As a child in a concentration camp, both parents lost: Emmie Arbel experienced so much cruelty that it is difficult for her to remember. The artist Barbara Yelin recorded her story – and created a touching biography.
Emmie was born into a Jewish family in the Netherlands in 1937 as the youngest of three children. She was four and a half when the police suddenly appeared at the door in 1942 and took the family to what was then the Westerbork Jewish transit camp on the border with Germany. The family lived there for weeks in fear of being separated from each other. Eventually the father was picked up and Emmie never saw him again. The mother and children were sent to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Brandenburg; the eldest son, Menachem, was separated from them.