My initial attempts to learn anything were very disheartening. The initial data came mostly on nurses as perpetrators in the euthanasia programs in Germany. These programs set out to kill any adult or child that didn’t fit into the Nazi ideal—that is the retarded, disabled, disfigured, etc. I was sick after a year of reading this sort of material. For those who want to learn about the topic, I can recommend Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, and Michael Burleigh’s Death and Deliverance in Nazi Germany. Any reader will need a strong stomach, but they are critical reading.

My next tack was to read the material on rescuers. There are wonderful collections of letters at the United States Holocaust Museum, and Archives Letters donated by nurses in the U. S. armed forces describe the liberation of the camps and the horror they confronted. In Australia, the New South Wales College of Nursing published the diaries of Muriel Knox Dougherty who led the nurses into Bergen Belsen. Finally, Leesha Bos lived in The Netherlands during the war. She could have been rounded up several times by the Nazis since she was Jewish and worked in the Jewish Hospital in Amsterdam. She escaped and worked for the resistance until the end of the war. Her book, The Tulips Are Red, is well worth reading.

What I really wanted to know was about the nurses who were victims and how they behaved. Almost all of them perished, but surprisingly, a major concentration camp existed in The Netherlands with a hospital. The hospital, by all accounts, provided wonderful care to the patients. It existed to delude the victims into believing that life in the eastern European camps to which they would be deported would be similar. Life in Westerbork was no paradise, but neither was it like the brutality in Poland, etc. It was the great delusion of the war, and not well known. Several books have been published on the camp, but none on the hospital itself.

I spent a full year rereading general Holocaust literature in preparation, and then became more specific in the literature review, did archival searches, and slowly located survivors through networks, and letters to organizations. Exactly one year ago, I flew to Amsterdam to visit the government archives. There, I saw film made in the camp itself and I now own a copy. I met the nurses to whom I corresponded over the past year and taped our discussions, a very emotional series of meetings for all of us. I still correspond with them, and one often sends gifts to my children. Finally, I visited the site of the camp, another emotional experience.

Today I sit at my desk trying to write a doctoral dissertation from all the data collected by letter, email, tape, and from archives, including a photo archive, and try to learn from their experiences.

My own students really are inspired when I lecture about these nurses. Each of the nurses understood immediately how to answer questions about care and caring. I asked how they believed they created a caring environment. They replied with different responses, such as comforting, providing hope, etc. The kind of responses we know are meaningful to patients, and yet, receive less and less in a climate of health cuts, and staff cuts. They provide explicit examples, and went on to describe similar experiences in other camps they were in, including Bergen Belsen, etc.

I find this personally meaningful in a society where we talk about caring and, often, do little. It has made me reevaluate who I am and what is truly important in life. I suppose that is one application of history and a lesson that we learn by reflecting on the past.