#Story
Here stood Camp Rees
The monument is simple, but what it reminds us of remains deeply moving: more than five thousand nearly starving, rag-clad Dutch men were imprisoned here and forced into hard labour by order of the occupying forces.
Among them was Richard van Norde (born 1927), one of the few who can still share his memories.
The Razzia
The 17-year-old Van Norde was arrested on the Koude Horn in Haarlem in the early morning of 6 December 1944. Another 17-year-old, Gé de Boer, was also arrested while hiding in Elswout. Just hours earlier, German soldiers had cordoned off Haarlem, Bloemendaal, and Heemstede. Eight hundred German troops scoured every neighbourhood, every street, every house, searching for men to send to Germany for forced labour.
Like an Animal...
"One evening, I heard my roommate, Gerlof, sigh deeply and realised he was dead. Immediately, I grabbed the piece of bread he kept under his head in a kind of knapsack—otherwise, someone else would have taken it."
"You lived like an animal here, you were fed like an animal, and you had to work like an..." He stops talking. He cannot go on. There are no words to describe what happened here.
‘A Hell…’
"...A hell," Van Norde calls the camp. "There was no running water, no food, no warm clothes, and every day we had to work extremely hard." The forced labourers were made to dig tank trenches and foxholes and erect barbed wire barriers to stop the Allies. "We had to break open the frozen ground with picks. Then you stood there all day, chopping, without food or drink, until nightfall. After that, you had to walk back to the camp for an hour, where you’d get a pan of soup. Well, soup... it was just water with a potato skin." Before long, the men suffered from malnutrition and dysentery, and many did not survive.