After having been informed brusquely by the commandant in Utrecht that she would be leaving the following day, she as the only woman in the company of thirty-seven men found herself once again chained to a male prisoner and loaded into the back of one of two trucks that were sealed off at the back with a heavy tarpaulin. No one could see in or out of the trucks. Inside it was pitch-black. Surprisingly, Sabine had been handed back her fur coat as well as her makeup bag for the journey.
She later said, “While we were being loaded up, two of the men were very polite and introduced themselves to me.”
Instead of going to Vught, as she had expected, she was taken to Amersfoort Concentration Camp. A male camp only.
Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort was a police transit camp and officially a holding place for prisoners who were to be sent east. In practice it was also a labor camp where mainly political prisoners and Resistance people were kept. By the time Sabine arrived there, the camp held a few thousand male prisoners. The camp commandant, Karl Peter Berg, would be sentenced to death after the war. His assistant was the feared Josef Kotalla. He became one of the infamous Breda Three, the last German war criminals who were held in Dutch jails after the war and would be sentenced to life imprisonment.
Sabine’s observation of him: he was a small man, and you could see he bit his nails. During her imprisonment there, he interrogated her twice.
Although a few other women passed through the camp from time to time, Sabine’s arrival created a great disturbance. The commandant was very displeased to see her. Since she was the only woman in the camp and could not be placed in the barracks with the men, the only option remaining was the punishment bunker. This was a concrete building with small, dark cells where the prisoners were kept. Sabine ended up in Cell 18.
Camp Amersfoort consisted of two parts. On one side stood the barracks for the prisoners, surrounded by very high barbed wire fences and watchtowers. This area was only accessible via the SS camp next to it. Here the SS guards were accommodated as well as the camp administration. Sabine’s bunker was situated in this area. Her guards were young Dutch SS men. When one of them entered her cell, wearing a too-big helmet and uniform, he looked so much like a child that Sabine asked him how old he was. “Seventeen,” he said. When she asked him if his parents were happy that he worked there, he admitted that they were angry with him. Although as soon as he realized what he had said, he got very cross and beat her. His fury was probably more with himself than with her.
The guards continually spied on her through a gap in the door, giving her no privacy at all. If she wanted to change her clothes, she had to turn her back to the door so they could not see her. Her small, dark cell contained only a narrow cot and a dirty bucket in the corner.
A few days later, while walking through the corridor to collect her daily bucket of water, she heard a guard shouting at a prisoner and, after a short silence, a shot. She was so shocked, she dropped her bucket and ran towards the cell to see a German soldier standing over a prisoner who had fallen on his knees, begging for mercy. The poor man had had no food or drink for the last three days and had not been allowed to relieve himself during that time either. He was pleading to do a pee. Sabine was so incensed that, without thinking of the possible consequences, she went up to the guard and pushed his hand holding the gun away. The guard was so surprised, he forgot to shoot her. A lucky escape for her. It could have turned out very differently.
Among my mother’s papers, I found a pile of official-looking documents (in German) relating to a hearing that took place in the camp. I spotted Sabine’s name on it several times, but it took quite a while before I managed to understand what took place during the first few days after her arrival and what these papers had to do with her.
Her arrival had caused not only great consternation but also a great upheaval within the camp itself. As a result, three Dutch SS guards would be dismissed and transferred to other camps.
On Monday, October 11, two days after her arrival, an SS officer reported that the Lageralteste (a Dutch prisoner who mediated between the Germans and other prisoners) had approached him to say that the prisoner Frans van den Berg, who worked as a chef in the camp, had spent time in Sabine’s bunker. This had been allowed by the three Dutch SS guards, the Blockführers, Westerhuis, Appelo and Gombert. The Lageralteste also added that Blockführer Westerhuis had smuggled cigarettes into her cell. The Blockführers were in charge of the barracks. These three often had guard duty in the bunker, which always had extra security because it was a punishment bunker. A day later, chef Frans van den Berg was called to account. He admitted that he had indeed visited Sabine and had asked her why she was there. Sabine had told him that many of her friends had been executed, but that she had no knowledge why and therefore did not understand why she was imprisoned. “That is all we spoke about,” declared van den Berg, “although I admit I sat next to her on the bed while we chatted.”
Frans van den Berg had been imprisoned in Amersfoort since it was built in 1941 and had been a chef from the start. He was considered the most powerful prisoner in the camp, because he had the freedom to move throughout the camp and therefore was able to pass on any news of what was happening anywhere in the camp. He had been head chef in a restaurant in The Hague before the war and was arrested after making some anti-German remarks during a speech. It was a major mistake. It would cost him four years of imprisonment in Amersfoort.
On Sunday night, van den Berg had visited Sabine for half an hour in her cell. The night before, when Sabine had arrived, van den Berg together with Blockführer Westerhuis had also visited Sabine in her cell to bring her evening meal.
