Nanette Blitz Konig

Nanette Blitz Konig was born on the 6th of April, 1929 in Amsterdam, Holland, daughter of Martijn Willem Blitz and Helene Victoria Davids. She had an older brother, Bernard Martijn born in 1927 and a younger brother, Willem, born in 1932 with a “blue baby” heart defect and died in 1936. She and her family were Jewish and her father worked for the Amsterdamsche Bank. Holland was occupied in May 1940 by the Nazis who began to persecute the Jews. In the beginning of 1941, Jewish students were obliged to go to Jewish schools and it was then that Nanette became a classmate of Anne Frank and remained so until the Franks went into hiding in 1942 The Blitz Family was arrested and taken to the transition camp of Westerbork. February 15, 1944 they were deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the end of November, 1944 Nanette´s father died. In the beginning of December Nanette´s brother and mother were deported from Bergen-Belsen and she remained alone. Her brother died in the concentration camp of Oranienburg and her mother was deported to Beendorf to a factory in a salt mine as a slave laborer and died in April, 1945 in a train that was on the way to Sweden. In January 1945 Nanette was transferred to a different part of Bergen-Belsen known as the small women’s camp. From there she saw Anne Frank in the large women’s camp through the barbed wired fence. These two camps become one section and it was then that Nanette got together with Anne and her sister Margot. Nanette survived Bergen-Belsen and was rescued by a British Major, Leonard Berney. After the war she spent three years in hospital with tuberculosis. During this period Anne´s father come to visit and asked about his daughters. Later Otto Frank gave Nanette the diary written by his daughter Anne “Het Achterhuis” (The Secret Annex). After Nanette recovered she went to live in England with her Aunts, where she mets her husband, John Konig of Hungarian origin. In 1953 they married and moved to Brazil. Nanette gives lectures about the Holocaust and her life. In 2018 she published a book “Holocaust Memoirs of a Bergen-Belsen Survivor & Classmate of Anne Frank”, in which she gives a detailed account of her experiences during World War II.