"The minute you give up hope you would finish in two days."
Hetty Verolme has reunited with some of the children from Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where she spent fourteen months as a teenager ensuring their survival.
Barracks 211, known as the Children’s House, was where more than fifty children were dumped to ride out the war.
The Nazis had taken their parents to other concentration camps to be used as slave labour or worse, sent to the gas chamber.
Hetty became known as "the little mother", forced to care not only for her little brothers Max and Jackie but for dozens of children facing imminent death at the hands of the Nazis.
While untold horrors went on outside, she kept the youngsters clean, and began to distract them with impromptu games, lessons and shows.
She even conducted brazen raid to steal food for the starving kids.
"I saw the children hanging on the bed and sitting on chairs and they were listless and I realised something had to be done to get that interest going," She told Sunday Night.
"The minute you give up hope you would finish in two days."
By war’s end Bergen Belsen was desperately overcrowded. Sixty four thousand people were crammed in the space of one and a half football fields.
Among them was Anne Frank, old enough to be in the adult section she died just weeks before the British liberators arrived.
"If Anne had been in the children’s house she would have survived."
Hetty's first moments of joy on swings built by the British soldiers days after liberation from the Nazis were captured on film, vision she cherishes.
Incredibly, not only had her three siblings survived, so had their parents who’d endured hell at other slave labour camps.
They emigrated to Australia and later Hetty made her fortune as a department store developer.
"You have to have imagination. Everything in life start with imagination. The building of a big building …or with any business if you do not have imagination you’ll never make it."
At a special reunion in Amsterdam, the children of Bergen Belsen reunited with Hetty, many for the first time in 70 years.
One of them, Julius Maslovat, was just two when he was dumped in the children's house.
"You look so distinguished. I’m so proud of you from that little boy you turned out to be such a good man," She told Julius.
"I’m very grateful to her because without her care I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have had the good life that I have enjoyed since then. I wouldn’t have my children I wouldn’t have my grandchildren," Julius told Sunday Night.
Hetty now visits schools with her books and talks to students about the Holocaust, but her message is a positive one.
"I want you to promise me, that you will tell your children that you met me and that I told you this story because this may be the only way that we can prevent it from happening, these awful things from happening again."
"What’s the secret to life? Love not hate."
Details of Hetty’s charitable trust can be found here:
www.holocausttrust.com.au
Hetty’s book is available to buy at:
http://hetty.com.au/
