The Orange River Station concentration camp was located a few miles outside Hopetown, distant from Kimberley as much as Johannesburg, Pretoria and Bloemfontein, but not from military action because in a strategic position, with a British military camp close by. Originally adjacent to Doornbuilt farm and now part of it, much upkeep has gone into the concentration camp cemetery area. The ‘original’ graves have been rendered neat, proper and seemly. While they may appear as restored, photographs from the war period and just after show something very different: careful mounds of earth with neither head-stones nor numbers, then stones placed on these, then later surrounds are added. In the most recent work, the number-plates on graves are often not sequential and anyway differ from the kerkhoff plan of graves. There is an obelisk memorial which has no date, and from its style this dates possibly from the 1940s to the 60s. ‘The names of the dead’? Absent.
View Orange River Station Doornbuilt gallery here
