At night, they slept on "hard mattresses filled with a little fetid straw" in dirty, lice-infested barracks. The conditions then deteriorated further. By 1945, as awareness dawned that Germany would lose the war, the guards stopped feeding the surviving prisoners, and ramped up their mass extermination efforts   Following negotiations by Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, Hetty Voûte, Gisela Wieberdink-Soehnlein, and other inmates were finally freed from Ravensbrück on April 28, 1945. Given fresh bread and lentil soup by representatives from the International Red Cross, they were also given medical care before being transported by van, train and ferry to Malmö. Initially not permitted to return to the Netherlands due to a severe food shortage there and because she still had not yet fully recovered from the effects of her concentration camp imprisonment, she was hospitalized at Landskrona before being transferred to Lidingö, a sanatorium near Stockholm when physicians discovered she had contracted tuberculosis. She was finally permitted to return home in April 1946.Voûte, Henriette, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands. On December 16, 1946, Hetty Voûte began a new life when she wed Christian Elie Dutilh (1923–1989) in Utrecht. Following their marriage, the couple relocated to the Dutch East Indies, where they greeted the arrival of two sons and two daughters. When Hetty contracted tuberculosis again in 1953, the family returned to the Netherlands, making their home in Amsterdam's Prinses Marijkestraat. She and her husband divorced in 1972. Hetty Voûte then became a biology teacher at the Huishoudschool in Amsterdam, a position she held for eight years. In her later years, she lived was a resident of Amsterdam who lived "in an elegant apartment on one of the loveliest streets in the city, just a few blocks from the Anne Frank House". Her parents and siblings also survived the war. Her brother, Jan Lodewijk Voûte (1904–1962), who was the oldest of the Voûte children, was known by friends and family as "Lodie," and was one of the two Voûte brothers who co-published a Dutch Resistance newspaper during World War II (an activity for which he was ultimately arrested and imprisoned by Nazi officials), went on to become a Dutch diplomat. Assigned to posts in Madrid, Spain; Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil; The Hague; and Santiago, Chile, he was appointed as the Netherlands' ambassador to Chile in 1960 – a position he held until his death there from heart disease on October 24, 1962.