Roving with the Arts: Hope not Hate #11: Willy Rosen and Johnny and Jones

Rosen’s luck ran out in the spring of 1943 when the remaining Jewish artists in the city were arrested and taken to Westerbork.

Here, for the last time, Rosen assembled ‘the best cabaret in Holland’.

Before he was put on a transport to Theresienstadt  Rosen wrote a farewell poem. It included these lines:

From here I saw some transports travel away, and now – I’m being thrown to the old steel tracks.  Now I myself am getting on board the train with my backpack; just between us, I find it bad enough.    

Along with his mother, Willy Rosen died in Auschwitz in the winter of 1944.

 

On 4 September 1944 Van Wesel and Kannewasser were deported on one of the last transports from Westerbork to a series of concentration camps: Theresienstadt,  Auschwitz Sachsenhausen, Ohrdruf and Bergen-Belsen.^[1] They died of exhaustion during the last days of the war in 1945, Johnny on 15 April, the day that the camp was liberated.^[1][