Every spring, hundreds of Dutch men and women, young and old, gather in the woods near the town of Amersfoort, near Utrecht.
Here they light candles in memory of 101 Soviet soldiers who were shot by the Nazis at this place, and then forgotten for more than half a century.
The story surfaced 18 years ago when Dutch journalist Remco Reiding returned to Amersfoort after working in Russia for several years. From a friend he heard about a nearby Soviet military cemetery.
"I was surprised because I had never heard of him before."
It turned out that 865 Soviet soldiers were buried at this place. All but 101 soldiers were brought in from Germany or other regions of Holland.
However, 101 soldiers - all unnamed - were shot in Amersfoort itself.
They were captured near Smolensk in the first weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and sent to Nazi-occupied Holland for propaganda purposes.
"They specially selected Asian-looking prisoners to show them to the Dutch who resisted Nazi ideas," says Reiding. "They called them untermenschen - subhuman - hoping that as soon as the Dutch saw what Soviet citizens looked like, they would join the Germans."
In the Amersfoort concentration camp, the Germans kept the Dutch communists - it was their opinion of the Soviet people that the Nazis hoped to change. They were kept there since August 1941, together with local Jews, from where they were all supposed to be transported to other camps.
But the plan didn't work.
Henk Bruckhausen, 91, is one of the few surviving witnesses. He recalls how, as a teenager, he watched the Soviet prisoners who arrived in the city.
"When I close my eyes, I see their faces," he says. "Dressed in rags, they didn't even look like soldiers. You could only see their faces."
“The Nazis led them along the main street, parading them, from the station to the concentration camp. They were weak and small, their legs were wrapped in old rags.
Some of the prisoners exchanged glances with passers-by and gestured that they were hungry.
"We brought some water and bread for them," Bruckhausen recalls. "But the Nazis knocked everything out of our hands. They wouldn't let us help them."
Brookhausen never saw these prisoners again and did not know what happened to them in the concentration camp.
Reiding began collecting materials from the Dutch archives.
He found that they were mostly Uzbek prisoners. The camp leadership did not know about this until a Russian-speaking SS officer arrived and began to interrogate them.
Most of them, according to Reiding, were from Samarkand. "Perhaps some of them were Kazakhs, Kyrgyz or Bashkirs, but most were Uzbeks," he says.
Reiding also found out that the prisoners from Central Asia were treated worse in the camp than everyone else.
“The first three days in the camp, the Uzbeks were kept without food, in the open air, in an area fenced with barbed wire,” the journalist says.
“The German film crew was preparing to film the moment when these 'barbarians and subhumans' start fighting for food. This scene had to be filmed for propaganda purposes, explains Reiding.
"The Nazis throw a loaf of bread to the hungry Uzbeks. To their surprise, one of the prisoners calmly takes the loaf and divides it into equal parts with a spoon. Others wait patiently. Nobody fights. Then they divide the pieces of bread equally. The Nazis are disappointed," the journalist says.
But the worst for the prisoners was ahead.
"The Uzbeks were given half the portion that other prisoners received. If someone tried to share with them, the whole camp was left without food as punishment," says Uzbek historian Bakhodir Uzakov. He lives in the Dutch town of Gouda and also studies the history of the Amersfoort camp.
“When Uzbeks ate leftovers and potato skins, the Nazis beat them for eating pig feed,” he says.
From the confessions of the camp guards and the memories of the prisoners themselves, which Reiding found in the archives, he learned that the Uzbeks were constantly beaten and allowed to do the worst camp work - for example, dragging heavy bricks, sand or logs in the cold.
Archival data became the basis for Reiding's book "Child of the Field of Glory".
One of the most shocking stories Reiding discovered was about the camp doctor, Dutchman Nicholas van Neuvenhausen.
When two Uzbeks died, he ordered other prisoners to behead them and boil their skulls until they were clean, Reiding said.
"The doctor kept these skulls on his desk for examination. What madness!" - says Reiding.
Suffering from hunger and exhaustion, the Uzbeks began to eat rats, mice and plants. 24 of them did not survive the harsh winter of 1941. The remaining 77 were no longer needed when they became so weak that they could no longer work.
In the early morning of April 1942, the prisoners were told that they would be transported to another camp in the south of France, where they would be warmer.
In fact, they were taken to a nearby forest, where they were shot and buried in a common grave.
"Some of them cried, others held hands and looked at their death in the face. Those who tried to escape were caught up and shot by German soldiers," Reiding says, referring to the memories of camp guards and drivers who witnessed the shooting.
"Imagine, you are 5 thousand kilometers from home, where the muezzin calls everyone to prayer, where the wind blows sand and dust in the market square and where the streets are filled with the scent of spices. You do not know the language of foreigners, but they do not know yours. And you do not you understand why these people treat you like an animal."
There is very little information to help identify these prisoners. The Nazis burned the camp archive before retreating in May 1945.
Only one photograph has survived, which shows two men - none of them is named.
Of the nine hand-drawn portraits of a Dutch prisoner, only two bear names.
"The names are spelled incorrectly, but they sound like Uzbek," says Reiding.
"One name is written as Kadiru Kzatam, another as Muratov Zayer. Most likely, the first name is Kadyrov Khatam, and the second is Muratov Zair."
I immediately recognize Uzbek names and Asian faces. The fused eyebrows, delicate eyes and facial features of half-breeds are all considered beautiful in my country.
These are portraits of young men, they look a little over 20, maybe less.
Probably, their mothers were already looking for suitable brides for them, and their fathers had already bought a calf for the wedding feast. But then the war began.
It occurs to me that my relatives might have been among them. My two great uncles and my wife's grandfather did not return from the war.
Sometimes I was told that my great-uncles married German women and decided to stay in Europe. Our grandmothers composed this story for their own comfort.
Of the 1.4 million Uzbeks who fought, a third did not return from the war, and at least 100 thousand are still missing.
Why were the Uzbek soldiers shot in Amersfoort never identified, except for the two whose names are known?
One of the reasons is the Cold War, which quickly replaced the Second World War and turned Western Europe and the USSR into ideological enemies.
Another is Uzbekistan's decision to forget about the Soviet past after gaining independence in 1991. War veterans were no longer considered heroes. The monument to the family who adopted 14 children who lost their parents during the war was removed from the square in the center of Tashkent. True, the new president of the country promises to bring him back.
Simply put, finding the missing soldiers decades ago was not a priority for the Uzbek government.
But Reiding does not give up: he thinks he can find the names of those executed in the Uzbek archives.
"The documents of Soviet soldiers - survivors or those whose deaths the Soviet authorities had no information about, were sent to local KGB offices. Most likely, the names of 101 Uzbek soldiers are stored in archives in Uzbekistan," Reiding said.
"If I get access to them, I can find at least some of them," Remco Reiding said.
