Seek and Hide: Hidden Children On July 26, 1942, the Jewish Council in the Netherlands, like its counterparts in the East, was informed by the director of the Office for Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam that all Jews between the ages of sixteen and forty would be taken to “labor camps” in “Germany.” The council was responsible for notifying the deportees and processing the complex paperwork. They could not know that these deportations were only one part of the massive “resettlement” operations initiated for all of Europe at the infamous Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942, where plans were made for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” or that between January and June, in a hasty building effort, four new extermination camps had been constructed in Poland at Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka to bolster the inadequate killing capacities of those already functioning at Chelmno and Auschwitz. Coordination of the transport of groups from so many different countries was crucial and dependent on very specific logistics, most important of which, here as in the East, was the availability of trains.
