The Mechelen transit camp, or officially SS-Sammellager Mecheln in German, was a detention and deportation camp established in the Dossin, the oldest casern at Mechelen, by the Nazi German occupier of Belgium. The transit camp was run by the SiPo-SD, a branch of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt in order to collect and deport Jews and other minorities such as Roma mainly out of Belgium towards the labor camp of Heydebreck-Cosel and the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
During the Second World War, between 4 August 1942 and 31 July 1944, 28 trains left from this Belgian casern and deported over 25,000 Jews and Romas, most of whom arrived at the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of war, 1240 of them had survived.
Since 1996 a Holocaust museum at the Dossin Casern reminds of its infamous period.
Read more about Mechelen Transit Camp: Location, Operation, Confrontation, Memorial and Museum
Famous quotes containing the words transit and/or camp:
“There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)