A collection of paper items from the Holocaust period of Ernst Weiner - the survivor of the Westerbork camp

A collection of paper items from the Holocaust period of Ernst Weiner - the survivor of the Westerbork camp

The story of Ernst Weiner, a Jew born in Vienna in December 1924: At the outbreak of World War II, he stayed with his family in the Netherlands, where he was held for about six months with a large group of Jews at the Cronfliet School, which was in fact a large private villa. In mid-1942 the Nazi regime banned further education there, and with the conquest of the area many of its members were sent to Buchenwald and Mauthausen to their deaths. Weiner himself was sent to the Westerbork transit camp. There he was put in a hut along with another 250 inmates. He was imprisoned in Westerbork until the end of the war, survived from dozens of transports that left the camp every week on Tuesday to Auschwitz (the camp served as a transit station for extermination camps in Poland and Germany, and every week about 1,000 Jews were put on trains and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz or Sobibor). When his good friends and family one by one find their death in transport to the death camps on freight trains. At school in his youth Weiner studied fine mechanics, and thanks to his practical knowledge of electricity he survived death. The camp's electrical system frequently collapsed, and he was the only one who knew how to take care of and repair it, the Nazis preferred to keep him in the camp alive rather than send him in transports. Wiener also managed to establish a good relationship with one of the camp commanders named Turkel, who made sure to update him whenever the danger of death was approaching, and saved his life several times. Weiner witnessed dozens of transports and even survived several times after being on the train himself. Writes in his testimony: "I personally witnessed many of the  transports and I too was on one of the trains and was saved thanks to Turkel's daring ...". (From his book 'Distorted Morality' attached)

In 1944, the British attacked the camp while Weiner and about 600 other Jews were still in it (in his testimony, Weiner tells how he could see the face of the British pilot who flew a few meters above the barracks). At the end of the war, Weiner was 20 years old, he was drafted into various missions in the Jewish Immigration Department of Marseille to help bring Jews to Israel. Weiner arrived in Israel only in 1949 and was immediately drafted into the war effort shortly before the conquest of Eilat. He was released from the IDF in January 1951.

Before us a collection of letters, documents, and certificates of Weiner from the Nazi period:

*  18 letters he wrote or received between 1938 and his release from Westerbork in 1945 (some of them Nazi ink stamps).

* 12 letters he wrote or received from the period after the liberation between the years 1945-1947 during his stay in France and back in the Netherlands.

* 4 Austrian birth certificates of him and his father.

* A photograph of Ernest Weiner, and more.

Attached: The book "Distorted Morality" by Ernest Weiner which was published by a private publisher - in which Ernest Weiner tells the fascinating story of his life during the Holocaust in detail.

general condition good - very good.