Apparently it had been a much more active thought for Henk because he had been looking on line for a long time to find a specific location where we hopefully could find some evidence of the refugee camp where my parents and my sister and brother were living when I was born 65 years ago. His plan was to surprise me on my birthday by taking me there. Two nights before my birthday he said he was quite frustrated because his birthday surprise was not coming together as he had planned. After all the searching he had done he still didn't have any specific address that we could put in the GPS.
We decided to just go to the city of Vegesack and see if we could see the river that must have been close to the hospital where I was born. My mother had said that when she looked out the window of the hospital she thought she saw "buildings that were moving" and then was told that she was seeing the tops of the ships on the river. Online we saw that there were 2 hospitals near the Lesum River which runs by Vegesack and we decided to go to the one that was the closest to the river which is now a Psychiatric hospital and ask if that used to be a general hospital.
We included the desire to find a bit more specific information in our prayers that night and the next day while we were preparing for our little trip Henk had the thought to go online again. He came across the words "displaced persons" instead of "refugee" as he was reading and decided to enter those words in his search for the camp. It brought up a "Jacobs University" which is housed in a place that used to be part of a camp for displaced persons. As we read further we were able to see dates of the changes that had taken place over the past 65 years and it seemed to fit with what Henk had been searching for. The best part was that the university had their address printed right there on the screen. 😀 Now we had an address for the place where I probably spent the first 6 months of my life!
We left at 6 in the morning on my birthday in hopes to get past where the usual heavy traffic jams take place and drove the first hour and a half to get to Zwolle where we picked up Henk's brother Thijs who was going along for the day. Then we entered the address of the university and headed out. Bremen is only about two and a half hours off to the northeast from Zwolle.
As we arrived at the University we drove through an entry that had a building on the right (the picture on the bottom right) where we stopped to ask if there was any specific parking area that we needed to go to. As I walked into that building I noticed how "old" it looked inside. I could imagine that it had been there at least 65 years ago. I was told we could park anywhere and go wherever we wanted to go except into the classrooms and labs that were in session. We walked around several of the long 2 story buildings and took some pictures. We saw a small church and went into a large two or three story building that housed a library and several other large rooms and conference halls. There was one building that seemed to have large doors like garage doors down the entire length of the one side.
I thought I'd send some pictures to my sister, Eve, who was 8 years old when I was born. The first picture was an old one (top left) that we found online with an entry very similar to the entry we went through. I hoped the pictures might spark some memories for her. Her response was that the only memories were of walking down a hallway past the neighbor's door to get to their door and of seeing Dad running with Harry, my brother, who was two at that time, under his arm heading to the doctor's office which was near the front gate of the camp, because Harry was choking on a piece of candy. The running dislodged the candy and Harry was just fine. Anyway, I imagine that first building I went into to ask about parking could have been a doctor's office. We had a comfortable feeling about the whole camp and enjoyed our time looking around. (we felt that this was a tender mercy moment )
Then we drove to Vegesack , to that Psychriatric hospital, (top left, which is only about 3 and a half miles west of the university) where we wanted to ask some questions. We walked into a room that had 2 women sitting at their desks and one looked up and asked if she could help us. I asked her if she spoke English to which she responded with a yes, of course. I explained why we were there and
that we were looking for a hospital that was a general hospital at least
65 years ago and that it had windows high enough to be able to see the
ships moving by on the river. At that moment the woman from the other
desk came over and the two women looked at each other and simultaneously said "you're at the wrong place" and then explained that there was an old hospital not far from there that we could walk to. They explained that it was no longer in use. It was a hospital that was built to help people who could not afford medical help and would have been exactly the sort of a place that refugees would have been happy to have in their time of need for medical attention. The woman we first talked to wrote down an address for us and then she went outside with us and faced us in the right direction and showed us where we needed to go to find the address. We walked maybe 2 minutes and found ourselves in front of an abandoned old hospital that was even closer to the river and was 3 stories high with windows facing the river. We could easily imagine Mom seeing the tops of the ships moving above the houses that were between here and the river. (wow - another tender mercy moment) Here are some pictures of that building, the river and a map showing how close it is to the Lesum River.
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