Survivors return from the concentration camps

Erna van Witsen-Weinberg was liberated from the Neustadt-Glewe concentration camp on 3 May 1945. She arrived in Amsterdam in late June 1945. She was admitted to the Portuguese-Israeli Hospital. Erna was one of approximately 5,000 Jews who returned to the Netherlands after surviving the concentration camps. Her husband was murdered in Auschwitz.

Somehow, the Jewish Dutch had to pick up their lives again. This was hard. Many of them were still ill or injured and severely traumatised by their stay in the concentration camps. They had often lost most of their relatives and did not know what had happened to the rest.

In the Netherlands, the returning Jews were often in for a chilly welcome. Their houses had been demolished or were occupied by other people. Some non-Jewish Dutch people were none too happy that the returned Jews wanted their old jobs or deposited items back. The non-Jewish population was not that interested in the suffering of the Jews, as they had suffered as well, especially during the Hunger Winter. Dutch government authorities even fined returned Jews for unpaid taxes, which they had been unable to pay due to their deportation. It was not until the 1960s that the awareness of the plight of the Jews increased.