http://www.old.jewishbookweek.com/new-books/ww2-holocaust.php To Leo with Love: Letters from Amsterdam, Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, 1943-1944

Miriam Bolle

Audley Square ISBN 9781906793005

February 2009

Mirjam Bolle was born in Amsterdam in 1917 into a middle class family, proud of being "Amsterdammers," and trained as a secretary. A gifted linguist (Dutch, Hebrew, German, English & French ) she was employed by the Jewish Council in Amsterdam during the war years. An orthodox Jew, Zionist, Socialist and intellectual she planned, with her fiance, Leo Bolle, to emigrate to Palestine. Leo settled there in 1939 within the intention that she would shortly join him. However the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany in 1940 eventually caused her deportation, along with that of her parents and sister, to Westerbork transit camp, and from thence to Bergen-Belsen.

During the time of separation from Leo, she wrote letters to him describing the political situation and what was happening to those they knew. Not only did she have a historians eye for detail but she was one of the few to write about the Jewish faith, the keeping of the festivals and practices within the camps. Her letters are the most important eyewitness account of the destruction of Dutch Jewry during the war and the only account to have been secreted out of Bergen-Belsen (at great personal risk) before liberation.

Leo (Menachem) had been a Rabbinical student in the Orthodox Seminary in Amsterdam and continued his studies in Jerusalem. Mirjam, her parents and sister managed to acquire places on the Palestine exchange list and in 1944 they were among the 222 Jews exchanged for German Templars from Palestine. They settled in Israel and Mirjam obtained a position with the Dutch Embassy. Leo fought with the Hagganah against the British and became a teacher and author of the Hebrew-Dutch Dictionary. Their son, an army pilot was shot down and killed and their daughter was blown up by a Syrian landmine. Their surviving daughter works at Ben Gurion airport (Rina - now deceased). Nearly all of Mirjam's relatives were killed during WW2.

The Letters, originally published in Dutch, are now deposited in the Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, and have been translated into French, German, Swedish, Danish, and are being translated into Finnish and Hebrew.

Tsipporah(Tsira) Sofer