1945
Konzentrationslager (KL)
BERGEN-BELSEN
Kleines Frauenlager
The Lüneburg Heath
THE GERMAN REICH
Twelve weeks before liberation
Clinging together, shivering, Anne and Margot are motherless now. The evacuation that followed the final selection in Birkenau has left Mummy behind in the infirmary and orphaned them. A forced march along icy roads, loaded with panicked Wehrmacht troops retreating in the face of the Red Army, was followed by a transport in a putrid boxcar without water or food before they were dumped onto this ghastly heath, the ground crisp with sleet, where they have been abandoned to the rawest elements. This camp has no gas chambers, but then, they’re not needed. The SS stay healthy on their side of the barbed wire and let starvation, the bitter winter, and pestilence do the führer’s work. The prisoner shacks teem with disease. Typhus travels in the barracks dust of every scuffle over every scrap of bread. Within the first six weeks, Margot has become so sick that she’s too weak to walk. Her voice has been replaced by an entrenched cough. The massive tent, where they were first sheltered, collapsed under the hammering of a thunderstorm, and now they are billeted in a frigid, louse-ridden block, packed together on the bottom pallet of a wooden bunk. This is Bergen-Belsen, and here the angel of death has made his home.
Except. Except there is one spot in this wretched cesspool where life is permitted. It is the Sternlager, the Star Camp, the Free Camp, where the so-called privilegierte Juden are held. Jews whom the SS think might still be valuable as hostages. There’s food in the Sternlager, bad food but food nonetheless. The inmates wear their own clothes in the Sternlager, instead of Kazet stripes or castoffs from the dead; their heads have not been shaved, and whole families have been kept intact. The barbed-wire fence that divides this paradise from what’s called the Kleines Frauenlager is tightly crammed with straw, but there are points of desperation where the straw has been torn away. Points where a portal has been opened between life and death.
It is through such a portal, no larger than a fist, that Anne has been reunited with her dearest Hanneli. Her dearest, dearest Lies. While Anne was snug in the Achterhuis, hidden from the German death grip, Hanneli had filled her nightmares. Her sleep had been shredded by dreams of her sweet Lies trapped behind the cruel barbed wire of a Nazi camp, her clothes in rags, freezing, starving, and begging for mercy while Anne slept tucked under thick blankets in an attic hideout and ate enough food to fill her belly. Anne had wept for her. Cried out her name. But in Bergen-Belsen nightmares are turned inside out, and it is Hanneli who receives Red Cross parcels and Anne who shivers in sickened misery on the opposite side of the wire.
A winter darkness bereft of stars. Anne stumbles across the snow-smeared ground toward the fence. It is so intensely wonderful to see Lies, and so intensely horrid. To find her alive, still a human being, Anne is enraptured. And for a moment, as she peers through the fence’s portal at Hanneli’s pale, oval face, she loves Lies with every inch of her being. Hanneli alive! But in the next instant, Anne’s mouth runs bitter. They sob together as their fingers touch through the barbed wire, but Anne can see the horror reflected in Hanneli’s tears. She knows what her friend sees. Anne has been reduced to a diseased animal, filthy, infested with lice and scratching herself bloody, her eyes swimming with fever, her head shorn, naked but for a horse blanket clutched around her body, her louse-infested rags discarded. Anne cries that she is freezing. That she is starving. That the lice are driving her mad, and Lies cries with her. For her.
“Anne, what are you doing in this place? Why aren’t you in Switzerland?” Hanneli demands, as if maybe Anne has tricked her somehow. Anne can only cry as she admits the truth.
“That was only a ruse,” she sobs. “Really we were hiding in the rear of Papa’s office building. The whole time.”
“Oh, my God. All this time in the middle of Amsterdam?”
“Until we were arrested. Lies, I am so cold,” Anne moans. “And there’s nothing to eat here. We’ve all been left to starve. Do you have some food you can share? Please, Lies. I’m so hungry. So hungry.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll get you something, I promise. Come back here tomorrow night, and I’ll have something for you.”
