The Concentration Camp: Kamp Vught
Note: When I first began working on The Not So Great Travel Blog, it was on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to France while looking out at the countryside at 200 miles per hour. The intention was, and has been, to provide a lighter look at the trials and tribulations of business travel. This post is one that I have started a dozen times. It isn’t light. It isn’t funny. And it isn’t happy. Instead it is a look at the worst of humanity – call it inhumanity – how we see it today and how it impacts us. It is also a personal perspective on visiting places of tragedy. I beg your forgiveness as I dive into a deep and horrid topic that is so critical to understand.
During my trip to the Netherlands, Cologne and The Rhine, I took a train to the middle of the Netherlands to a small town called Vught. There was a castle that I wanted to see, and more importantly a place I felt I needed to understand. For years I’ve studied the Second World War, with an eye toward the naval, air and land battles. I’ve studied the great speeches of Churchill and Roosevelt, and the propaganda machine of Goebbels. I’ve learned about the atrocities of the holocaust, but never felt I truly understood it.
On this trip, I decided to connect with this painful part of history. In Amsterdam, I found myself visiting the holocaust memorial with the names and birthdays of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis. The memorial is moving, and it was difficult not to feel the sense of the scale of the tragedy. Seeing the birthdays and ages of those who died makes you wonder who they were and what would have become of their lives had they not been murdered. Everyone has a story, and those were the stories that were cut short.
In Vught, I took a taxi to a castle that had been well preserved as a country estate – more of a mansion than a traditional castle, but it still had a moat. The same driver who took me to the castle then came back and took me to the concentration camp on the other side of the freeway about 30 minutes away. We took the back roads through the beautiful countryside, trying to find our way to a place that was built to be away from most people. We pulled up to the entrance to the museum, which is to the right of the entrance to the largest Dutch prison. It was the start of a strange experience that seemed full of the unexpected.
At the entrance, I received my audio guide and went into a theater to see the opening film about the camp and the context in which the genocide occurred. The Nazis were not original: they modeled the system of camps after the British during the Boer War in what today is South Africa. Where the British pled ignorance, the Nazis found a model for genocide and cruelty. It was in this model that the system of concentration camps and death camps were formed.
The museum was a fascinating look at the people who lived in the camp and their daily lives that had been so upended. This was a concentration camp, not a death camp. As such, the industrialization of murder was smaller in scale. The cruelty was overwhelming. The stories in the museum were sad and inspiring. The history was documented well and told in a way that felt honest and not heavy handed. It was a place of persecution, a place of cruelty and a place of death for so many. It was the location of a war machine that relied on the persecuted to provide the means to their persecutors to continue the cruelty. It was a place that intentionally turned people against each other, to bring out the worst in people under a blanket of fear.
It was also a place of art and beauty in strange ways. In the layers of barbed wire fencing recreated with the guard towers, there were wildflowers blooming. Against the backdrop of evil there was art and music and singing. There was bravery mixed with the tragedy and violence.
Continuing on with the tour was a visit to the bunkhouse where people lived in deplorable conditions in bunks on mattresses of burlap bags filled with straw. Then it was a visit to the children’s memorial before a tour of the morgue. The morgue had the rooms where bodies were examined and the cremation ovens where they were burned. Outside the morgue, in the shadow of the neighboring penitentiary is a mass grave of ashes from those who died at the camp.
Leaving the morgue, there is a story of the final days of the camp in which 11 people were shot. As they were shot, a woman sang Ave Maria, which was played on my headset in the audio tour. Heading back to the main museum building there was an exhibit about Ukraine. While the camp itself is sad, it is also important to understand that the elements that brought the holocaust are still with us today.
As I left the museum, I walked by the gift shop full of books about the holocaust, genocide and humanity. Many of the books were in Dutch so I didn’t look too closely at the titles. As expected, there is no postcard, keychain or magnet from the gift shop. It is a place for reflection and remembrance, and a backdrop for discussion about the most serious topic of the human condition: how can we be so cruel to one another?
After leaving the museum, I walked to the memorial for the 11 people who were shot, with Ave Maria still in my head. The site was the execution grounds used in the deaths of more than 300 people. It was difficult to separate the mountain bikers on the trails with what I had just seen, and the tragedy that took place on these grounds. After getting lost a few times and stumbling into a large military base on the same grounds where the concentration camp once stood, I found it. The memorial was in a clearing surrounded by trees. A river was slowly flowing nearby. It was here where the 11 people were killed, who are remembered at the memorial and the more than 300 who were killed who’s names are not mentioned on the stone edifice. On this spot where there is unquestionable natural beauty.
That night I went to an Asian restaurant near my hotel and had sushi and a beer. I tried to process what I had experienced. It was sad, and I felt for everyone who had been involved. I wasn’t angry, just sad.
The rest of the trip, of which I have written about here on this blog, brought me to some incredible castles along the Rhine between Cologne and Mainz. I saw the Gutenberg Bibles and learned about Martin Luther as my friends and family at home celebrated American Independence Day. These deserve a space of their own to write about in greater detail.
The impact of Vught took a while to sink in. I look back on the trip and I can’t recall it filled with happy memories. There is a sadness that I still feel, a heaviness that is difficult to lift. It is an understanding of what evil we are capable of. It is an appreciation of art and life in a place of cruelty and death. I think about the guards who were not born evil, but who let so many live in such terrible conditions. I think about the requirements for reform after prisoners were packed into a cell so tightly that many were found to have died the next day.
The events that I wanted to connect with had more depth than I ever thought, and have required more time to process than I understood when I first arrived. To say that humanity is complicated is an oversimplification of the tangled web of contradictions and emotions. I’m not certain I will really ever understand what happened during the holocaust. My perspective has changed as I think about the individual lives that were cut short, and what they could have been. It is perhaps this in which the important lesson lives: the value of human thought, human lives and how we contribute and shape our environment including those around us.
I feel we have a heavier burden to stand up against slipping into our history of repression. We must make sure that we are a positive influence on those around us, and that we always think about the value a life brings. While this may be viewed by some as applying to our current political environment, I believe it transcends any period of history and goes toward the aspiration of how we can be better as people in the world.
