Bloeme Evers-Emden

Who is Bloeme Evers-Emden?

Met Anne and Margot in the Jewish Lyceum, Westerbork, and Auschwitz.

Born in Amsterdam, the daughter of a working class couple (a diamond cutter and seamstress). They lived in a Jewish neighborhood but had renounced religion. She met Anne and Margot in the fall of 1941, when everyone had to go to the Jewish Lyceum. She was in Margot's grade level, but in a different class. When she got a summons from the Nazis at the end of 1942, Bloeme's father was able, diligently moving up the chain of command, to successfully argue for a temporary exemption for his daughter! She continued going to school as her class diminished over the months. On the day of her finals for her last year of High School (spring 1943), she was suddenly the only student left taking exams (in the morning there had been three) and she was arrested that night. She very resourcefully escaped, complete with hiding place arranged for her (of course it was quite complicated). Then she worked and lived in a nursing home, and helped nurses. But she eventually had to leave. (This was now one year of hiding.) She got false papers, moved to Rotterdam and found work as a maid until they went on vacation in August 1944: she had to live elsewhere for two weeks. While in hiding, she was arrested.

At the prisoners' barracks in Westerbork, she met the Franks again. Like them, she was sent to Auschwitz, but their paths were separate after that. She was part of a small group of women who stuck together and tried to keep each other's dignity and spirits up (encouragement, mothering as a second family, kept track of dates). In October they were sent to a work camp. Anne had a rash and so was not eligible to go, so Margot and Edith stayed behind with her. Bloeme a dream in November that the liberation would on the first of May. They were liberated on the eighth.

She married Hans Emden. They raised a "relatively large family." She studied psychology part time and attained her doctorate in the late 1980's. She and Hans became active in the Jewish community in Amsterdam. She still has special friendships with those women she banded with for nine months in the camps.