OK, some geography- since taking the train Northwest from Luxembourg to Brugge, which is in extreme Western Belgium, we have been working our way to the east across Belgium and then toward the Northeast corner of the Netherlands.
From our campground hotel this morning we drove to Kamp Westerbork, near the German border. This was Nazi transit camp where all the Dutch Jews were taken before being send off to Auschwitz or Bergen belsen. Not much remains of the camp itself, but the museum there does a devastating job of personalizing the horror of what was done. Lots of personal effects and stories. In the camp there is a memorial consisting of one beer- can shaped stone for each of the 107,000 Jews who passed through the camp. Taller stones for older people , small ones for the children. Many of the stones have accompanying photographs. The whole collection is in the shape of a map of the Netherlands. The camp closed in the fall of 1944 because they simply ran out of Dutch Jews. Anne Frank and her family were among the last to be transported to the death camps. Overall, fewer than 5000 survived.
We moved on, and stopped at the town of Borger which has megalithic tombs dating from 3200-2800 b.c. All the huge boulders there were brought down from Scandinavia by glaciers in the Ice Age. In many cases they are able to identify exactly where the boulders came from. Even if nature delivered the stones to the site , it is amazing how people were able to move them and build huge tombs so long ago.
Spent the night at a very modest b&b near the town of Bourtange, which we plan to visit tomorrow.
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