Just before they were deported, the Slagers gave their jewelry to their next-door neighbors, who passed it down from generation to generation, with instructions to return them.
A Dutch historical society returned jewels to a Jewish family that had given them to neighbors for safekeeping before being deported by the Nazis.
The jewels were returned to a descendant of Benjamin Slager and Lena Slager-de Vries at a ceremony in the town hall of Winschoten in the north of the Netherlands on October 28, exactly 72 years after her relatives and 500 of the town’s Jews were sent to the Westerbork concentration camp, the Dagblad van het Noorden daily reported.
Only 46 of the town’s Jews survived the Holocaust.