Jonathan Gardiner

One-Way Ticket from Westerbork Jonathan Gardiner

Westerbork, the Nazi transit camp in the north of occupied the Netherlands, is unlike any other camp in WWII. This is a unique story of the lives and fates of over 105,000 Jews who went through Westerbork, on their way to concentration camps in eastern Europe during the Holocaust.

The camp was overseen by Albert Gemmeker, a commander who duped thousands into boarding the trains to take them to their deaths. He was so impressed with his own work that he had it filmed. Camp Westerbork had one of the largest hospitals in Europe, a dental practice, numerous workshops producing furniture and even toy elephants. It had its own narrow-gauge railway and farm, a theatre, a church and even the "Best Cabaret in Europe", to entertain Adolf Eichmann.




One-Way Ticket from Westerbork relates the human stories held within those trains, presented for the reader to reflect upon. This is not an historical tome but the author's reflection on what happened to people who had just became numbers and an attempt to restore their identity.