Her interest in the topic grew out of her own experiences during World War II, when she was forced to go into hiding from the Nazis and was subsequently arrested and deported to Auschwitz on the last transport leaving the Westerbork transit camp on 3 September 1944.

Her father went to the Central Room for Jewish Resettlement and found a sympathetic German who stamped the order "released."

When the Germans arrived, they took her to an assembly point for Amsterdam Jews, but she managed to enter the building without being registered.

At first she hid in the home of Christian friends of her parents who worked in the Dutch underground, but they were afraid that if they were arrested, Bloeme would be, too.

She spent the next year hiding in 15 to 16 different places, including an Amsterdam old-age home and a job as a maid for a widow and her son in Rotterdam.

[4][5] Bloeme saw Anne, Margot and their mother regularly in Auschwitz,[6] although she was part of a separate group of eight women who stayed together, encouraging and helping one another.

[3][7] In October 1944, Bloeme and her group were selected for transfer to the Liebau labor camp in Upper Silesia.

She and a small group of friends began walking back to the Netherlands on foot, arriving six weeks later.

[3] In the 1980s, she began holding group therapy sessions for former hidden children, addressing "our grief, our anger, our aggression and our mourning".