TILBURG, Netherlands, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- The diary of a Jewish teenager, written while imprisoned during the Holocaust, offers a rare glimpse at daily life in a Netherlands concentration camp.
Archivists in Tilburg, Netherlands, have made public 18-year-old Helga Deen's diary, a 1943 journal written as love letters to her boyfriend and concealed in a green school notebook marked "Physics," Britain's Independent reported Wednesday.
"Even though everybody is very nice to me, I feel so lonely. Every day we see freedom from behind barbed wire," she wrote, with additional excerpts telling of her feelings of powerlessness and about the kale stew prisoners were forced to eat daily.
"Very few diaries have been written in the camps because of the conditions of life there. If diaries were written in the camps they were rarely recovered because people's luggage was taken away when they were deported," said David Barnouw of the Dutch Institute for War Documentation.
Deen's diary is only the third concentration camp journal found in the Netherlands and the first written by a woman.
The Deens reportedly were transferred to Poland's Sobibor concentration camp where they were killed upon arrival.
