Elsie Trovillions collection

Letter and envelope sent by Rie Wittenberg Hetteligh from Haarlem to Elsie Trovillions (donor's mother), dated July 1945. The two young women knew each other before the war, either as pen pals or personally. Rie described in her letter the long years of German occupation of Holland; confiscation of food and valuables, cold and other hardships suffered by the local population. She mentioned the murder of the majority of Dutch Jewry. Rie expressed her graditude for Americans, Canadians, and British for liberating Holland and described the shortages in postwar Holland. She told her friend that she was married since May 1943 and a young mother; in indirect way she asks for some help.