Nanette Blitz Konig

Nanette Blitz Konig was born to an affluent Jewish family in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, a daughter of Martijn Willem Blitz, director of the Amsterdam Bank, and his wife Helene Victoria Davids. She had an older brother, Bernard, and a younger brother, Willem, born with a heart defect, who died in 1936. In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied The Netherlands, and at the beginning of 1941, Jewish students were forced to attend Jewish-only schools. At this time, Nanette became a classmate of Anne Frank. In 1943, the Blitz family was arrested and deported via the Westerbork transit camp to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Nanette's father died in November 1944. At the beginning of December, her mother and brother were deported to other camps and Nanette was alone. She later learned that Bernard died in the Oranienburg concentration camp, while Helene was sent to slave labor at the Beendorf salt mines; she was released in April 1945 but died on a train en route to Sweden.

In January 1945, Nanette was transferred to a part of Bergen-Belsen known as the "small women’s camp." From there, she saw her friend Anne through the barbed wire fence in the large women's camp. When these two sections were joined, Nanette was reunited with Anne and her sister Margot. Nanette survived to be liberated by British troops in April 1945. After the war, she spent three years in the hospital due to typhus, the disease that had killed Anne and Margot Frank in the camp. During this period, Anne's father visited Nanette to ask about his daughters. Later, he gave Nanette a printed copy of the diary written by Anne, first published in 1947 as Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex). After Nanette had recovered, she went to live in England, where she met her future husband, John Konig. In 1953, they married and moved to São Paulo, Brazil. Nanette gave lectures about the Holocaust and her life. In 2018, she published her memoir Holocaust Memoirs of a Bergen-Belsen Survivor and Classmate of Anne Frank. The book won the Readers' Favorite International Gold Medal Award in 2019.