Vreemdelingenrecht.com - het weblog

"On 6 and 7 June 1943 two trains left Vught station. On board were 1,269 Jewish children who had been imprisoned in the concentration camp in Vught. Among them was an eight-year-old boy named David Jacob Zak. Everyone called him Deddie. On 11 Ju ne he and his parents, Simon and Judith, were killed in the gas chambers of Sobibor. Two months ago I accompanied the King and Queen on their State visit to Poland. The programme included a visit to the museum dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising which began 70 years ago this month. There we were told about the preparations being made for a memorial at the site of Sobibor extermination camp, the place where over 30,000 Dutch people died. The Germans completely destroyed Sobibor before the end of the war. In excavations carried out later, someone found a name tag of a Dutch boy that read: Deddie Zak, Uiterwaardenstraat 17 III, Amsterdam. That tag is on exhibit at the museum, with a photograph of an eight-year-old lad. Seeing...

Seventy years ago, on December 17 1942, British Foreign Minister Sir Anthony Eden reported to the House of Commons that the Jews of Germany and German-occupied Eastern Europe were being systematically starved and murdered.  He read a declaration by the Allies (named by Franklin Delano Roosevelt the “United Nations”) condemning this “bestial policy.”  The declaration included a “solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”  The Allies, declared Eden, would try to give asylum to as many refugees as possible. After the Second World War, the General Assembly of the newly created United Nations, a body larger than the anti-Hitler coalition, accepted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948.  Five months later, a group of European countries created a Council of Europe, agreed to a European Convention on Human Rights, and gradually accepted the jurisdiction of a European Court of H...