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.
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