Renata Laqueur papers

Renata Laqueur was born in 1919 in Brzeg, Poland. In that same year her family moved to Amsterdam after her father, Ernst Laqueur, had been appointed professor of pharmacology at the University of Amsterdam. Renata attended school in Amsterdam, and eventually studied at the International Secretarial School in 1939. In 1941, she met and married Paul Goldschmidt, a speech therapist. Renata and her husband were arrested in 1943, and taken to the Vught concentration camp and the Westerbork transit camp. Their arrest was due to Paul’s sister and brother-in-law, who were members of the resistance and, when their home was raided by the SS, held false identity papers for Renata and Paul. Due to the efforts of Renata’s father, Paul and Renata were released. They were arrested again, however, in November 1943 and were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. While imprisoned, Renata kept a diary, spanning from March through December 1944. On April 10 1945, Renata and Paul were placed on the last transport from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt. The train, infamously known as “The Lost Train,” did not reach its destination and was stopped by Soviet troops in the town of Tröbitz on April 23. For several months while they recovered, Renata helped in a hospital for liberated camp prisoners, until she fell ill with typhus. The couple returned to Amsterdam in 1945, where they lived together until 1950, when they divorced. During this time, Renata deposited a typed manuscript of her diaries in the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. In 1952, Renata immigrated to the United States, and in 1960, she began undergraduate studies at New York University. In 1971, Renata completed her Ph.D. dissertation which examined fourteen diaries, including her own, written by inmates in concentration camps. Meanwhile, excerpts from her diary that she had deposited in the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation had been published in anthologies in the Netherlands, and in 1965 had been published in paperback under the title “Dagboek uit Bergen-Belsen.” Her diary has been republished several times since.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Renata Laqueur collection was donated by Renata Laqueur to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1995. These donations were given two separate accession numbers: 1995.A.1169 and 1995.A.1203. These accessions have since been unified, and can be located under 1995.A.1169.