Anny Holländer née Weissberg

Anny Holländer was born in Köln as Anny Weissberg, the daughter of Rebekka and Isaac Weissberg. Her parents owned a clothing shop in the Heumarkt in Köln. After finishing school Anny studied to be a teacher. Anny later married James Holländer and moved to Berlin. In 1935, her daughter Rachel was born and in 1938 her son Samuel. 

Horrified by the events of the Kristallnacht, Anny and James decided to seek a safer place for their children. Rachel was sent to a foster family in the Netherlands and three weeks after Samuel was born Anny left with him for the Netherlands as well.

From 1938 Anny stayed in the Netherlands, mainly in Den Haag and Leeuwarden. James joined the family in Leeuwarden in May 1940, but was soon sent to the Police transit camp in Westerbork in the Northeastern part of the Netherlands. From the mid-1940s to July 1942, James was confined in Westerbork, while Anny and the children were able to live freely in the Netherlands. From time to time, Anny and the children would go to visit James at the camp.

 In July 1942, Anny decided to join James in Westerbork; since James already worked in the camp, the family had better conditions than the the Dutch Jews, that had to live in big barracks and later were deported to the extermination camps. 

Anny, James and the children stayed in Westerbork until they were sent to Bergen Belsen in February 1944. They were brought to the Sternlager - the star camp, where prisoners wore yellow star patches on their clothing instead of the camp uniform. The conditions were harsh. Men and women were separated and placed in big barracks. Food was scarce. Regardless of the weather, the prisoners had to stand outside between 4-5 hours every day. James and Anny had to work. James had to dig out wood roots from the frozen ground and Anny had to disassemble shoes. As time went by, diseases spread around the camp. James and Samuel were infected with Typhoid.

On 10th of April 1945, five days before Bergen Belsen was liberated by the British, James, Anny, and the children, along with 2500 prisoners, were ordered to board a train. Destination: Theresienstadt. The journey continued for days. The train had to change route due to allied bombing until its final stop outside the  village of Tröbitz in Brandenburg.

On the 23rd of April, Soviet soldiers freed the train. Of the prisoners, 198 were already dead, from malnutrition and disease, and 320 additional people would die due to exhaustion and disease.

James died in Tröbitz on the 25th of April 1945, at the age of 40.

After two months in Tröbitz, American soldiers transported Anny and the children along with the rest of the surviving Jews to Maastricht, the Netherlands. Samuel was ill and was taken to the hospital. After 7 days, on the 4th of July 1945, he died. He was 6 years old.

Anny stayed in the Netherlands. A few years after the war Anny married Emil Abrahams from Amsterdam, where they lived together with Rachel, Anny’s daughter and Daniel, Emil’s son. In 1951 the family moved from Amsterdam to Jerusalem, where Anny continued to live until her death in 1996 at the age of 88.