A diary containing love letters written by a Jewish teenager to her Dutch boyfriend while she was imprisoned in an internment camp in 1943 has turned up in the Netherlands. Archivists in Tilburg announced the rare discovery with parallels to Anne Frank's diary. The journal was kept by 18-year-old Helga Deen during the final month of her detainment in a Dutch internment camp from April to July 1943. She apparently kept the secret diary for her boyfriend in order to help him understand what she was experiencing. In July 1943 Deen, her brother, father and mother were deported to the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor, Poland, where they were all murdered.
The family of Deen’s late boyfriend, Kees van den Berg, donated the diary to the archive earlier this year. Van den Berg had written back to Deen on some of the blank pages of the diary, concealed within a school notebook marked Physics and apparently transferred back and forth between the pair. He kept the diary after Deen was deported, and saved it along with a lock of his girlfriend’s hair.