Westerbork

Category: Genocide

After their arrest, the Van Pels and Frank families were sent to the Westerbork detainment camp in Hooghalen, The Netherlands. Unlike other concentration camps, Westerbork was not a death camp. Its function was to detain Dutch Jews and prepare them for transport to other Nazi concentration camps. When the Van Pels and Frank families arrived at the camp, it was holding thousands of jews and gypsies from Germany and the Netherlands. Between July 1942 and September 1944, trains left weekly for Auschwtiz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt. A total of 107,000 people passed through the camps on 93 trains. Of these, only 5,200 Jews survived after leaving Westerbork. When Anne Frank and her family arrived at Westerbork, they were treated as criminals because they were arrested in hiding. They were immediately sent to the detention barracks for hard, manual labor. After nearly a month at Westerbork, Anne and her family were transported to Auschwitz on September 2, 1944. They left on the first of the last three trains ever to leave Westerbork (the final three transports were likely a response to pressure from Allied forces).