Monument Slachtoffers Concentratiekampen

The monument in Eindhoven commemorates the 1.1 million people, Jews and non-Jews, who died in the concentration camps, but not in a gas chamber. There was no monument to them yet. Of the 1.6 million people who went to the concentration camps, only 500,000 returned. One of them was the initiator of this monument, Mr J. van Putten. He was in camp Buchenwald from October 1943 to April 1945. To avoid employment in Germany, he went into hiding with two friends in the Noordoostpolder. When they tried to find their luck elsewhere, things went wrong and they were stopped just before Paris by the Gr? Ne Polizei. Van Putten ended up in camp Buchenwald and was confronted with suffering: 'You encountered deaths everywhere. Fifty thousand people stayed in the last weeks, while the camp was calculated for seventeen thousand. I was seriously ill, had TB and was in the death barracks. Yet it was not an accumulation of misery. I also have good memories. People laughed and lived '. However, the liberation of the camp by the Americans under General George Patton was a mild experience. 'Not a festive feeling, but a quiet, happy realization: now it is over!'