(22 Oct 2004)
Vught
1. Exteriors of the Vught detention camp
2. Inside hut for inmates of the camp
3. Close up Helga Deen's diary and a picture of her
4. Gerrit Kobes, Archivist from the Tilburg Regional Archives reading Deen's diary
5. Close-up of the diary
6. SOUNDBITE (English): Gerrit Kobes, Archivist from the Tilburg Regional Archives:
"On the sixth of June, she wrote in her diary about a child deportation. You know on the sixth of June, almost 13 hundred children were deportated (sic) to Germany, and Helga saw this deportation. She wrote "It is too much. I am distraught. And tomorrow again. But I must. I must because when my happiness will die, I will die too. Let us never forget." After this, she couldn't write anything for about four or five days."
7. Close-up of photo of Deen
8. Various inside Vught detention camp
9. Black and white photo of arrival of Jewish inmates of Vught on April 9th 1943
10. Black and white photo of concentration camp inmates working
11. SOUNDBITE (English): Jeroen Van Den Eijnde, Director of National Monument Camp Vught:
"It is always special when you find certain documents that give you a direct insight into what people experienced when they were inside a concentration camp. When all the people have died when they have experienced it themselves, we only have their documents and of course a lot of former prisoners wrote about their experiences in the camps after the war, but a few who were inside, wrote about life in the camp as if you are looking over the shoulders of someone who has been there."
12. Close-up of the diary
13. SOUNDBITE (English): Jeroen Van Den Eijnde, Director of National Monument Camp Vught:
"So Anne Frank is Anne Frank and she is of course a universal symbol of the holocaust, but we have to give Helga Deen her own credits and we must not compare her story with the story of Anne Frank. Two individuals who have their own experiences and unfortunately both died in this war."
14. Deen's photo and diary
STORYLINE:
A Holocaust-era diary containing love letters written by a Jewish teen to her Dutch boyfriend while she was imprisoned in an internment camp in 1943 has turned up in the Netherlands.
Archivists in the Dutch city of Tilburg on Tuesday announced the rare discovery with parallels to the famed diary by Anne Frank.
The journal was kept by 18 year-old Helga Deen during the final month of her detainment in a Dutch internment camp. She was at the Vught camp from April to July 1943.
"On the sixth of June, she wrote in her diary about a child deportation. You know on the sixth of June almost 13 hundred children were deported to Germany, and Helga saw this deportation." said Gerrit Kobes of the Tilburg Regional Archive.
Deen, her brother, father and mother were transported to the Nazi concentration camp in Sobibor, Poland, that July. Soon afterwards, all four died at the camp.
The family of Deen's late boyfriend, Kees van den Berg, donated the diary to the archive earlier this year.
Van den Berg had written back to Deen on some of the blank pages of the diary, concealed within a school notebook marked "Physics" and apparently transferred back and forth between the pair.
He kept the diary after Deen was deported, and saved it along with a lock of his girlfriend's hair.
"Maybe this diary will be a disappointment to you because it doesn't contain facts," Deen wrote to Van den Berg. "But maybe you'll be glad that
you find me in it: conflict, doubt, desperation, shyness, emptiness."
Only her father survived the war, returning to collect Anne's notes and to publish them.
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