Amazingly, Camp Westerbork was built not by the Nazis but by the Dutch government in 1939 to house some of the thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled to the Netherlands from German oppression. The first group of refugees transported there were anxious at being kept so near the German border and uneasy about the camp’s isolation. ‘A vast and desolate area of bare heathland and sand,’ was how one described it. ‘We were very depressed, but we had to accept it,’ said another.
