Westerbork’s Heartbreaking Truth: 1943 in Color

This profoundly moving colorized footage presents the nearly complete, 1-hour-47-minute restoration of the Westerbork transit camp film from 1943, captured during World War II in the Netherlands. Commissioned by camp commander Alfred Konrad Gemmeker and filmed by Jewish photographer Rudolf Breslauer—who tragically perished in the camps—the film exposes the grim reality of Jewish laborers toiling and boarding trains to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. The motion-stabilized, speed-corrected visuals now shimmer in color, revealing iconic scenes like Settela Steinbach’s haunting deportation moment, recently identified as a Roma girl. Despite Gemmeker’s controversial 10-year sentence, claiming ignorance of the camps’ horrors, this restored archive—excluding 25 seconds due to a copyright claim—pierces the soul, gripping history buffs and Holocaust scholars with Westerbork’s painful legacy in vivid hues.