Abstract:
Many European nurses were caught up in the
horror of what happened to Jewish people during the
Second World War, trapped in ghettoes and
concentration camps. The advanced age of the nurses,
however, decreases the number of firsthand accounts
available. This paper reports on the experience of
nurses in one camp, Westerbork, in the Netherlands,
highlighting their work and relating their stories.
Facing extreme suffering, they chose to care about
others when it would have been easier to distance
themselves. Until recently, historians' interest in
medical practices in the transit and concentration
camps has centered on medicine and sanitation.
Utilisation of a nursing framework allows new material
that has previously been overlooked to provide a
broader understanding of the context of health care
within the camps. Westerbork is an ideal camp to
study since it had a genuine hospital with medicines
and equipment available and a number of wards that
provided care. Data collection was through oral
interviews, archival documents and literature. The
conclusion is that these nurses provide powerful role
models of care that are as significant today as they
were then.
