Maria Johanna Vaders was born in 1922 in The Hague, the Netherlands.

From the age of barely eighteen, Vaders, a young civil servant at The Hague's employment office, was involved in various resistance movements. The group to which Vaders belonged went by the code name “A.C. contact V.G.” (Officials Contact Free Group The Hague). They forged identity papers and identity cards and carried out courier missions.

In 1944, after three years of operation, the group was denounced by an informer. Maria Vaders was sent to the Oranjehotel prison in Scheveningen on June 20, 1944, then deported to Herzogenbusch, a section of the SS concentration camp of Vught in the Netherlands. On September 6, 1944, the camp's male prisoners were transported by cattle truck to the concentration camp Oranienburg and the female prisoners to the concentration camp Ravensbrück. Vaders was one of the group of two hundred Dutch women sent on October 13, 1944, to the Agfa Camera Factory, an external camp of Dachau in the Giesing section of Munich. They were rare among prisoners of Dachau in that they were female. Vaders was registered as prisoner number 123,145, survived to see liberation, and subsequently returned to the Netherlands.

Vaders later wrote about the attempts she and the other Dutch women in this external camp made to fight the inhuman Nazi system at the camp: their resistance against the excessively long hours of work, punishment roll-calls, and inadequate rations. As Vaders was held responsible for the women's acts of resistance, she was sent for solitary confinement in “the bunker” for seven weeks. During this time, she fell ill and was transferred to the disinfection barracks for two weeks, only to be returned to the bunker afterwards. She later learned that she was supposed to have been deported to Bergen-Belsen as an “NN” (Nacht und Nebel, night and fog) prisoner, but it never happened.

Vaders said about her poem “Bunker Dachau,” “I didn't write in the bunker, it was too dangerous. I had hidden a pencil in my hair and at some point I managed to write out a short note on toilet paper in shorthand. I then wrote down all my thoughts at some later point….” In 1993, Maria Vaders published a small collection of poems about her concentration camp experiences, including the poem reproduced here. She died in the Netherlands in 2000.