Abel Herzberg

Abel Herzberg
Abel Herzberg in c. 1913
Born	Abel Jacob Herzberg (1893-09-17)17 September 1893 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Died	19 May 1989(1989-05-19) (aged 95) Amsterdam, Netherlands
Occupation	Lawyer writer
Notable awards	Constantijn Huygens Prize (1964) P. C. Hooft Award (1972)
Children	Judith Herzberg (b. 1934)

Abel Jacob Herzberg (17 September 1893 – 19 May 1989) was a Dutch Jewish lawyer and writer, whose parents were Russian Jews who had come to the Netherlands from Lithuania. Herzberg was trained as a lawyer and began a legal practice in Amsterdam, and became known as a legal scholar also. He was a Zionist from an early age, and around the time of the outbreak of World War II he attempted to emigrate with his family to Palestine. During the war he remained active in Jewish organizations until he was interned, with his wife, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where his legal background and status as a legal scholar (which made him desirable to the Nazis in a possible exchange for Germans abroad) earned him a seat on a prisoners' court. After their captors moved them from Bergen-Belsen, he and his wife were later liberated by the Soviets and made it back to the Netherlands, where they were reunited also with their children. He continued his legal practice in Amsterdam, though he traveled to Palestine and was offered an administrative position in newly-founded Israel.

Herzberg had written a play before the war, and in Bergen-Belsen he began keeping a diary. After the war he began a career as a writer, his first publication, Amor fati, being a collection of essays on life in Bergen-Belsen. In 1950, he published a history of the persecution of the Jews as well as his diary of the camp; he is one of the earliest historians of the Holocaust. His published works include historical texts, journalism, diaries and autobiography, novellas, and plays.

Herzberg was born in Amsterdam into a family of Russian Jews. His parents migrated from Lithuania, having been part of the exodus of Eastern European Jews of 1882–1914. Herzberg's father, a Zionist who traded in diamonds, was active in aiding Jewish migrants on their travels to the United States; the history of the Jews as well as the contemporaneous diaspora were frequently discussed in the family. Herzberg's father took the family to the Eighth Congress of the World Zionist Organization in The Hague, an important moment for young Abel, who later wrote about the experience of seeing the Zionist flag: "There, for the first time in my life, I saw a Jewish flag and I knew we weren't dreaming. All we had to do was wait forty years, forty bitter years".