Aat Breur-Hibma

Adriana Klazina "Aat" Breur-Hibma (The Hague, 1913 – 2002) was a Dutch draftswoman and painter. Her work matters chiefly for the pencil portraits she made at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was held as a Nacht und Nebel prisoner, and which are preserved at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Born in The Hague, she studied at the Academy of Visual Arts on the condition that she obtain a teaching certificate. During the German occupation she joined the Dutch resistance, forging identity cards. After her arrest in 1942 she was deported to Ravensbrück in September 1943. There, thanks partly to her skill as a draftswoman, she worked in the bookbindery and gained access to scraps of paper for her clandestine drawings of fellow prisoners.

After liberation she was repatriated seriously ill with tuberculosis and spent years in hospitals and sanatoriums, rarely speaking of her experience. It was her daughter Dunya who, decades later, brought the drawings to light and published in 1983 the book "De verborgen herinnering", which pairs them with the testimonies of some of the women portrayed. Breur-Hibma was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1998, together with her husband Krijn. Her legacy lies in an exceptional visual record of the women's concentration camp world.