Esther van Vriesland

On 31 December 1941, the Gorcum-based Esther van Vriesland (1926-1942) started her diary in a school notebook. The last sentence she wrote was: "Still, let me write about peace in the next notebook!" Unfortunately, she did not live to see peace. On 5 October 1942, she was killed in Auschwitz.

Esther was a 15-year-old Jewish girl from Gorinchem during World War II. She kept a diary in four notebooks over a period of just under a year. In her diary, she wrote about everyday things, such as school, friendships, parents and falling in love. But Esther was Jewish, and between the lines you can also see how she experienced the increasing isolation of Jews and uncertainty about her fate.

When the Germans rounded up the Van Vriesland family, Esther threw the notebooks onto the neighbour's flat roof. Her neighbour's boy caught them and her neighbour's girl kept the notebooks. This is how her diary was preserved. It was published as a booklet in 1990, a second completely revised edition in 2010 to mark 65 years of liberation.

Near the house where the van Vriesland family lived on Kalkhaven 53, five trip-stones were placed on 16 April 2019 in memory of this horrific history.