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1 " He liked to introduce himself to his new victims with: “I am Kees Kaptein, the greatest Jew crusher in the Netherlands! "
― Annejet van der Zijl , The Boy Between Worlds
2 " March 1, 1943, about one year after the Wannsee Conference, when the Entjudung, the “Aryanization” of Holland, was virtually complete. "
3 " Without protest, officers in The Hague supervised the transport of Jewish prisoners, and some even agreed to work as guards in Westerbork. "
4 " Imagine that your own children, who you brought into the world, just walk past you. It’s enough to make anybody crazy. "
5 " On July 14, 1942, the first trains left for Westerbork in Drenthe. "
6 " They knew where they were going by then—Ravensbrück, the concentration camp set up by Himmler in 1938 for all the women who did not fit the Aryan Kinder-Küche-Kirche ideal: criminals, prostitutes, Roma, and, in recent years, increasing numbers of Resistance fighters from all over Europe. "
7 " In assessing what happened in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, later generations were quick to draw hard lines between good and evil, but they hadn’t experienced the war and all its ambiguity firsthand, and it was all too easy to see things as black or white. But those who had lived through it knew better: only the dead were blameless. All survivors had something to feel guilty about—if only the mere fact that they were still alive while so many others, some of whom had surely been better, braver, more deserving than they, were not. "
8 " There was, for example, one group in Rotterdam that refused to help Jewish people in any way, shape, or form, because they believed that the Jews had brought this misery on themselves by crucifying Christ. "
9 " In general, they weren’t particularly intelligent and thus easily influenced, and thanks to the unusual wartime circumstances, they suddenly found themselves wielding a power they had never had before. "
