Lina Saartje Letter was the the youngest of the four children of the in Zwolle born Aron Israel Letter and Rosette Hamburger from Nijkerk. Lina was born in Zwolle on 18 October 1906 and had an older sister yet, Helena, who was born 8 June 1901. There had been also two brothers, Karel and Sally, who have died already young and very young: Karel was 9 years old when he died in 1909 and Sally was only 5 months in 1905. Also Lina’s parents didn’t die high aged: her father passed away as a widower on 16 February 1921 at the age of 57 and her mother died in childbirth at the age of 36, two days after the birth of Lina Saartje, on 20 June1906.
On 2 June 1939 the still unmarried Lina Saartje Letter arrived in Amsterdam, where she found a room in the Beethovenstraat 99 3rd floor with Olga Kühne, who ran a guesthouse in Amsterdam since April 1934. On 27 June 1940 she moved to Schubertstraat 30 parterre, again a room with Olga Kühne. When Olga Kühne moved to Geuzenkade 61 on 6 February 1942, Lina Saartje moved to Jekerstraat 11 2nd floor, where she came with the family of Isaac Snuijf and Bloeme Pais.
When Lina Saartje Letter was brought into Westerbork on 1 October 1942, she mentioned N.(athan) Heijmans (brother of her brother-in-law Abraham Barend Heijmans), who lived at Uiterwaardenstraat 340 and Olga Marie Kühne at Geuzenkade 61, as “addresses for correspondence”. Many correspondence could not have been there, as the next day already, on 2 October 1942, she was deported to Auschwitz. There, on arrival on 5 October 1942, Lina Saartje Letter was immediately killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Sources include the City Archive of Amsterdam, archive cards of Lina Saartje Letter, Helena Letter, Abraham Barend Heijmans, Nathan Heijmans and Olga Kühne; residence cards of Amsterdam Beethovenstraat 99, Schubertstraat 30 and Jekerstraat 11; website wiewaswie.nl/ births, deaths and marriages of the Letter families and the file cabinet of the Jewish Council, registration card of Lina Saartje Letter.