(Times of Israel) Eddy Boas - 75 years ago, in the middle of the night on 28 September 1943, a Dutch Nazi and a German soldier, with guns in hand, broke down our front door in The Hague in Holland. I was nearly 4 years old. My father, mother, brother, and I were pushed down the stairs and herded into an army truck surrounded by Dutch policemen, with our neighbors silently looking on. 107,000 Dutch Jews were transported via Westerbork to Nazi concentration camps. Only 5,000 survived the Holocaust and 102,000 were murdered, including 64 of my immediate family. The four of us were held prisoners in Bergen-Belsen for 434 days. I had my 5th birthday in Bergen-Belsen and was one of the very youngest to survive. My father's job was to take a horse and cart around the camp and pick up the dead bodies lying around in the dirt and the dead from the barracks. The major advantage of this job was that he was able to steal food meant for the horses, such as a carrot or potato. Every morning at 5:00 a.m., rain, hail, snow or shine, the prisoners, including children over four years old (which included me), had to go on roll call. This became particularly bad during the extreme winter of 1944/45. The roll call could take hours, especially if a prisoner was missing or if there was a miscount. As is well known, Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. According to Red Cross records, they have no other record of a family of four - father, mother and two sons - going into a concentration camp and coming out alive, as a family of four.
2018-10-19 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive