Dark Skin At Sobibór: Alternative Perspectives on Memory Culture
While I was living in Berlin over the summer I often walked past a Holocaust memorial on my way to the gym. Centrally located in a busy and bustling part of town, this large sign post lists the names of the well known nazi concentration and extermination camps as well as a few very obscure ones. When I got close enough to take a good look I did a double take. Surely they couldn’t have been that sloppy. ‘Maybe it’s on the other side,’ I thought to myself, but no. The Sobibór extermination camp, located in occupied eastern Poland and one of the deadliest camps where up to 300,000 people were slaughtered, was nowhere to be seen.
Considering the reality of the anti-Blackness crisis in Germany, it is extremely ironic that the omitted death camp on that memorial I often walked past is the only one I’ve been able to find where Black people were murdered by the nazis in gas chambers. This glaring omission of Sobibór piqued my curiosity, and over the past months I’ve been doing research into this camp as a part of my cultural criticism and conceptual art project based on the work of Victor Klemperer.
Klemperer was a German Jew who was lucky enough to have never seen the inside of a concentration camp thanks mostly to luck and his “Aryan” wife. While experiencing nazi oppression, this highly assimilated WWI veteran recorded a meticulous diary of daily indignities, frustrations, oppression and then deportations and murders inflicted on Germany’s Jewish community by the nazis. During Trump’s ascension to the White House and then again during the George Floyd uprising, I repeatedly turned to Klemperer’s diaries for clarity and also as a kind of catharsis to help grapple with these challenging and confusing times. Some of what I was reading in his diaries was much too familiar, frighteningly so — especially as it related to the issue of police violence and extrajudicial killings. The fear and terror on George Floyd’s face as he was exterminated in broad daylight by a white police officer is what motivated me to build a conceptual and social practice art project around Klemperer’s work and philosophy.
Despite knowing the history of German colonialism and genocide in Namibia; despite knowing how the nazis studied Jim Crow racism, and despite my project being birthed from the George Floyd uprising, until very recently something had always felt incomplete, as if an important piece of the puzzle was missing. Willie Cambridge, a young Black boy with a Jewish mother was that missing puzzle piece. He was murdered at the Sobibór extermination camp in the summer of 1943 next to his mother and sister. Discovering Willij (Willie) Johannes Cambridge and the tragic fate of his family was a revelation. I was struck when I first saw his picture on a memorial website because he looks very similar to a fifth grade school photo of mine. What this child’s story reveals very clearly is that European history is also Black history; we are firmly embedded within the Western world despite attempts to erase us and hide both our achievements and our tragedies.
Finding Black people who were murdered at one of the nazi extermination camps is an extraordinary discovery, and I say that as someone who is very familiar with Holocaust education going back to my high school days over twenty years ago. The Black people living in nazi Germany were mostly of African and German origin and they certainly faced discrimination, exclusion and oppression, but there was no systematic campaign targeting Black Germans. Some of them were individually targeted and incarcerated in concentration camps like Buchenwald and Ravensbruck, but overwhelmingly, most thankfully survived their ordeal. Willie Cambridge is proof that Black people were also caught up in the worst aspects of the nazi death machine. Keeping in mind that many victims of the Holocaust left behind no trace at all, this discovery begs the question: how many others were there — how many other Black people were forced to endure the unthinkable?
Focusing on Black Europeans who were murdered in a nazi death camp might sound strange to those who are embedded in movements like Afrofuturism which is primarily forward looking and optimistic. I would like to be optimistic, but my perspective is rooted in the certainty that we are not moving into any glorious future until we reckon with the past. The general disregard for Black perspectives and Black histories is hindering us from manifesting this glorious future. The situation in Germany today is a great example of this. Those who promote a clear examination of history are being slandered as antisemitic for using words like “settler-colonialism” to describe the state of Israel. Meanwhile, most Germans are blissfully unaware that resistance to German settler colonialism in Namibia precipitated the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero and Nama people. When we forget we are doomed to repeat, and this gaping hole in German “memory culture,” this erasure of Germany’s Black history, helps explain why German civil society is once again enthusiastically supporting genocide, apartheid and colonialism.
Germany’s much overhyped “memory culture” is severely limited by that society’s refusal to effectively interrogate their entrenched western chauvinism and institutional racism. Instead of being concerned with protecting universal human rights and preventing future genocides, German civil society is engaged in a strange kind of privilege-preserving and pain-avoiding mental gymnastics. Nothing exemplifies this more than the German concept of Zivilisationsbruch (“breach of civilization). Mainstream German society considers the Holocaust to be a breach of civilization that stands above and apart from all other genocides and crimes against humanity. Whether they care to admit it or not, essentially what this means is that because this genocide happened inside civilized Europe, in “the garden,” it is considered more consequential and more important than, say, the nearly ten million Africans murdered by Belgian colonialism in the late 19th century or the hundreds of millions of Natives murdered by British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French colonization of the Americas. The discovery of a European Black and Jewish person with connections to both Europe and the colonies throws a much needed wrench into the assumptions of this Euro-centric tortured and twisted logic.
Most of the remainder of this essay will explore Willie’s life and final days, but before going there readers should be aware of how the Willie Cambridge “micro-history” helps us address several important issues. First, this story helps us to more effectively confront the unfortunate alignment of the modern day, mainstream Jewish identity with whiteness and western imperialism, and the way the effects of the Holocaust and its erasure of diversity continues to impact our world today. Because when most people think of a Jewish person they do not think of someone who looks like brown skinned, doe eyed Willie who was both Black and Jewish.
Another consideration involves a phrase I discovered through my research into German Jewish history: cultural syncretism. The Yiddish language is a great example of cultural syncretism, when those arriving in Western Europe from the Middle East merged their Jewish culture with German culture to produce a new and unique language that was both Jewish and German. The destruction of Willie’s family is analogous to the destruction of the Yiddish language. Manifestations of cultural syncretism with so-called inferiors were abhorrent to the nazis who wanted to keep German culture and society “pure” and free from “foreign” influences. This despite the many contributions of Jewish Europeans to European culture over a period of time spanning more than one thousand years. Most of the people who were murdered at Sobibór were Yiddish speakers born in Poland. The virtual destruction of the Yiddish language and its disappearance from Europe is an example of the drastically altered social and political landscape after WWII.
Along with Yiddish, the cultural syncretism and forward thinking embodied by the uniqueness of Judik Bamberg’s bi-racial family was virtually annihilated by Hitler’s genocidal war of extermination. On the other side of the destruction of this syncretism, Germans now position themselves as authorities on what constitutes correct and acceptable Jewish life and use their authority and privilege to punish anyone who dares contradict them. It is an extremely grotesque development considering the history.
Willie, his sister Henrietta and his mother Judik were deported to Sobibór from the Westerbork transit camp with over 2,400 other people on July 6th, 1943. This event happened during a time when the Germans were losing the overall war, but they were determined to win their declared war against Jewish people and continued scouring Europe for victims for as long as possible. Sobibór was one of the most dreadful of all the extermination camps. Not only did people face imminent robbery and murder there, but rape and sexual assault were common as well. The few who were selected to work as slave laborers were subjected to all manner of abuse and torture, often serving as entertainment for the SS and the Trawniki men guards. This camp was part of a network of genocidal institutions where the nazis carried out their plan to ethnically cleanse European society of everyone deemed racially impure, dangerous or superfluous. These camps and extermination centers were also the places where cultural syncretism and other challenges to nazi ideology were extinguished.
However, Sobibór also saw the most daring and successful uprising and mass escape of WWII with people organizing themselves to murder their nazi guards before escaping under machine gun fire while dodging landmines. It is an incredibly powerful and inspiring story of resistance. What’s strange is that we hear frequent references to the Warsaw ghetto uprising which was relatively unsuccessful, but not nearly as much about Sobibór where people managed to kill a significant number of nazis and their collaborators and free themselves. On October 14th, 1943, a Jewish Red Army soldier and Communist who had been recently imprisoned at Sobibór as a forced laborer made use of his military training and spearheaded this uprising. This is most likely one major reason why we in the Western world have not heard more about this event.
Research into the Sobibór uprising is what led me to the Cambridge family. Now is a good time to transition to taking a look at this unique family and what happened to them. Willie Cambridge, the first member of the family I discovered, was born in Belgium in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power and during a time when the storm clouds of racism, fascism and antisemitism were gathering in intensity. Judik Bamberg, born in the Netherlands, was around seven months pregnant with Willie when she married Zechariah Cambridge, a Black man from the then Dutch colony of Surinam. A few years later their daughter Henrietta was born. Considering the political and social atmosphere of the time, Judik’s decision to have a non-clandestine relationship with a Black man then marry him and have his children was quite extraordinary in the context of the time period. It’s fair to assume that Judik Bamberg was an open minded, forward-thinking person who was definitely ahead of her time. On one of the memorial websites her occupation is listed as “traveling saleswoman,” so we can assume that she was a friendly and outgoing sort of person. The pictures I’ve been able to find of her show someone who was certainly the epitome of a modern woman and a “cool mom”. Guaranteed she did as much as possible to shield her children from the racism of strangers and then from the deteriorating political situation after the nazis invaded the Netherlands in the spring of 1940. Up until that point, I am quite sure that Willie and his sister Henrietta lived relatively happy and carefree lives as all children should.
The following walk through of what Willie and his family endured is based on Sobibór survivor testimonies and cross examinations of perpetrators during their trials after the war. Willie’s descent into the abyss began with the nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Most of us are familiar with seeing the Holocaust in the Netherlands through the lens of Anne Frank’s story, but the popularity of this narrative somewhat obscures the nature of Dutch society at the time. Miep Gies, the woman who was the main supporter of the Frank’s while they were in hiding, was not Dutch but was from Austria. Before risking her life to help hide her friends, she married her boyfriend, a Dutch man, to avoid deportation back to Austria after refusing to join a nazi woman’s association. However, most Jewish people in the Netherlands did not receive this level of support from their non-Jewish friends, neighbors and acquaintances. Most Dutch people were either tacit or overt supporters of nazi ideology, or if they disagreed were nevertheless committed to social order and “going along to get along”. Perhaps the most critical factor was the collaboration of Dutch police forces and civil servants with the nazi occupiers; this collaboration was particularly acute in the Netherlands, a so-called “Germanic brother nation” of nazi Germany. Along with most other northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark, etc, Dutch people were considered to be “racially valuable”. This atmosphere of collaboration, racial supremacy and eugenics led to the murder of around 75% of Dutch Jews, the second most “successful” ethnic cleansing of a European country during the Holocaust after Poland.
Willie and his sister Henrietta would have been compelled to join their mother in donning the garish yellow star identification badge in April of 1942. Around this time Judik gave birth to a baby girl, the product of a relationship with a European Jewish man named Izaak Nathan Bouwman after officially divorcing from her husband in 1941. Thankfully, in the spring of 1943 neighbors agreed to take in her baby girl shortly before she and her other two children were ordered to report to the Westerbork collection and transit camp. The resistance networks that organically sprang up were too late to save most people, but Judik’s daughter was lucky enough to be hidden for the remainder of the war.
Westerbork was located near the German border and was the place from where most Dutch Jews were transported “to the east”. At first the purpose of the camp was to give shelter to Jewish refugees from Germany andAustria who poured into the Netherlands seeking refuge from nazi oppression. When the decision was made to commit outright genocide, the purpose of the camp changed. As with virtually everyone sent to Westerbork, the Cambridge family lived there for about a month before their scheduled deportation. As a young boy in this camp Willie, like most other people there, would have been lulled into a false sense of security. Westerbork was not Dachau. It was a relatively comfortable place compared to most other nazi camps. There was a school for children, enough food to eat, recreation areas, people were generally not beaten or mistreated, and some were even able to obtain permission to leave the camp to attend to business and personal matters. There was even a well staffed and fully functional hospital there; clearly, the nazis were very committed to deceiving people about their true intentions.
