An 107-year-old Holocaust survivor has been given one of Amsterdam’s highest civic honours for her efforts to educate people about the German occupation of the Netherlands.

Mirjam Bolle-Levie received the Andreaspenning in Jerusalem at the premiere of Lost City (Verdwenen Stad), a film about the role of Amsterdam’s tram network in the deportation of the Jews.

“I’m very honoured to receive this distinction,” she said after being handed her certificate by the Dutch ambassador to Israel, Marriet Schuurman. “I didn’t know I’d been so noble and done so much for Holocaust education.”

Bolle-Levie is the last surviving link to the Jewish Council (Joodse Raad), which liaised between the German occupiers and the city’s Jewish population.

After the war its two chairman, David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, were criticised for not doing more to protect the community. Three-quarters of the Netherlands’ Jewish population died in the Holocaust, more than in any other occupied nation.

The council was ordered to distribute Stars of David to Amsterdam’s Jews and compiled a register of names and addresses that was later used by the Nazis to carry out deportations.

Jewish Council

Bolle-Levie, who became the council’s secretary in 1938 at the age of just 21, always defended Cohen and Asscher. “They thought at the time that they could do a deal with the Nazis and put off the deportation of the Jews for as long as possible,” she said in 1995. “They thought they were doing the right thing.”

As a member of the Jewish Council Bolle-Levie had a bar, or exemption, from deportation, but in 1943 she was rounded up during a razzia and sent to Bergen-Belsen in January 1944.

Six months later she was transported to British-occupied Palestine in a prisoner exchange. She married Leo Bolle, who had emigrated from Amsterdam in 1938, and took Israeli citizenship when the country was established in 1948.

The letters she wrote to Leo during the war, which were never sent at the time, were published in 2003 under the title Ik zal je beschrijven hoe een dag er hier uitziet (“Let me describe to you what a day here looks like”).

The Andreaspenning is awarded to individuals who “deliver exceptional performances with a nationwide influence” in areas such as art, science, politics, sport and journalism.