The courage to care: nurses facing the moral extreme

Many European nurses were caught up in the horror of what happened to Jewish people during the Second World War, trapped in ghettoes and concentration camps. The advanced age of the nurses, however, decreases the number of firsthand accounts available. This paper reports on the experience of nurses in one camp, Westerbork, in the Netherlands, highlighting their work and relating their stories. Facing extreme suffering, they chose to care about others when it would have been easier to distance themselves. Until recently, historians' interest in medical practices in the transit and concentration camps has centered on medicine and sanitation. Utilisation of a nursing framework allows new material that has previously been overlooked to provide a broader understanding of the context of health care within the camps. Westerbork is an ideal camp to study since it had a genuine hospital with medicines and equipment available and a number of wards that provided care. Data collection was through oral interviews, archival documents and literature. The conclusion is that these nurses provide powerful role models of care that are as significant today as they were then.