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They’d decided that if the Nazis deported them, they would do their best to survive the labor camps. The men would do hard manual labor. The women would work in munitions factories or in cleaning jobs.

But they would live—live in the hope of a better future. Not an easy decision, but there were no easy decisions for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

They’d long ago packed their rucksacks for this contingency. Lars’s contained three sweaters, two pairs of trousers, underwear, and a canteen. He now stuffed a pair of shoes in the side compartment and a rolled-up wool blanket under the flap on top.

“This is my fault,” Lars’s father said to him as they readied their luggage. “If you did not have your mother and me to worry about, you could have fled.”

“Nonsense, Papa.” Lars cupped his hand behind his father’s neck. “We made this decision as a family. And we will endure it as a family.”

As Lars filled a sack with bread, apples, and some sugar cookies that Dahlia liked, he heard pounding on the outside door of the tenement building. He opened it to the Green Police.

Clutching his wife and daughter, his mother and father behind them, Lars marched with the other Jews to the corner of Weesperstraat. They were put on trams to the Muiderpoort railway station and loaded onto trains. “We will stick together,” Lars von der Haas whispered to them. “We can handle anything together.”

They were taken to a camp in Westerbork, a facility that had been set up originally to house Jewish refugees emigrating to the Netherlands. The Nazis, now in control of the country, announced that they would repurpose it as a hub for deporting Jews to labor camps in the east. The camp was roughly 120 acres in size, surrounded by fences of barbed wire, with watchtowers at each corner.

For four days, Lars and his family were kept in a cottage with two rooms (a bed in each), a bathroom, and a hot plate. They ate rations of soup broth and chunks of bread. They went outside but avoided interaction with any of the other detainees, wanting no trouble from the guards patrolling on horseback. In the evening, Lars would play the guitar he brought, the best rendition he could muster of “Korenbloemen blauw” (“Cornflower Blue”), “Breng eens een Zonnetje” (“Sprinkle a Little Sun”), and whatever other upbeat songs he could remember.

The fourth day, Lars awoke to a banging on the cottage door. He opened it to an SS guard. “You shall leave by train in one hour,” said the guard.

“Yes, sir. Where are we going?”

“Sobibór,” he said. “Eastern Poland.” He put out his hand. “Your card?”

“Ah, yes.” Lars pulled out his Dutch identity card, marked with a black capital letter J on both sides, and handed it to the guard.

The guard nodded and handed back the card. “All right, Lars von der Haas,” he said. “Be at the train with your family in one hour.”

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Sobibór camp

Sobibór, Poland

THE TRIP SPANNED THREE days. Three thousand Dutch Jews, Lars von der Haas and his family among them, traveled by cattle train. Twenty cars with a capacity for fifty people each instead held one hundred and fifty. The passengers stood shoulder to shoulder with only a small portal for ventilation. The heat and stench were overpowering. Children struggled to breathe. Infants cried relentlessly. Baggage was stacked to create seating, with children and the elderly taking turns.

Lars was particularly worried about his daughter and his mother, with her asthma problems. Dahlia was too grown for Lars to hold in his arms, so he put her on his shoulders for as long as he could. His family encircled his mother to give her extra space to breathe.

At least ten different people passed out at one time or another during the trip and were placed on stacked baggage until they could recover. One man died on the second day from a heart attack. His wife did not stop crying for the remainder of the trip.

The village of Sobibór was a swampy and sparsely populated hamlet on the eastern border of Poland. The Nazi camp was cocooned within a dense forest of birch and pine trees and was not visible from the popular Lublin-Chelm-Wlodawa railway line. A spur off the railway, however, allowed the Nazis to roll the train right up to the camp.

When the doors on the cattle cars clanged open outside the camp, morning sunlight streamed into the car, blinding the detainees. A row of inmates, Jews dressed in blue jumpsuits, were lined up to help them off the cattle cars like bellhops at a hotel. Behind them was a row of armed SS guards in gray uniforms.

The three thousand Jewish detainees slowly spilled out of the cattle cars, taking the hands of their Jewish counterparts in the blue jumpsuits, who were stoic and largely avoided eye contact. Lars jumped out before the rest of his family and made sure to keep his wife, daughter, and parents near him, each carrying their luggage.

Beyond the greeting committee, Lars was pleased with what he saw. The camp looked, in a word, charming. The officers’ quarters were quaint cottages painted in vibrant colors, with meticulous landscaping, intricate gardens, and picket fences, each with a pleasant name like Schwalbennest (the Swallow’s Nest), Lustiger Floh (the Merry Flea), or Gottes Heimat (God’s Home).

The camp’s only mark of being a detention facility was its double barbed-wire fences enclosing the camp, though the fences were thatched with pine branches—whether to keep inmates from looking out, or others from looking in, Lars did not know.

On the front porch of the administrative building, the Obersturmführer—the camp commander—approached a microphone while holding a piece of paper. “Quiet. Quiet. Stand where you are and be quiet.”

Lars looked at his family and put a finger to his lips. Jews from Nazi-occupied territory understood the price of disobedience. Three thousand people quickly grew silent.

“Welcome to Sobibór,” the commandant continued, speaking slowly while reading from the paper, as Dutch was clearly not his first language. “This is a labor camp. You will be treated well. You will be given adequate food and shelter as long as you work hard and comply with our orders. For temporary purposes, we will ask you to separate into groups. On this side,” he said, gesturing to his left, “women and children. On that side, men and boys aged fourteen or older. I say again, this is only temporary.”

Lars untucked his arms from his wife and daughter. “It’s okay,” he whispered to Dahlia, kissing her on the forehead. “Do not worry.” He kissed his wife. Then he and his father took their positions, while Annika and Lars’s mother stood on the other side with their arms looped with young Dahlia’s.

The separation took a long time. Spouses were reluctant to split apart. A man, a widower with two young daughters, refused to leave his children. SS guards used whips to force him into compliance. Senior SS officers, however, were quick to quell the overly violent reaction. The point, clearly, was to remain as calm and orderly as possible.