Dutch War Grave Stein

Near the castle ruins of Stein is the monastery cemetery of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. A total of 159 religious, including Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, are buried here. The fathers and brothers have lived in the mission house on the castle grounds since 1921. Around 1970, sisters also came to live there and the monastery complex was given the function of a retirement home for religious people.
The last religious were buried in the cemetery in 1993. In the year 2000, the castle park including the monastery cemetery was transferred to the municipality of Stein.

This cemetery contains the war grave of Dirk Oudendijk.
In response to actions by the resistance in which three N.S.B. members were shot dead, the German occupier decided to hold a raid in Beverwijk and Velsen-Noord. Five hundred boys and men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would be taken as hostages to Camp Amersfoort until the perpetrators of the murders came forward.
On Sunday morning, April 16, 1944, German soldiers entered Beverwijk and Velsen-Noord
inside. They systematically closed streets and went from house to house to round up boys.
19-year-old Dirk Oudendijk, a student at the Apostolic School, was also arrested.
The boys were collected at the station in Beverwijk and transported in cattle trucks to the Polizeiliches Durchganglager Amersfoort.
From there, 700 prisoners were transported to Germany in July 1944.
Dirk Oudendijk stayed in the Schafstädt camp near Obhausen, in eastern Germany. There, malnutrition and abuse proved fatal.
He was buried in Obhausen but after the war transferred to the cemetery of the mission house in Driehuis-Velsen. In 1974 he was reburied in the monastery cemetery in Stein.

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Source

• Text: TracesOfWar
• Photos: Claudia Van den Hof-Brok