The first transport from the Netherlands left 15 July 1942: 1137 people, six of whom have returned. The Jewish labor camps were emptied in September-October. The pace was accelerated. 43 transports in five months, from 15 July till 12 December 1942, 38.327 Jews were deported. All these transports went to Auschwitz. Millions of defenseless people were gassed here, their teeth knocked out to be processed in Germany, their hair cut to serve as raw materials for German factories, their ashes used to make the soil “fertile”. The Germans put in a lot of effort and expense to wipe out the traces of their insane crimes. For us in the Netherlands, Auschwitz remains the gathering place for everything that was deported to the East. Let us try to briefly sketch a picture of what happened there.
July 18, 1942. The first transport from the Netherlands arrives in Auschwitz. It is between 23 o’clock and midnight. "Women, get out". They must line up in rows of five. Women with children are set apart, floodlights flash through the horrified ranks. The children must be handed over. Cries. A woman returns, blood flows from a large hole in the forehead. People in striped clothes come to take the luggage from the train. They soon know that these are people from the “Kanada Command”, the group whose job it is to rob their newly arrived fellow sufferers of everything they still brought with them. They sit in the dark, next to the rails; there was no platform at the time. Then they are led through narrow passages between barbed wire, through tunnels, further and further until they arrive at the actual camp. They keep waiting. In the gray morning they see groups of people emerging between the barracks, the old prisoners going to roll call.
Now also from Holland. Soon they can no longer be distinguished from these others. They are registered. The stamp that will remind them of this cursed place every day for life is tattooed on the left arm. From now on they are only a number. It is slowly dawning that this is not a labor camp but a concentration camp. They cannot and do not yet believe that it is an extermination camp too. They must pass table after table: sick barracks, labor services, imprisoned administration, political department. Always new questions, new cartstore cards. Only one number is at the top. The name, a side issue without meaning, is somewhere small at the bottom.
This registration and administration was worked out in the smallest detail in the German concentration camps. Everything was recorded: every murder and crime, how many people arrived daily, how many died, how many built the crematorium, how many labored in the mines, how many women were made unhappy for life in the experiment barrack and how many people were gassed. Everything was organized, registered and summarized in large statistics. 84 different forms had to be used to send daily specified reports to the SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt in Berlin Oranienburg, where the central administration of all German concentration camps was located and where the “gentlemen” could see the result of their diabolical plans at a glance.
After registration, the new arrivals are dragged to the sauna, the bathhouse, where they are stripped naked and only the most necessary items of clothing are thrown at random to them. Then they are cut bare. Nothing can change the appearance of women more profoundly than by robbing her of her hair. Every shaved man soon bears the outward stamp of a crook, a certain roughness comes into his own. A woman seems to be a violated animal, almost a wild beast. Many cannot handle the shock. They are only in the camp for a short time, but already know that the grip on the barbed wire, which is under high voltage, can end suffering. A grab for the wire, a shot from the sentries, who are obliged to shoot, even though they know that they can never track down their victim on this flight from the camp in their last rest.
Source: De Oorlog die Hitler won (The War Hitler Won) by H. Wielek. Parts from pages 358-362. Publisher Amsterdamsche Boek and Courant Mij NV. (ABC) Amsterdam 1947.