where the train had to really slow down. It was dark already, and I was keeping my eye on a little split in the door. And when I saw her jump, I said a prayer: Lord, protect her.

The rails there are situated mostly on the dike. German soldiers were sitting on the roof of the train with machine guns, but it was very late on the 6^th or early on the morning of the 7^th of June and quite dark. She knew that curve was coming, knew where there would be woods and shrubs, and she jumped at the right spot.

That escape gave me an indescribable feeling. There!—one got out. Thank you God! I said to myself.…

We arrived at Vught in the darkness of early morning, and there was roll call immediately. About eight had disappeared. So, apart from the woman I had seen jump, there were other escapees. I was very happy that eight had gotten away during the train trip alone. I heard that report because the guards often spoke to each other as if we weren’t even there; to them, we were just like cattle. Sometimes that was a good thing because when they discussed what was happening in the war, those of us who could understand German picked up a lot of information. When your life is at stake, your ears are like radar. Whenever I heard them discussing anything—such as how many had escaped—I listened very closely.

When the train stopped and we got out, we were in the middle of the woods. The step off the train seemed very high—we had to jump down—and all around us were woods. No paths really, just woods. Many German soldiers were stationed all around, still with their bayonets mounted, holding Doberman Pinschers on leashes. We were told to form rows and march into the darkness because the train couldn’t carry us any closer to the camp. If some fell—if they stepped in a hole in the pitch darkness, say—there was screaming and pushing and a couple of whacks. But people quickly got up and marched again on the uneven ground. After a while, we came to the front gate of Vught.

At the camp, we were all put in an enormous reception hall: it had no windows, except maybe a few very high up, and it was still quite dark. There was no place for us yet in that camp, and for a while they didn’t know where to put us. Suddenly and unexpectedly the officials at Vught had received sixteen hundred people from Scheveningen—and perhaps from other prisons as well. The leadership did a lot of running around there, and the Germans left us standing in that hall with no beds, no blankets, nothing. But I had a rain coat, and I put it over my head and got down on the concrete floor. I felt blessed: at least I had something. I was very tired, and I slept.

In the morning, someone high up said that the prisoners all had to undress—the men gave us the order—and so we stood there naked. If you tried to keep your bra and your panty on, they got mad and yelled, “Undress! Undress!” There we stood, while those officers were passing by, when suddenly a whole bunch of male soldiers came into that hall. I was scared, standing there naked. Those soldiers started walking back and forth, laughing and making remarks about what they saw. So many young women, and all of them undressed in front of those guards and the other officers walking back and forth. There were female guards too, so it was not as if we were at the total mercy of those men; but I’ll never forget the way they walked past and stared.

It was a very short time that we were absolutely naked because one woman guard came along and said, “Hey, get those people their prison dresses.” Our own clothes were bundled up, except our underwear, and we all got prison gowns. We still didn’t know what was going to happen to us. We finally got our underwear back, put it on again, and got into our prison gowns. They were the kind of gowns that could be opened a long way in the front: no buttons—only hooks and eyes, and very large pockets; no sizes, of course, just large and small; thick cotton, as heavy as denim, and gray with dark blue stripes. For a very long time after the war, I would never wear stripes—never….

When we came to our barracks, we found a big “4” painted on it. Around that group of barracks stood a tall barbed-wire fence, and outside lay a large open space, then another very high barbed-wire fence, just like you see in pictures of all the concentration camps. That fence was hot with electrical current. On the corners stood towers, and in the towers were guards with machine guns.

Right away they made a big announcement: “There is another fence with barbed wire, and there are mine fields between, and we have trained dogs. So don’t ever try to escape. You will be shot, or killed by the current, or ripped to pieces by the dogs, or else you’ll step on a mine.”

Nakedness in front of those soldiers, the prison gown, and that warning—that was our introduction to the concentration camp at Vught. (from chapter 13, Things We Couldn’t Say)

LTP Note: The following is our most recent YouTube video clip. This one is featuring Holocaust survivor and Lighthouse Trails author, Anita Dittman. The video is a ten minute segment of her DVD, The Story of Anita Dittman, based on her book, Trapped in Hitler’s Hell.

Lighthouse Trails YouTube Video Clips courtesy of “Luke.”

by James Hutchens
courtesy Kjos Ministries

This week an above the fold headlines of the Washington Times stated: “Israelis may stay home to avoid arrest.” The lead article went on to say, “Israel is seriously considering restricting travel to Europe by its senior officials and military officers fearing they might be arrested in the wake of a disputed U.N. report [The Goldstone Report] that accuses the Jewish state of targeting civilians in its Gaza war earlier this year.”

This is but another example of the growing anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment (that Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1967, correctly labeled anti-Semitism), which many see as rising to pre-WWII levels, especially in Europe, but also in the U.S.

As a matter of fact Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu is on record as saying “It is 1930 and Iran is Germany.” Others have noted the similarities of the anti-Semitism of the 1930s, not only in Iran, but in Europe and even in the United States. This is particularly true with the world wide growth of Islam and its inherent antipathy toward both Jews and Christians. Speaking of the Mahdi, who is Islam’s coming Messiah, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini has declared, “The Mahdi will offer the religion of Islam to the Jews and Christians; if they accept it they will be spared. Otherwise they will be killed.” (Amini, Al-Iman Al-Mahdi).

Which begs the question, will safe houses be needed again? Some of our Jewish friends look realistically at what is occurring and ask, “Do we have any friends out there?” They see that Iran’s President continues on-going threats to wipe Israel off the map. They see Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is on fast track. This is no idle threat. This man means what he says! Remember the sequence, first the Saturday people, the Jews, and then the Sunday people, the Christians. The Nazi concentration camps are a living testimony to this chilling truth.

Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, opened in 1933. In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of whom two-thirds were political prisoners and nearly one-third were Jews. 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its sub-camps. Dachau had a special “priest block.” Of the 2720 priests (among them 2579 Catholic) held in Dachau, 1034 did not survive the camp. The majority were Polish (1780), of whom 868 died in Dachau. First the Saturday people then the Sunday people. Should we expect anything different if authoritarian national socialism reigns?

Prior to WWII there were about 8,300,000 Jews in Europe. Six million perished in Nazi ovens. A little over a million were able to emigrate to various countries throughout the world, including what is now Israel. Over a million survived not only in Germany but in other European countries controlled by the Third Reich. How? Christians put their lives on the line to save fellow human beings by providing safe houses for those fleeing the Nazi death machine. Click here to continue.

Related Information:

Media misleading on Jews evicting Arabs from Jerusalem

Splitting the Evangelicals from Israel

A Time to Remember … Lest We Forget