Johan Siegfried van Cleef

On the 1st of January 1944 Johann- Ziegfried Van Cleef, while imprisoned in Westerbork transit camp in Holland with his wife Hertha and daughter Daisy, was given a drawing with the dedication from Daisy for his 39th birthday. The man portrayed delivering mail in the drawing is Johann himself, who worked as a mailman in the camp. Written on the side of the drawing is the dedication "Congratulations! From Daisy". The drawing itself was made by artist Leo Kok, who used his artistic talent to document daily life in the camp.

Approximately six months after, the Van Cleef family was transferred from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen. Johann and the other male prisoners were assigned to forced labor, digging sewage trenches and Hertha worked in the shoe factory. Of her time in Bergen-Belsen, Daisy remembers unending hunger, standing in the freezing cold during roll-call, and the smell of burning bodies. Johann did not survive the bitter cold, hunger and brutal work conditions at the camp, and succumbed eleven days before his 40th birthday.

Hertha and Daisy were liberated in April 1945. A year later in April 1946, a few days before her 10th birthday, Daisy and her mother immigrated to Eretz Israel, where Daisy Marion Yuliana changed her name to Miriam.

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