In an article benignly titled “The ‘Road to Heaven’ at Sobibor” almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about a photograph accompanying an article in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad published around that time.
It was the photo of “a blissful, peaceful, country path bordered on both sides by tall pine trees.”
A path that was described in the newspaper as a “reflection lane,” a path that roughly coincides with a path previously known as the “Himmelfahrtstrasse,” or road to heaven.
A path that now leads to Stara Kolonia Sobibr, according to the article: “a typical Polish hamlet, where clean washing flutters in the wind, farmers on old tractors rumble by and lumbermen lug tree trunks.”
But soon enough the reader realizes that, 68 years ago, this idyllic-looking “road to heaven” led to the five gas chambers of the Nazi death camp of Sobibor located deep in the forests in the Lublin district of South-Eastern Poland.
Gas chambers where about 250,000 Jewish men, women and children were systematically exterminated — more than 34,000 of them Dutch.
After doing some research, I found out that a dozen or so of my relatives’ lives ended tragically at Sobibor.
But Sobibor wasn’t the only Nazi death camp. There were other camps. Camps with now-chilling, sinister names like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka, and Belzec. Another 112 de Wind’s were murdered at some of these camps.
There is a unique and powerful “Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands,” a virtual monument dedicated to preserving the memory of all the Dutch men, women and children who were persecuted as Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and who did not survive the Holocaust, the Shoah.
In the “de Wind list” at the Monument, one can find the birthplaces and the ages of most of the 124 de Wind victims — some as old as 92 and some as young as 14 — a significant portion of an entire de Wind
