Dunya Breur (1942–2009)

Dunya Breur was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, during World War II. Her parents Krijn Breur and Aat Breur-Hibma were both in the Dutch Resistance and were arrested in 1942. Dunya's father was executed by the Germans, and her mother took five-month-old baby Dunya with her to prison at Scheveningen. Aat managed to give the child to her parents before being deported to the slave labor camp at Ravensbrück. Dunya's mother survived the war but had to spend some years in a sanatorium being treated for tuberculosis. Dunya was raised by her grandparents and was finally reunited with her mother when she was in primary school.

Dunya studied Slavic languages at university and worked as a translator of books, stories, and report from Russian and Polish. In 1980, after years of family silence on the subject of the war, she discovered drawings that her mother, an artist, had made in Ravensbrück and was deeply affected. She published them along with stories of her mother's experiences and that of other women survivors in the book A Hidden Memory: The Drawings of Aat Breur-Hibma from Ravensbrück. In 1983-1984, she was a programmer and translator with Jules Schelvis, a Dutch survivor of Sobibór, on a series of television interviews about Sobibór. She also wrote about Sobibor in the weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer and in Dutch newspapers. Dunya also researched the history of her father, and wrote about it in the book A Heart-to-Heart with My Father in 2000.

She also wrote about her own depression and experience in a psychiatric hospital and was active in patient groups. She died in 2009 of breast cancer just short of her 67th birthday, and posthumously received the Rachel Borzykowski prize from the Sobibor Foundation.