The Rescue of Belsen's Diamond Children

by Bettine Siertsema

Overview

This book uncovers the history of a group of Jewish workers and merchants in the Amsterdam diamond industry during the Holocaust. They and their families were exempt from deportation for a long time, but were eventually deported to Bergen-Belsen. In the end, almost all of the men perished, and the women barely survived slave-labour. Their children were left to die in the camp, but were miraculously saved by the intervention of a Jewish Polish woman, ‘nurse Luba’. The main sources on which this book is based are video testimonies of the surviving members of this group, personal interviews, minutes of interviews taken down in shorthand shortly after the war, and personal documents such as letters, archival documents, and autobiographical books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030977092
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/12/2022
Series:	The Holocaust and its Contexts
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bettine Siertsema is Assistant Professor of History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Table of Contents

1. Background and Overview of the History.- 2. Amsterdam, 1940-1943.- 3. Westerbork and Vught.- 4. Bergen Belsen.- 5. Sachsenhausen.- 6. Beendorf.- 7. The Children and Nurse Luba.- 8. Liberation.- 9. Picking up Life after the War.- 10. Reunion.- 11. The Complexities of Memory.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Bettine Siertsema has offered a highly engaging microhistory of the fate of the Jews who worked for the diamond industry in Amsterdam, reconstructed through meticulous research, including a sensitive interpretation of the memories of their surviving children. This is an important contribution to the historiography on agency and survival in extremis.”

• Christine Schmidt, The Wiener Holocaust Library, London, UK