Philip Mechanicus

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Philip Mechanicus
Diary page from Westerbork

Philip Mechanicus (born April 17, 1889 in Amsterdam ; died October 12, 1944 in Auschwitz ) was a Dutch journalist .

Life

Mechanicus was born in Amsterdam as the eldest of seven sons of the Jewish family of Elias and Sarah Gobes Mechanicus. After graduating from elementary school, he made his living doing messenger services for a newspaper at the age of twelve. He was later given a job in the office and began reading many books. At seventeen he wrote his first articles for the newspaper Het Volk and started his journalistic career.

After completing his military service, Mechanicus went to the Dutch East Indies around 1910 , where he wrote in Medan for the Sumatra Post and later in Semarang on Java for the Lokomotif . In 1919 he returned to Europe with his wife and daughter. Shortly thereafter, Mechanicus got a job as editor in the foreign department of the Algemeen Handelsblad . The couple separated in 1921, Mechanicus married a second time a few years later and again fathered a daughter. But this marriage was also short-lived.

In the early twenties and early thirties, his travel reports, which he wrote for the Algemeen Handelsblad , were particularly popular with the newspaper's readers. His reports on the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1934 and on Palestine were published in bound form and Mechanicus soon rose from reporter to head of department .

Second World War

After German troops occupied the Netherlands in May 1940 ( western campaign ), he was soon given to understand that a Jew in this position as a journalist was not welcome and so he was dismissed. However, he continued to write articles under the pseudonym Pére Celjenets (which means something like "change village" or "relocate" in Russian).

On September 27, 1942, Mechanicus was arrested on the street and taken to the police prison. The journalist who refused to wear the yellow star was the victim of denunciation . He had previously been able to organize a hiding place for his wife and their daughter in good time, in which the two survived until the end of the war.

Mechanicus, however, was deported to the Amersfoort concentration camp on October 25, 1942 and tortured. On November 7th he was taken to the Westerbork transit camp , where he was in the infirmary until mid-1943 due to his serious injuries. Despite these difficult times, Mechanicus wrote diary notes:

This article or section needs to be revised:
Mechanicus certainly did not write his diary in English, there is also a German translation in book form.
Please help to improve it and then remove this mark.

10 June 1943
About fifty children who were on the transports from Vught have been admitted, dispersed in the isolation barracks for the ill. They suffer from scarlet fever, measles, pneumonia, and mumps.

At the beginning of March 1944 Mechanicus was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the Lüneburg Heath, and on October 9 he came to Auschwitz with another 120 prisoners. From the information provided by two survivors, it can be concluded that he was shot there three days after his arrival on October 12, 1944.

Fonts

  • De pose of natuurlijkheid
  • Een cursus fotografie (autobiography in woord en beeld)
  • De uivariaties
  • De vrolijke keuken met illustraties van Judith Ten Bosch
  • Laatste keuze uit het photographically woordenboek van Philip Mechanicus (2005)
  • Bewarring zaait nieuwe identiteit, Opzet tot een manifest / pamflet / schotschrift in het boek EAT THIS! Het kookpunt van publiek domein (2006 give away bij uitgeverij Duizend & Een te Amsterdam)
  • Cooking in Nederland Unieke recepten met Nederlandse producten (ism Ferry André de la Porte). Tgv 20 years Alliance Gastronomique Néerlandaise. Uitgave: Zomer & Keuning Boeken BV, Ede. ISBN 90-210-1022-4
  • “La Hollande s'amuse” with photos from Ferry André de la Porte
  • Russian travel sketches: Collected travel letters , Algemeen Handelsblad, 1932
  • In Dépôt. Dagboek uit Westerbork . Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1964 ISBN 978-90-74274-21-0
    • In the depot - diary from Westerbork . With a foreword by Eike Geisel . Translation Jürgen Hillner. Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1993, ISBN 3-923118-83-X

literature

  • Renata Laqueur: Writing in the concentration camp. Diaries 1940–1945 Edited by Martina Dreisbach and with a preface by Rolf Wernstedt, Donat-Verlag, Bremen 1992, Zugl .: New York, Univ., Diss., ISBN 3-924444-09-9 , pp. 130ff.
  • Koert Broersma: Buigen onder de storm. Levensschets van Philip Mechanicus 1889-1944 , Van Gennep, Amsterdam 1993. ISBN 90-6012-969-5 exp. Edition 2019, ISBN 9789023256236
further literature
This article or section needs to be revised:
It is unclear how this literature list relates to Mechanicus.
Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

  • Floris B. Bakels: Verbeelding als Wapen , Tjeenk Willink, Haarlem, 1947
  • Karl Adolf Gross: Two thousand days of Dachau. Experiences of a Christian among masters and herd people. Reports and diaries of inmate no.16921 . Neubau-Verlag, Munich, 1946
  • Abel Herzberg: Tweestromenland. Dagboek uit Bergen-Belsen , Arnhem, 1950
  • Heinrich Eduard vom Holt: World trip into the heart. Diary of a doctor , Balduin-Pick-Verlag, Cologne, 1947
  • David Koker: Vught Jewish transit camp. February 13, 1943 to February 8, 1944 . Reich Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam, unpublished
  • Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz : The powerful and the helpless. As a prisoner in Dachau. Volume 1: How it began . Volume 2: How it ended. Friedrich-Vorwerk-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1957
  • Jacques Lamy: Buchenwald , January 18, 1944 to June 25, 1945, unpublished information, owned by the author
  • Hanna Lévy-Hass: Maybe it was all just the beginning. Diary from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 1944–1945 , Rotbuch-Verlag, 12th to 13th thousand, Berlin 1982
  • Simone Saint-Clair: Ravensbrück: L'Enfer des Femmes . Fayard, Paris, 1967
  • Gerty Spies: Diary fragment from Theresienstadt . In: Drei Jahre in Theresienstadt , Munich, Verlag Christian Kaiser, 1984, pp. 98–113
  • Loden Vogel: Dagboek uit een Kamp , GA Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1965
  • Anna Hajkova: The Jews from the Netherlands in Theresienstadt from: Theresienstädter Studies and Documents 2002, pp. 135-201
  • Sandra Ziegler: Memory and Identity of the Concentration Camp Experience , Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3084-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/dutchcamps.html
personal data
SURNAME Mechanicus, Philip
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Celjenets, Pére
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH October 12, 1944
Place of death Auschwitz concentration camp