Soon after Hitler took power in 1933, Fanny Heilbut and her family emigrated from Germany, like tens of thousands of other German Jews. But after the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, the Heilbuts were back in Nazi hands. In early 1944, they were deported to Bergen-Belsen. Writing in the later 1940s, Fanny Heilbut describes the suffering in this camp, where her husband and one of her sons died. In April 1945, just days before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen, Heilbut and her last surviving son were forced on a train heading towards the Theresienstadt ghetto, together with many hundreds of other Jewish inmates. They were liberated by Soviet troops on 23 April 1945 near the town of Tröbitz (some 90 miles south of Berlin). Fanny Heilbut later emigrated to Britain and died in London in 1949.
Source: Wiener Library