Chef van den Berg declared, “Since Saturday evening I have been able to speak several times to Sabine in her cell. The Blockführer did not interrupt.”
You might think van den Berg perhaps also had other ideas in mind, and this tallies with what Blockführer Gombert declared during his questioning: “I knew that the prisoner (v.d. Berg) had visited Zuur several times and he told me that ‘mit dem mädel nichts zu machen sei’ [nothing doing with this woman].” In other words, the chef had made advances towards Sabine, but she had managed to ward him off.
The interrogator asked Gombert if he did not know she was a Nacht und Nebel prisoner and was therefore not allowed any contact with the outside world. Gombert admitted that he knew this.
The whole affair was considered very serious. It is likely that Camp Commandant Berg himself was present throughout the hearing, and he certainly signed off on the papers himself.
From a separate hearing regarding another Nacht und Nebel prisoner, it is evident that other prisoners, on the initiative of Blockführer Westerhuis, collected cigarettes and even a bottle of cologne for Sabine.
As a result of this upheaval, the three Blockführers were taken into custody and dismissed. Gombert and Appelo were sent to Camp Vught. What happened to Westerhuis is not clear, although he too was dismissed. The chef stayed in Camp Amersfoort until it was liberated by the Canadians and even then stayed on for some months longer to cook for the prisoners too ill to be able to leave the camp.
In 1995, my daughter Karen, for a work project regarding the fiftieth anniversary of liberation, when interviewing her grandmother, was told stories of which I knew nothing. Some of these have been of great interest for this book. One of them concerned Camp Amersfoort.
“At nighttimes a guard would walk up and down the corridor to check on the prisoners, but one night I heard him approaching very softly and stopping outside my door. I was very afraid he had come to rape me and curled in the farthest corner of my bed, clutching all my clothes against me to protect myself. But he came in very quietly and kneeled by my bed and whispered, ‘Listen. Three men are planning to escape, and they want you to come with them. They will wait for a moonless night. I will leave your door unlocked that night. Go to the office, where I will leave the key to the outside door on the desk. Then walk to the barbed wire fence at the end of the yard and wait there.’”
It was a badly thought-out and reckless plan. Although the bunker stood outside the main area, from the watchtower, which stood exactly in the middle between the SS side of the camp and the prisoners’ side, any fleeing prisoner would be clearly visible.
When Sabine came to the camp, this news of the arrival of a lone woman had spread like wildfire. Everyone was convinced she would be executed. When she received news of the escape, she had an impossible decision to make. She herself also expected to be shot, and therefore there was nothing to lose in trying to escape and possibly die in the attempt. Equally she still hoped she would be allowed to go home, and she did not want to jeopardize her chances of release. It was an agonizing decision: go or stay. The outcome might be the same.
On the evening before the escape, the number of guards was suddenly increased, and a loud banging on her door announced the arrival of Commandant Berg and his assistant, Kotalla. Sabine was in the process of mending her overcoat when the men entered. Her bucket was turned upside down, her cell was searched, her mattress was torn open, and Commandant Berg ripped her coat out of her hands and shredded it. (“I later repaired it again,” Sabine said defiantly.) Berg and Kotalla were clearly looking for something, probably a letter that had supposedly been smuggled into her cell. They were furious. No incriminating evidence was found to indicate that she was part of an escape plan.
Sabine never discovered whether the men planning the escape were found out or who they were or indeed if there ever really was an escape plan.
Moeder Bien had not heard anything from her daughter for several weeks and was very worried. She decided to send a letter to the court in Utrecht seeking information regarding the whereabouts of her daughter.
The Kriegsgericht returned a short note to her:
Regarding your request of 19th October 1943 we hereby inform you that according to a decision taken in this case stl.1n1 107/43 no information can be given.
After three weeks in Camp Amersfoort as the only female, she suddenly heard women’s voices. Another nine women had arrived in her cell block. They turned out to be her old cellmates from Utrecht.
The following morning, all the women were put on a train to Haftanstalt Kleve, a correction house just over the border near Kleve, Germany.
They stayed there for a few days before they were transported in coal wagons to their final destination.
On the way, the women discussed what might be waiting for them: Where were they going? For how long? In any case, they concluded, it could not possibly be worse than Amersfoort. At least they would not be shut up in a dark damp cell.
“We were so naive,” Sabine said later.
On the way, they stopped at a station that was being bombed as they passed. Everyone was told to leave the train. Sabine contemplated escaping, but sense prevailed. Where could she go? Who in Germany would help an escaped Dutch prisoner?
“But if I had known what was waiting for me,” she said years later, “I would have taken the risk and run.”
The journey ended at concentration camp Ravensbrück, about 80 km north of Berlin, where she arrived on Monday, November 1, 1943.
Another awful chapter was about to begin.