Saturday would be at the museum as that was the location where Jan's celebration master-plan would be executed. We would use the remaining part of this Thursday afternoon to visit both the National Monument Camp Vught, a German build concentration camp near the town of 's-Hertogenbosch and the museum in Best. For Sunday we had no specific plans yet but there would be ample time and enough activities going on to allow for a late decision. For me, even though the camp at Vught is only a small one, a visit to the concentration camp is always a moving experience and for Bill this must have been worse as the surroundings must have brought back memories of the POW camp in eastern Germany. The monument is only a small part of the total camp, a large part of which is used by the military.
Part is used as living quarters and a further part is within the walls of a high security prison.
The camp was in use for not longer than a year and a half but still the number of prisoners in the camp totaled 31000 men, women and children. A few weeks ago a beautiful monument was unveiled, a worthy monument for the 1268 children that, on the 6th and 7th of June 1943, were put on transport to extermination camps in Germany. Not more than twenty are known to have survived. Standing in front of this monument with all the names, often of brothers and sisters, and the age, the youngest child being 1 month of age, one can only silently weep for these innocent human beings that were so brutally murdered and hope that some day the world will learn. After killing them the victims would be brought back to the camp where they were cremated in one of the two cremation ovens.