Abel J. Herzberg (1893–1989)

Abel Jacob Herzberg was born in Amsterdam to Russian Jews who had moved to the Netherlands from Lithuania. His father was a diamond merchant and dedicated Zionist. Abel entered the University of Amsterdam in 1912 to study law. His education was interrupted by conscription into the Dutch military in World War I, but in 1918 he completed his doctoral degree in law. He set up a law practice in Amsterdam and married Thea Loeb in 1923. In 1930, he joined the national board of the Dutch Zionist Union, and the next year became editor of its magazine. In his play Vaderland (1934), Herzberg alluded to the murder of his brother-in-law by Nazis in Germany and warned of further Nazi anti-Semitic violence and the state of denial by many Jews. In 1940, around the time of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in World War II, he and his family unsuccessfully attempted to escape to England. In 1943, Herzberg and his wife were sent to the Westerbork transit camp and then deported to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. There his legal background and status as a legal scholar made him a candidate for a possible prisoner exchange for Germans abroad and helped keep the couple alive. Herzberg began keeping a diary in the camp. He and his wife were put on the so-called Lost Train that wandered all over Germany, but they survived to be liberated by the Red Army in 1945. They returned to the Netherlands, where they were reunited with their children. Herzberg took up the practice of law again and also became a professional writer. His first publication was Amor fati (1946), a collection of essays on the war. In 1950, he published Chronicle of the Persecution of the Jews as well as his diary of the camp, Tweestromenland (English translation: Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen) -- he was one of the earliest historians of the Holocaust. His other published works included novels, historical texts, journalism, diaries and autobiography, and plays. In 1972, he was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize, the highest award of Dutch letters, for his lifetime body of work.