Dina Dasberg was only seven and a half when her family was rounded up from their Amsterdam home and transported to Bergen Belsen.  Deaf since birth, Dina struggled to understand what was going on around her.  But one thing gave her continued strength, even in the camp: quiet moments with her father, when he told her stories from the bible and illustrated them to ensure she understood.

Dina was born in Haarlem, to a well-off Jewish family.  When she was three years old, her mother discovered she was deaf.  Under the looming Nazi specter, however, there was nothing to be done for her.  One year later, the family was forcibly relocated to Amsterdam.

Dina, now in her 70s, was interviewed by Ynet.  She recalled the day her mother Bertha packed all their belongings.  Although the move was not by choice, it proved beneficial for young Dina, as the big city provided her the opportunity to learn for the first time.

“A private tutor came and taught me to speak in front of a mirror, I went to a special school for the hard-of-hearing, and lived in a private bubble of false normalcy,” she remembers.

Her mother, ever wary they would be made to leave again, kept a packed suitcase under the bed at all times, and instructed young Dina to prepare one, too.  She proved prescient, for one day the Nazis appeared in their living room and shipped them off, first to a transit camp near the border, then to Bergen Belsen.

Dina described the hardships of life in the camp.  “It was a very difficult camp.  There were barracks – one department for women, and one for men.  My brother, my father and other relatives who came with us were separated.  I remained with my mother and grandmother.  I remember narrow benches with three levels.  My mother and I slept on one bench, and my grandmother slept beneath us.”

It was Dina’s father’s job to make sure everyone showed up for roll call.  “Sometimes that meant standing a whole day in the cold, the snow, children and the elderly, until the number of inmates was exact.  It was very difficult, especially in the winter.  I was afraid of the Germans, but I was more afraid of their wolfhounds.”

Yet Dina’s father Eliazar found opportunities to to spend time with his young daughter.  To make sure she knew her Jewish heritage, he would tell her stories from the bible, starting with creation.  He would then illustrate those stories on receipts, which he kept in a tin cigarette box for safekeeping.

“He would take me to a quiet corner and tell me stories from the bible.  Each time, he told me one story, in order — and then he drew it for me.  The pictures were meant to help me understand because I couldn’t hear well.  It was our time together, and I always waited impatiently for the next meeting.”

But Dina’s father suffered from tuberculosis, and as time went on, it became harder and harder for him to continue.  “My father could barely stand.  We got as far as Judges in our illustrated bible, Saul and Samuel, and that was it.  Father couldn’t any more.”

The Dasbergs were among the lucky ones.  Bergen Belsen served not only as a concentration camp, but also as a prisoner exchange camp.  In January 1945, relatives in Israel succeeded in negotiating their inclusion in an exchange, along with several British soldiers, in return for German prisoners.

From the time the Dasbergs left Bergen Belsen until shortly before Eliazar’s death in 1989, Dina did not see her father’s 43-page creation.  She believes the memories were too difficult for him.

When Dina’s brother, Shimon, suggested she donate the bible to Yad Vashem, she did not hesitate.  After all, the museum already has a Passover Haggadah (prayer book) her father made along with another inmate at Bergen Belsen.

Dina’s bible is now being published in a memorial volume called “Silent Witnesses,” written by the late Haviva Peled-Carmeli, former Senior Curator and Director of the Artifacts Department in the Yad Vashem Museums Division.  The book contains images and stories of artifacts from the Holocaust which tell the tales of their owners, many of whom cannot speak for themselves.

For Dina, however, the bible reminds her not of her suffering, but of her father, and the love he had for her.