On the other hand, when the deportations “to the east” began in July of 1942, this nevertheless produced great anxiety among the camp’s residents, as told here by survivor Joseph Melkman:
“On the night between Monday and Tuesday, at 3 AM, they closed the block we were living in, sealed it hermetically, no one was allowed to leave or enter. And then the block leader read out the names of the people designated for deportation — an alphabetical list… From all the terrible things I saw, later too in the camps, murderous beatings etc, my strongest recollection, and that of others, is from that night, 3 AM Tuesday morning, in the total silence and darkness, when they read, as though they were meting out the death penalty to those who were being deported. Sometimes you yourself could be one of them, and if not you, then relatives, friends, acquaintances. Each and every week, a certain number of death sentences at the same hour. And that made such a terrible and indelible impression on us, on all of us, on all those who also wrote about it, that we still have a sensitivity to Tuesdays, the day that the death penalty was meted out to Dutch Jewry.”
Have you ever traveled with young children? Even under the best conditions it can be quite an ordeal. To keep up the ruse that people were being sent to work camps, deportees from Westerbork usually received enough food and water to last them for the two or three day journey to Auschwitz or Sobibór. But as the war progressed sometimes they received nothing. Until March of 1943 the nazis used third class rail carriages for deportations before switching to cattle cars, sometimes furnishing them with mattresses, sometimes not. Often, people were packed in so tightly there was barely any room to sit down. After three days stuffed in a cattle car, the deportees on Willie’s transport would have arrived in Sobibor disoriented and highly anxious. The journey itself was likely an intimation of what was to come because who transports human beings that way? Nevertheless, the nazis were determined to try and fool the deportees from Western Europe right up until the last moment.
As mentioned above, Sobibor was constructed to look like a pleasant Bavarian village that had sprung up in the middle of the heavily forested Polish countryside. The first thing Willie and his family would have seen when stepping off the train were brightly painted cottages, tiled roofs and flower beds; it is likely they were greeted with music played by the “camp orchestra,” Jewish inmates whose job it was to perform calming melodies for the doomed arrivals as part of the deception. Unlike Polish Jews who lived in closer proximity to nazi terror and were familiar with it, Jewish people from Western Europe arriving at Sobibór were lulled into a false sense of security to make the extermination process easier for the camp guards. Usually an SS man in a white coat addressed the crowd explaining that they’d arrived at a camp where everyone would be given work suitable to their abilities. I’m not sure what lie they told about the fate awaiting children, but of course it was something designed to make sure people did not become too suspicious — not yet. After filing through a warehouse where their baggage and luggage were deposited, everyone assembled in a large courtyard where men and boys over 14 were separated from women and children. At this point everyone was informed that they would need to take a shower for sanitary reasons. It was at this stage where the nazi mask of politeness began to slip. The orders became sharper; as families were separated people began to be rushed along so they would not have enough time to absorb the meaning of the guard towers and the men in black uniforms milling around them with whips, bayonets and guns on their hips. This is a survivor’s account of his impressions after being separated from his wife at Sobibór.
There we were, defenseless, powerless, exhausted, at the mercy of the Germans, and completely isolated from the rest of the world. No one could help us out here. The SS held us captive and were free to do as they pleased. … While we were waiting, I had a little time to collect my thoughts. Our harsh treatment seemed to be in conflict with the image of the Tyrolean cottage-like barracks with their bright little curtains and geraniums on the windowsills. They had had such a friendly and calming effect on me after all the tensions of the preceding days.
While the men and older boys were held back, I assume Willie would have been quickly hustled along with his sister and mother with the other women and children to a large makeshift shed where everyone undressed. Naked, this family that certainly stuck out from the crowd would have walked down what was cynically termed “the road to heaven,” a narrow fenced in path with tree branches woven into the fencing to prevent any prying eyes from seeing what was happening. The path diverged to a barracks building where women and girls had their hair cut. Did Henrietta have her African textured hair cut as well? What must the prisoners assigned to do this hair cutting have thought when they saw these two brown skinned, naked children with African features? It is my personal belief that the hair cutting station is where most people were divested of their remaining illusions. Those cutting the hair were not allowed to speak with the doomed people or answer any of their questions, and guards were stationed there watching everyone carefully. But their eyes and demeanor must have betrayed that something was seriously amiss. After exiting the hair cutting barracks the path Willie would have taken led directly to a wide open clearing where the “sauna” building awaited them. What happened next is too terrible to imagine, worse than any horror film because this large building was essentially a torture chamber. For those who were reluctant to take the final steps inside, their sixth senses screaming out that something simply was not right, there were the men in black uniforms to prod them and move them along with force if necessary.
