On the road as I've been lately, I've missed a number of anniversaries of significance to me, but here is one I'd like to mark, late though I am with it. I mean the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp at Westerbork, which I visited in 1995 and where thousands of Dutch Jews were interned during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, before they were sent on to the death camps in Poland. There's an item about the anniversary here; and see also here.
For obvious reasons the main focus of historical and other memorialization and education about the Jewish tragedy has been on the extermination camps and other sites of death. But these transit or deportation camps in Western Europe were also places of a quite special kind of daily misery - holding uncertainties about where exactly people were bound and what would happen to them when they got there; and about whose names would appear on the next list to be posted. There's a powerful diary of his experience at Westerbork by Philip Mechanicus who later perished at Auschwitz. It was published posthumously. Its English title is Waiting for Death.