The diary of a holocaust victim has been presented to Dutch Deputy Health Minister Jet Bussemaker in a former theatre in Amsterdam. The Hollandse Schouwburg was used by the Nazi occupiers in the Second World War to hold Jews and other Holocaust victims before dispatching them to transit camps in the Netherlands and then to Nazi concentration camps.

The diary of Klaartje de Zwarte-Walvisch was found in a transit camp near the Dutch town of Vught. In it the 32-year-old seamstress describes the last terrible months of her life. The diary begins on the day of her arrest, 22 March 1943, when Jew hunters drag her and her husband to the Hollandse Schouwburg and ends on 4 July 1943 when she is sent to another Dutch transit camp Westerbork. Later she is transported to Sobibor, where she was sent to the gas chambers. Ann Frank also passed through Camp Westerbork, before she died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

The raw tone of her descriptions of life in Vught portray an impressive and shocking picture. Like Ann Frank, she wanted other people to read her diary, in it she wrote: “I desperately hope everything I have written in this diary reaches the outside world.”

Klaartje's brother-in-law retrieved the diary when he accompanied her to Camp Westerbork. It had been in the possession of the Jewish Historic Museum in Amsterdam for a few years and was discovered during the making of a television series on the Second World War. The programme-makers went in search of the identity of the anonymous seamstress and discovered her name on the transport lists.

Photo: Vught transit camp - Flickr/Qsimple