After his final terrible agonies, Willie’s body would have been burned on a makeshift grill constructed from railway tracks, one of many burnt offerings to whatever name we want to give to the forces at work in this situation.
These industrial murders, while terrible, were not as singular as Germans today would like us to believe. Because a propensity for cruelty, mass murder and mass death is unfortunately a part of German (and European) culture going back centuries. Take note of this description of a massacre of several thousand Jewish people committed in 1349 in Strasbourg:
The new rulers of the city did not care about either the contract of protection with the Jews nor the financial losses for the city which resulted from the pogrom. The two deposed officials were left with the task of leading the Jews to the place of their execution, pretending to lead them out of Strasbourg. At this place, a wooden house had been built in which the Jews were burnt alive. Those Jews who were willing to get baptized as well as children and any women considered attractive were spared from the burning alive. The massacre is said to have lasted six days.
This medieval persecution was sparked off in part by the spread of the Black Death for which Jewish people were scapegoated. For Germans and others to say that the Holocaust is incomparable to any other historical crime shows us that people are not familiar with their own European history, and that their interest in Jewish life and Jewish history is very superficial. The only thing that is singular about the Holocaust is the level of cruelty exhibited towards people and a few specific technological “innovations”. Sobibór is a clear example of this. Unlike in the Middle Ages when Jewish people were deceived, stripped naked, then forced into structures and burned alive, people at this particular death camp were murdered with exhaust fumes from a Soviet tank engine. Perhaps the singularity in this case is the intensification of the cruelty and brutality; for many WWII era Jewish people trapped in Europe, neither conversion to Christianity, an attractive appearance or being an innocent child spared one from annihilation.
Some may wonder what is the point of dredging up this history. Well, between March and July of 1943 around 34,000 people were deported from the Netherlands and murdered at Sobibór. At the current moment there have been around 20,000 people murdered in Gaza over the past two months, including many who suffered horribly trapped for days under rubble with no hope of rescue. We’re watching a genocide unfolding right now that, in terms of the numbers of people killed, rivals what was taking place during the Holocaust. Let us keep in mind that six million people were not murdered overnight or in the same manner. The Holocaust is a collection of massacres that took place in wildly different forms and contexts, from shootings to gassings to hangings, to deaths by disease, exposure and starvation. The numbers of dead in Gaza could rise even more dramatically as over one million people there are currently facing starvation and disease in addition to the ongoing IDF bombings and ground troops targeting civilians.
Sinead O’Connor made the interesting decision to convert to Islam years before her recent passing. This is what she had to say during a riveting spoken word performance not long after she was blacklisted from the mainstream for challenging the Catholic Church:
If there’s ever going to be healing there needs to be remembering, then grieving.
The grieving aspect is what is generally missing from modern day Holocaust memory culture. Too many people are content to read an article or book or two, watch a documentary, throw their unconditional support behind an ethno-state, and then feel smug and secure in being on the right side of history. From what I’ve noticed, very few actually grieve for Holocaust victims in part because the general public does not have a full and complete picture of what happened to people back then. In fact, the lack of education is at a crisis point which perhaps helps explain the acceptance of so many people of a currently unfolding genocide in Palestine.
Masha Gessen, a well known Jewish intellectual and investigative journalist, recently ran afoul of Germany’s increasingly McCarthyite atmosphere that has mostly been targeting Black people, Arabs, Muslims and leftist leaning Jewish people. To their credit, the Heinrich Böll Foundation which originally rescinded their endorsement of their work, agreed to Gessen’s request for a public discussion of Germany’s memory culture. This crucial and straight to the point quote from Gessen is a great place to end this essay:
The biggest difference between Gaza and the nazi-occupied ghettos in eastern Europe is that many Gazans, most Gazans, are still alive and the world still has an opportunity to do something…
It is unfortunately too late for doe eyed Willie, his mother Judik and his sister Henrietta, but it is not too late for many of the children who remain alive in Gaza and the West Bank.
