Abstract: Concentration camp survivor and psychiatrist who became a high profile campaigner on child abuseThe Dutch psychiatrist and psychotherapy professor Dries van Dantzig once confessed to a colleague that he survived Neuengamme concentration camp "by making myself invisible"-which makes his survival seem all the more remarkable, as later he was rarely out of the public arena as a tireless and hard hitting promoter of mental health care.Imprisonment followed by years in a tuberculosis sanatorium may have sharpened the sense of injustice that reportedly drove Van Dantzig in his later public life.Today he is remembered as a merciless debater, publicist, political lobbyist, and film critic.His refusal to take "no for an answer" ensured that mental health and especially child abuse had a higher place on the political agenda of postwar Holland than it otherwise might have had.Van Dantzig was renowned for glaring from the front row at conference speakers with whom he disagreed.He made countless television appearances, and seemed to know a remarkable number of government ministers personally.The simple theme that underpinned his career was that, compared with somatic illness, psychiatric illness was largely ignored and underfunded.He illustrated this by arguing that every year more children would be killed by abuse than would ever die from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which attracted millions more in funding.He suggested that up to 30% of the population had a neurosis, and that cases of child abuse could result in 50 to 80 deaths a year.Dries van Dantzig was born in 1920 into a progressive and left leaning family in Gouda.His education in Amsterdam was disrupted as the second world war broke out while he was still in his teens.He was eventually arrested for his involvement with the resistance and sent to Neuengamme near Hamburg.Of the 5500 Dutchmen sent there only 600 survived.Van Dantzig was among the few who did because, he later claimed, he was able to blend into the background amid such horrors as collecting dead bodies to take to the ovens or eating the food of those who had died.Yet all the time he was sharpening both his observational skills and his acute sense of injustice.