Museums put faces to liberated death camp prisoners
A double exhibition in Mechelen and Willebroek focuses on portraits of Belgians who were freed from Nazi death camps after the Second World War
Not just a number
The Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights, better known as the Dossin museum, faces the former military barracks that were used during the Occupation as a transit and detention centre for Jews and others destined for concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz.
Almost 26,000 people passed through the barracks – 25,482 Jews and 352 Gypsies, including 5,430 children. Only 1,276 lived until the end of the war.
Fort Breendonk, 20 kilometres south of Antwerp and built between 1909 and 1914, served as a labour and transit camp and is now a national memorial. The first prisoners arrived in September of 1940. During the course of the war, there were between 20 and 600 prisoners present at any one time, mainly those working in the black market, smugglers, Jews and others who broke anti-Semitic laws.
About 3,600 people passed through the Fort Breendonck camp; 1,733 survived the war, while about 300 were murdered in the camp itself. The camp was liberated in September of 1944.
Bring them home
The exhibition at Dossin concerns Paul van Zeeland, the Belgian high commissioner for repatriation, who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, in the spring of 1945 – exactly 70 years ago – to help bring his compatriots home.
“The main focus of this exhibition is without a doubt the portraits of the liberated Belgians,” explains Dorien Styven, one of the researchers at Dossin. “After months of research, we were able to identify about 60 Belgians and reconstruct their life stories. The prisoners, who had been but a number in Buchenwald, were given back their faces. That corresponds perfectly with the main mission of the Dossin museum: to place the victims once more in the midst of life.”
The horrors are brought into the light and documented in full
At Breendonk, meanwhile, the liberation narrative is that of Paul Lévy, the former head of the Belgian Radio News Service turned war correspondent, who followed in the wake of the Allied troops who liberated camp after camp on their way to take Berlin.
Lévy had himself been imprisoned in Breendonk in 1940 and ’41, though he was not deported. He later reported on the conditions inflicted in the camp by the liberated Belgians of the resistance on suspected collaborators. Both he and van Zeeland, in their different capacities, were there to act as the first public witnesses of the atrocities that had taken place, but also the ray of hope that liberation had brought.
“The exhibition shows not only the passage through a desolate Germany, but also the life in the camps of the victims – their suffering, their liberation and their repatriation,” says Herman Van Goethem, director-general of the Dossin museum. “The horrors are brought into the light and documented in full; instruments of torture are shown in public; the dead are photographed.”
Humanity restored
The purpose of the van Zeeland exhibition, too, is to restore to the inmates some semblance of the humanity that had been stripped from them. Dossin’s research centre identified 60 Belgian prisoners in Buchenwald, and the museum’s collection of documents and other artefacts has allowed each of them – once merely a number in some ghastly administrative system – to regain a face and a life story.
“They are exhibitions in their own right, but this is a unique chance to look at the same period from two points of view,” says Herbart Beyers, events co-ordinator at Breendonk. “The co-operation was enriching for us, too. We already had a pretty broad picture of the whole story, but we were able to get several unique pieces on loan, which provided a fine addition to our own collection.”
The double exhibition is an initiative of the two participating museums as well as Cegesoma, the Brussels centre for historical research and documentation on war and contemporary society.
