Did you know...German invasion of the Netherlands

[angels4u]

THE NETHERLANDS

After the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, a civil administration was installed under SS auspices. Arthur Seyss-Inquart was appointed Reich Commissar. He presided over a German administration that included many Austrian-born Nazis. They in turn supervised the Dutch civil service. This arrangement was to prove fateful for the Jews of the Netherlands.

During 1940, the German occupation authorities banned Jews from the civil service and required Jews to register the assets of their business enterprises. In January 1941, the German authorities required all Jews to register themselves as Jews. A total of 159,806 persons registered, including 19,561 persons born of mixed marriages. The total included some 25,000 Jewish refugees from the German Reich. A Jewish council was established in February 1941.

The arrests of several hundred young Jews (sent to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps) led to a general strike by Dutch workers on February 25, 1941, and a hardening of Nazi policy. The German authorities and their Dutch collaborators segregated Jews from the general Dutch population, and incarcerated 15,000 Jews in German-administered forced-labor camps. The Germans then ordered the concentration of Jews in Amsterdam and sent foreign and stateless Jews to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeast part of the country. Some of the remaining provincial Jews were sent to the Vught camp. As of April 29, 1942, Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing.

Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands began in the summer of 1942. The last train left Westerbork for Auschwitz on September 3, 1944. During these two years, the Germans and their Dutch collaborators deported 107,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, where they were murdered. Only 5,200 survived. In addition, 25,000-30,000 Jews went into hiding, assisted by the Dutch underground. Two-thirds of Dutch Jews in hiding managed to survive.

The geography of the Netherlands made escape difficult. The ruthless efficiency of the German administration and the willing cooperation of Dutch administrators and policemen doomed the Jews of the Netherlands. Less than 25 percent of Dutch Jewry survived the Holocaust

[angels4u]

A NEWLY-discovered diary of a young Jewish woman has shed a haunting glimpse on her life in a Dutch prison camp in World War II before she was sent to her death, in an echo of the Anne Frank diaries.

"Even though everybody is very nice to me, I feel so lonely. Every day we see freedom from behind barbed wire," Helga Deen wrote in extracts made public this week by archivists in Tilburg, in the southern Netherlands.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She wrote the diary in 1943, at the age of 18, after she was taken to the Vught detention centre nearby.

It recalls the document left behind by Anne Frank, another teenager living in the German-occupied Netherlands, which was published after her death and has since become a potent symbol of the Holocaust, the Nazi slaughter of millions of Jews.

Helga Deen was a pupil at a Tilburg secondary school when she was arrested and taken to Vught, which was infamous in the Netherlands as a transit camp on the way to Nazi death camps in Germany and Poland.

"This is an extraordinary find. Very few diaries have been written in the camps because of the conditions of life there," David Barnouw of the Dutch NIOD institute for war documentation told AFP.

"If diaries were written in the camps they were rarely recovered, because people's luggage was taken away when they were deported," he explained.

Deen's diary is only the third so-called camp journal discovered in the Netherlands, and the first written by a woman.

In it, she wrote about how the prisoners were deloused and children put on transport.

The diary shows how desperation slowly set in. In an excerpt dated June 6, 1943, just after 1,300 children were deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor death camps in Poland, she wrote:

"Transport. It is too much. I am broken and tomorrow it will happen again. But I want to (persevere), I want to because if my happiness ... and willpower die, I too will die."

Deen, who wrote the journal for her boyfriend, hoped she could escape the transports through work, but was told in early July 1943 that her family would be on the next train.

"Packing, this morning a child dying which upset me completely. Another transport and this time we will be on it," she wrote.

It was her last diary entry.

Deen was deported to Sobibor, where she was recorded as having died on July 16, 1943 together with her parents and her brother.

How the diary was smuggled out of the detention camp and survived all these years is "an absolute mystery," according to the Tilburg archivists.

The journal was brought in by the son of Helga's wartime boyfriend Kees van den Berg. He found the green notebook with diary entries in pencil in a brown purse together with a lock of hair and a fountain pen.

"The purse was like a religious relic for my father. Nobody could touch it," Van den Berg's son Conrad told the Brabants Dagblad paper.

Deen's diary will be shown to the public at an open day on October 30. The Tilburg archive is looking into publishing it in May next year.

"We will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the liberation and that will be a good moment to publish the journal," Gerrit Kobes of the Tilburg archives told the Dutch ANP news agency.

Anne Frank's diary tells of her own family's two years of life in hiding in occupied Amsterdam before they were arrested and transported across Europe. She died in March 1945 aged 15. - AFP

[Can Do (Phil 4:13)]

Thank you Angels!! I just love it when people present inspiring bio's for us to read.

Thanks!

Faithie