Evelyn

Evelyn Askolovitch

Evelyn was born in Amsterdam in 1938, after her family left Germany, worried about the rise of Nazism. Turned in by neighbors, they were arrested and deported, first to the Netherlands, then to Bergen-Belsen, one of the few camps where they didn’t kill the children on arrival, unlike Auschwitz. At the time, Evelyn was not yet four years old; she barely remembers the long year she spent in the camp. Her memories start after the war, when she remembers becoming a child again. When the family returned to Amsterdam after the war, Evelyn found herself in a classroom where all her classmates had been hidden or deported. But no one talks about it. The children never mention the war among themselves, as if those three years had never happened. So much so, that for a long time, Evelyn felt she had no right to speak out as a former deportee. It wasn't until 2010, when she received a list in which her name was written in black and white alongside other Bergen-Belsen deportees, that her deportation suddenly became real.
Evelyn now lives in Paris. Whenever she returns to Amsterdam, she is deeply distressed to find that there is virtually no trace left of the Jewish quarter where she used to live, and it feels as if it never existed. The truth is 65% of Dutch Jews were exterminated.