“Dear Henri, we are in good health in a railway truck that is probably taking us to Holland. We are thinking of you very much, we are sorry to be going so far away,” 13-year-old Blanche Zybert wrote in a scrawled letter, dated September 21st, 1943.
The letter, along with instructions and a plea to post it, was thrown from one of two trains that had left a repurposed military barracks in northern Belgium the day before, together carrying 1,434 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 51 would survive the concentration camps.
More than 25,000 Jews, and several hundred Roma, would pass through what became Dossin transit camp in Mechelen, a small Belgian city between Brussels and Antwerp.
The vast majority had been served compulsory labour notices and were under the impression that from Dossin they would be sent somewhere and forced to work. Thousands of Jews were rounded up in police raids in Antwerp and other cities.
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Nearly two thirds of the people transported from Mechelen were killed in the gas chambers shortly after they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau; the remainder were used for slave labour.
German paperwork lists the names of those loaded on to the transports destined for the Nazi death camps. There were Jews from Ukraine, Poland, Austria and Germany on the list, suggesting many of those held in the camp had already fled west at some point and got as far as Belgium.
The paperwork records Blanche as being born in Antwerp, in July 1930. There was a 31-year-old pianist, Lily Marbach, from Vienna on the same train. Julian Birnbaum, from Essen, Germany, was listed on the transport paperwork as “worker”. Faige Konigsdorf, a 53-year-old woman originally from Poland, was recorded as “housewife”.
They would have been packed into sealed cattle cars to be transported east towards the concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland*. The documents are part of an archive maintained by the Kazerne Dossin museum in Mechelen.
When you think of the legacy of the Holocaust, your mind probably goes to the sites of the camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, perhaps the memorial in Berlin.
I visited Auschwitz for the first time, aged 20, during an interrailing trip that also brought me to several Jewish museums and synagogues in central Europe, by chance rather than design. I remember coming across one set of figures that struck me that summer, which I looked up again recently.
Nearly two thirds of the Jews in the world lived in Europe in 1930, making up 1.7 per cent of the Continent’s population.
Today, it is less than a tenth, accounting for 0.1 per cent of the European population. There was once a large, vibrant Jewish community right across mainland Europe that simply doesn’t exist any more, apart from some small pockets.
I found those numbers to be a clearer illustration of the decimation of Europe’s Jewish population than the horrifying death toll of the six million killed. You can be desensitised to a number you read in a history book as a child in school.
Dossin reminds you that the Holocaust wasn’t confined to Auschwitz. The barracks was a key Belgian cog in the Nazi’s system of extermination that stretched throughout most of occupied Europe.
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There were an estimated 75,000 Jews living in Belgium in the late 1930s. The majority of them had emigrated here, fleeing pogroms and poverty in eastern and central Europe. Many came from Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. They usually settled in the big cities: Brussels and Antwerp.
Germany conquered Belgium in a matter of weeks in 1940, along with the other Low Countries, and France. The first set of anti-Jewish regulations were published in Le Soir newspaper late that year. Local officials in Antwerp collaborated more fervently in the persecution of the Jewish population in Belgium than authorities in Brussels.
Dossin began to be used as a transit camp from the middle of 1942. The first of 26 transports, each carrying close to 1,000 people to Auschwitz, left in August that year. At the start police raids to round up Jews focused on those who did not have Belgian nationality, though they were targeted later.
Letters displayed in the museum show the people who were held in Dossin, sometimes for months, had no inclination of what would happen to them next.
“My dear, I arrived in Mechelen on Saturday afternoon ... Please send me two shirts, two pairs of underwear, one good pair of shoes and one grey blanket. You can continue to send us the same parcels, for which we are very grateful,” Felix wrote in a letter in April 1943.
The letter 13-year-old Blanche threw from the train headed to Auschwitz the following year was addressed to someone living in the centre of Brussels.
“Have courage, I’ll see you soon,” she wrote.
*This article was amended on March 5th, 2026 to refer to “concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland” rather than “Polish concentration camps” as stated in an earlier version.
