This map of Westerbork, a transit camp in the north of the Netherlands was drawn by Ruth Wiener. Ruth was the daughter of Dr Alfred Wiener, who founded the Wiener Holocaust Library. To escape antisemitism in Germany, the Wiener family had moved to Amsterdam in 1933. Ruth was incarcerated in Westerbork in 1943 and later Bergen-Belsen with her mother and two sisters.
After a year in the camp, in January 1945, the family were chosen for a rare opportunity to be part of a prisoner exchange scheme between Germany and the United States and were placed on a train to Switzerland. Shortly after crossing the Swiss border, Margarethe, whose health had slowly deteriorated over the course of their imprisonment, was too ill to continue travelling. On 25 January 1945, she was taken into a Swiss hospital where she died just a few hours later.
The girls were reunited with their father in New York.
