Philip Mechanicus (1) (1889–1944)

Philip Mechanicus was born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, one of eight children of Elias and Sarah Mechanicus. After leaving school, he started working for the social-democratic daily newspaper Het Volk in the shipping and records department, and worked his way up to become a journalist. After doing his military service, he worked in the Dutch East Indies for the Sumatra Post in Medan and De Locomotief in Semarang. n 1919, he returned to The Netherlands. He joined the foreign affairs staff of the Algemeen Handelsblad in 1920. He wrote reports about the Soviet Union, which were later collected and published in book form as Van Sikkel en Hamer (From Sickle and Hammer, 1932), and about Palestine. After Nazi Germany invaded his country in World War II, he was barred from working as a journalist, and briefly wrote under the alias Pére Celjenets. In 1942, he was arrested and tortured by the Nazis for not wearing the yellow star. He was transferred to the Westerbork transit camp, where he kept a diary from May 28, 1943 to February 28, 1944. He was deported in March 1944 to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, then sent to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered on arrival. In 1964, his Westerbork diary was published as In dépôt: Dagboek uit Westerbork (English translation, Waiting for Death: A Diary), an important source of our knowledge about the camp. Koert Broersma published a biography called Buigen onder de storm: Levensschets van Philip Mechanicus (Bowing Under the Storm) in 1993.