Marching at Disneyland

The big event of the year is marching at Disneyland. Here is the colorguard and the band marching down main street Disney.

Go Brent, go!

Adventures in Drum Majoring

Brent was asked to be the Drum Major at his middle school this year. That is quite an honor because the music programs in our school district are really outstanding and a big deal even at the elementary school level. There are approximately 160 kids in the band.

Mastering the overhead toss was definitely the most difficult move. He had many cuts and bruises on his arms, legs and even his head before finally learning how to catch it. Mom worried about his teeth getting chipped since she had heard stories about that so he had to wear a mouth guard while practicing until she could see that he had it down.

Yeaaaa....he had just a little fun.

Horrors at Camp Vught

There were two events that occurred at Vught that were particularly notorious. One is what happened in cell 115. Here is the story. Women in barracks 23B found out that there was a traitor among them. When they had singled her out they cut off her hair in order to punish her. Because of that the 'hairdresser' was locked up in the Bunker prison. Out of solidarity the other women protested by writing a letter to the commander and signed by writing down their numbers. The camp commander and some henchmen drove as many women as possible into one single tiny cell. He managed to squeeze in 74 women in a cell with a surface area of 9 square meters and hardly any ventilation. They were locked up for 14 hours. Some women lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen. Some went crazy with fear. Perspiration and heat inside the cell caused the brickwork to form nitric acid which caused corrosive burns. When the cell was opened the next morning, 10 women were dead. The woman who caused this drama, committed suicide by running into the barbed wire.

As awful as that was, this is even worse....One day the Germans thought there were too many Jewish children in this camp. They slept in the same cots as their parents but without proper medical care or soap and water, there were many outbreaks of infectious diseases. Since Vught was a labor camp and not a day care center, the Germans wanted to get rid of these children. They promised the Jewish parents to send their children to a brand new children's camp somewhere in Holland. None of the parents believed them but had no choice. On June 6, 1943 all children 0-4 years old were rounded up an taken to the railway station. With only a brief stop at a transit camp, the children went straight to the gas chambers of Sobibor. The next day all the children 4-16 followed the same route. There were 1,260 children killed along with 1,800 parents who were allowed to go with them. The youngest victim was only 6 days old and his story is most puzzling of all. When his train stopped at the transit camp, he was taken off the train and hospitalized in an incubator and cared for by private nurses for two weeks. When he had completely recovered, he was sent on the next train to Sobibor. This monument carries all of the names and ages of the murdered children. Whole families were wiped out.

The grounds around this camp are just beautiful and have lovely bike paths and flowers and canals, etc. But the horrors once committed here are just steps away.

Vught Concentration Camp in Holland

This was a most sobering experience. The Vught Concentration Camp was a labor camp. They did not gas prisoner's here, though the death rate was very high due to starvation and harsh punishments. Between January 1943 and September 1944, 31,000 men, women and children were imprisoned here.

The beds in the dormitory were originally made of iron but these are the same size as the original beds. A bed is about 5 feet in length. No adult could be comfortable in that size of a bed and usually more than one person occupied it. The prisoners did not receive sheets or pillows. The mattresses were filled with straw or paper. They received a "thin prickly horse blanket" and that was it.

These were the wash basins. During the war a conduit pipe ran the length of these basins with six taps on either side for a total of 36. There were at minimum 240 prisoners, usually more, 7 or more at each tap struggling for a thin stream of cold water.

As previously mentioned, there were no gas chambers here. When someone died, their body was picked up by a German criminal who was nicknamed "Joep the corpse-picker" because he hauled off the body using the wheelbarrow seen in the background. Then the body would be incinerated. There are still ashes in the incinerators.