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The beds in the dormitory were originally made of iron but these are the same size as the original beds.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.