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The Ravensbrück Memorial mourns the Holocaust survivor Erna de Vries, who died last Sunday at her home in Lathen (Emsland) surrounded by her family. Three days earlier, on 21 October, she celebrated her 98th birthday.

Memorial director Andrea Genest: "Erna de Vries was closely connected to the Ravensbrück memorial, where she was a frequent guest as a contemporary witness. Anyone who had the privilege of meeting her personally knows that the world has become poorer again. The staff of the Ravensbrück Memorial mourn the loss of a great person who will be sorely missed. Our deepest sympathy belongs to her relatives."

Erna de Vries was born in Kaiserslautern in 1923 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. In July 1943, she and her mother were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where her mother was murdered on 8 November 1943. Erna was transported from Auschwitz to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in September 1943, where she had to do forced labour for the Siemens & Halske company, among others. She was liberated in April 1945 on one of the death marches in Mecklenburg.

After liberation, she married Josef de Vries (1908-1981) in 1947, with whom she settled in his home town of Lathen in Emsland and started a family. With their three children, they had a fulfilled family life. Since 1997, Erna de Vries has told her story to a large number of people, including at the Ravensbrück memorial. In 2012, for example, she took part in the project "Siemens in Ravensbrück", where she spoke to pupils from Siemens Professional Education Berlin about her experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

For her commitment, she was awarded honorary citizenship by the joint municipality of Lathen, and the Federal Republic of Germany recognised her in 2006 with the award of the Medal of Merit of the Order of Merit and in 2014 with the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon. Since 2015, a secondary school in Münster, since 2016 the square in front of Lathen town hall and since 2018 the primary and secondary school in Lathen bear her name.

In 2007, Erna de Vries participated in the documentary film "Ich wollte noch einmal die Sonne sehen" (I wanted to see the sun one more time), which was made by young people in the association Zeitlupe. Gisa Knolle and Birthe Templin lovingly portrayed Erna de Vries in conversation with her daughter Ruth and granddaughter Rebecca in their film "Was bleibt" (2008). In 2011, Erna de Vries published her memoirs under the title "Der Auftrag meiner Mutter. A survivor of the Shoah tells" (Metropol Verlag, Berlin).