A Jewish women waiting before her deportation to the Westerbork camp, Amsterdam, The Netherlands July 1942

A Jewish women waiting before her deportation to the Westerbork camp, Amsterdam, The Netherlands July 1942.

About 73% of Dutch Jews were murdered, a far greater percentage and number than anywhere else in occupied Western Europe due to the much greater control German authorities had over the cOuntry. The vast majority of those who survived either managed to escape or hide before they were being rounded up

and deported. Of the 107,000 who were deported like this woman, 102,000 were killed (some sources

suggest 104,000), a death rate of 95 to 97% Chances are thus very low that she or anyone else in this photo made it, unfortunately.

Westerbork was a so-called transit camp from which she was quickly transported to an almost certain death at an extermination camp (at this point: Auschwitz-Birkenau or Majdanek; more would be opened later) in occupied Poland. The few days she would live after this photo

were spent being thirsty, hungry, confused, frightened and exhausted, only to experience a torturous death

from slow suffocation after having been shoved into a dark chamber. The industrial nature of the mass murder

of West European Jews and Sinti and Roma should not gloss over the fact that these victims suffered greatly

before their deaths. The Netherlands: the highest number of Jewish victims in Western Europe

Three quarters of the Dutch Jews were murdered during the Second World War. In other Western European countries such as Belgium and France, these percentages were much lower. Read here what caused the differences.

Pim Griffioen, Ron ZellerAfter the raid on the Secret Annex on 4 August 1944 the eight Jews who were in hiding there were transferred to the transit camp in Westerbork. From there the Frank family took the last train from the Netherlands to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944.At that time more than 100,000 Jews had already been transported from the Netherlands, the large majority to the concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor.

Of the countries in Western Europe occupied by the Nazis, the Netherlands suffered the largest number as a result of the persecution of the Jews, both in terms of percentages and in absolute numbers.

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