Diaries of another 'Anne Frank' shed light on camp hell

[emad]

The Independent
By Daniel Howden
20 October 2004


The newly discovered diary of an 18-year-old Jewish girl has offered a haunting insight into life inside a holocaust-era Dutch prison camp in a find archivists are comparing to the Anne Frank diaries.

The writings of Helga Deen describe her last month of imprisonment at the Vught detention centre during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands before she and her family were transported to the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland where they were murdered almost immediately after arrival.

"Even though everybody is very nice to me, I feel so lonely. Every day we see freedom from behind barbed wire," she wrote in an extract from her 1943 journal made public yesterday by archivists in Tilburg, in the southern Netherlands.

Ms Deen's entries, written as love letters to her boyfriend, were concealed in a green school notebook marked "Physics". Inside its pages the youngster paints a haunting portrait of everyday life inside the camp, charting everything from her feelings of powerlessness and despair to arguments between inmates and the taste of the kale stew they were forced to live on.

More:
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=573895

[Canadian_moderate]

1. As a person born in the Netherlands, I am so ashamed

that the Netherlands had the worst stats in occupied Europe for protecting their Jewish population during WW2. Roughly 72% of Jews in the Netherlands perished during WW2. Part of the problem was their knack for bureaucracy (organization) and the detailed population registry they kept. It was very easy for the Germans and the traitors (Dutch nazi collaborators, of which many were in the police forces) to identify Jews. Another problems was that the country is small and densely populated so it was not that easy to hide.

The one thing that does give me some pride is the fact that the Jewish Holocaust museams around the world recognize so many "Righteous Gentiles" among the Dutch who tried to protect and defend the lives of their fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish.

Apparently Otto Frank (Anne's father) didn't not want many sections of Anne's diaries publicized because of very delicate personal information contained in those sections.

[elehhhhna]

2. my family's from Arnhem and it is a shame to know that the fabled

"Dutch Resistance" didn't really come together until non-jews began to be conscripted.

[sui generis]

3. my grandfather and uncle were in Dachau

my grandfather survived but my uncle (14 at the time) did not.

Neither were there for being Jewish - my grandfather was involved in the early socialist movement (and Jewish, but married to a German aristocrat) and my uncle was probably gay.

I don't necessarily think it's fair to say that they waited until "conscripted" - remember many people who were put into the early concentration camps were put in there for many reasons besides being Jewish at the beginning. Many people did not want to believe the rumors (just like here) that the concentration camps were death camps -- after all the government controlled the media and showed marvelous documentaries about how happy and productive the interns were at these camps on staged sets. Of course the "actors" were all gassed a week after filming, but it really took a while before people could even think about what to do.

Something like that had never even been countenanced before, just like hijacking planes with boxcutters here. Like America, a faction of hard line conservatives had taken over government and ruled by fear. When decent people realized that Jews were actually being murdered, and that they couldn't get food stamps for rations to feed their children, many people chose to protect their families rather than risk sure death in a rebellion. And many people put everything at risk and even died trying to be decent humans when they realized that they could make a difference.

Mostly, as with the 9/11 hijackings, people sat around in disbelief. 9/11 cannot happen that way again - if someone pulled out a box cutter on a plane that would be the end of them, not of the plane.

I think that in the same circumstances again, a country like Germany or the Netherlands would not, could not ever "let" it happen again.

[emad]

4. War nearly always brings out the scum in humanity. Will Abu Ghraib

eventually produce smilar diaries to those of WWII that have so shocked us?

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. But what about here?

[noonwitch]

5. The people in the dutch resistance were brave and saved lives

You should be proud of them. The people who hid the Franks, people like Corrie ten Boom, who lost her sister, nephew and cousin, but none of the jews that they hid, were heroes and the dutch should always be proud of them.

WWII was 60 years ago. Of course, no one should ever forget, but there comes a time to recognize that the modern dutch, germans, italians and japanese are not responsible for the things that happened then, any more than I am responsible for slavery or the bombing of Hiroshima.