The Holocaust survivor Erna de Vries is dead. She survived two Nazi concentration camps and gave many lectures about the Nazi era.
Lathen – The Holocaust survivor Erna de Vries is dead. She died early Sunday morning (October 24th, 2021) in her house in Lathen, Lower Saxony (Emsland district), as her daughter Ruth de Vries announced to the news agency epd.
Erna de Vries only turned 98 on October 21. “We sat with her with my sister and brother. She received a lot of flowers and welcomed a few more visitors, ”said Ruth de Vries.
Erna de Vries was in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps during the Holocaust
Erna de Vries, maiden name Erna Korn, was born in 1923 as the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Protestant father in Kaiserslautern. In 1943 she was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, later moved to Ravensbrück and survived until it was closed. In 1947 she married the Jew Josef de Vries (1908-1981), who like her had survived the Holocaust.
Since 1998, Erna de Vries had given hundreds of lectures, mainly to young people, but also to interested adults, about her life and experiences during the Nazi era, the last time in February 2020 and thus shortly before the outbreak of the corona pandemic in Germany. She had been recognized for her commitment. Last year Erna de Vries suffered a stroke and since then has mainly been in bed, as Ruth de Vries said. (jtr / epd)
