Community pays to replace Urk family's memorial stone at extermination camp Sobibor

Thanks to a fundraising campaign by history teacher Maarten Post, quickly funded by the Urk business community, Israel, Hendrika, and Lea Kropveld from Urk again have a memorial stone at the extermination camp Sobibor in Poland. Their plaque disappeared during a renovation of the now-memorial site and museum, Omroep Flevoland reports.

The Urk family was among many thousands of Jews, Roma, and Sinti transported from Camp Westerbork in cattle wagons on trains to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied territory in Poland during the Second World War. From the outside, Sobibor appeared peaceful, with small houses and neat gardens. But behind the facade was an industrial killing machine of unprecedented scale. Sobibor was not a concentration camp, but an extermination camp where nearly 170,000 people were murdered in around 18 months.

After disembarking from the cattle wagons, Nazi soldiers separated men from women. Unbeknownst to him, this was likely the last time Israel saw his wife, Hendrika, and his daughter, Lea. In the barracks, the Jewish, Roma, and Sinti prisoners are forced to undress, told that hygienic measures were needed after the long journey. They handed over their valuables at a kiosk, told that they would be returned to them with their clothing. In another barrack, the women’s heads were shaved bald.

The naked prisoners walked along a path through a pine forest, with pine branches laid between the trees to make escape impossible. At the end of the path, they entered what they believed were bathhouses, but were instead gas chambers. Nearly 170,000 people walked this path to their deaths, including some 34,000 Dutch, with Israel, Hendrika, and Lea among them.

At the time, the path through the forest was mockingly called the Himmelfahrtstrasse, the road to heaven. Today at the memorial site, the long path through the pine forest is named the Memorial Lane. On either side lie boulders bearing the names of murdered people, families, and entire extended families.

The stone of the Kropveld family is now back on that path. On behalf of the municipality of Urk, a floral arrangement in the Dutch colors is laid with the stone.

The Kropveld family’s stone is one of the last to be placed in the forest path. There is no longer room for new stones, and no new stones can be requested, the Dutch Sobibor Foundation told Omroep Flevoland.

The museum in Poland is looking into new ways to preserve the Memorial Avenue, and also into whether it can be expanded virtually to represent more of the nearly 170,000 people murdered there.