So a night later Hanneli has bundled up a parcel from the Red Cross packages and heaves it over the wire. But there are many rats on Anne’s side of the fence, animal and human alike, and a very large specimen of the human variety scurries out of the darkness and snatches the bundle from Anne’s hands. She screams, and then she weeps. She weeps not just because she is starving but also because Lies is so beautiful. Because her dear Hanneli has something that she will not share with her loving friend Anne. Something she cannot share.
Hope.
The next night when Anne meets her at the tiny hole in the fence, Lies has another parcel for her and manages to toss it over. This time Anne snatches it up before any rats attack, and she tears it open with a wild appetite. But there is no hope for her in Hanneli’s offering. Only Red Cross rations. A few Swedish knäckebrod crackers, some dried prunes, and a hard cookie. Holding back the cookie for Margot, she sobs as she devours the rest in front of Lies, as her friend watches through the portal. She sobs. The angel of death is following her, she tells Lies. Stealing her life from her, person by person, until soon she will have no family at all. No one.
11
FURIES
This is the Site of
The Infamous Belsen Concentration Camp
Liberated by the British on 15 April 1945
10,000 unburied dead were found here.
Another 13,000 have since died,
all of them victims of the
German new order in Europe,
and an example of Nazi Kultur.
—Sign erected on the Lüneburg Heath by the 11th Armoured Division, British Army of Liberation
Your furies have passed over me; Your terrors have cut me down.
—Psalms 88:17
1945
Displaced Persons Camp (DPC)
BELSEN
(Camp No. 2)
Under 81 British General Hospital Staff, RAMC
Typhus Block / Women’s Ward
BRITISH-OCCUPIED GERMANY
It’s still shocking. Every time she wakes from a fitful sleep and finds herself lying in an actual bed with actual sheets that are clean and bleached white, it’s shocking. How can this be? How can she deserve such luxury? The makeshift hospital around her smells of chlorine disinfectant and diarrhea, and the flies, buzzing everywhere, are having their feasts. Yet there’s a breeze wafting through the open window sash that’s warm and hopeful, and a part of Anne cannot help but take pleasure from it. Her brain is often murky, so when it recognizes pleasure, it is the oddest sort of sensation, the joy of simple warmth touching her face.
There is a bottle of clear saline solution hanging from a rack dripping down through a tube into a needle that’s inserted into Anne’s arm. The needle is held in place with strips of white tape. Sometimes the bottle will capture the sunlight in the morning, and Anne will watch, in awe, as the silvery light is distilled into her veins. It is on such a morning, as the daylight invades the ward, that Anne Frank manages to make a request of the British Red Cross nursing sister, who has recently changed her linen after she inadvertently shit herself, since diarrhea is still such a close friend. The nurse is a small, compactly built young woman, wearing a triangular cap on her head and dressed in trousers and army boots under her white smock. Her face is plain, no cosmetics, no expression beyond that of blunt detachment, except for the brief moment when she was changing the bedding and Anne had glimpsed a flash of something like pity in the woman’s eyes. Perhaps even something like compassion.
“Please, there is a mirror?” Anne asks. She knows that much English at least, enough to ask this question. The
first time she speaks, however, the nurse does not seem to hear her, and could she really be blamed for going deaf to the constant drubbing of demands coming from her patients? Schwester, Schwester, Fräulein, bitte! A bowl. Sister, please, eine Pfanne. Ich brauche eine Schüssel geben, bevor ich mich scheißen. I must have medicine. Medycyna. Siostra, medycyna. My dressing must be changed. No, change my dressing first.
So the next time, Anne must strain to speak up. “Please, a mirror?”
The nurse frowns back at her. Says nothing, only stares. Holding onto her frown, she swats blankly at a fly, and then, with a thump of her army-issue boots, she turns and marches away. Well, that’s it, Anne thinks. That’s it. No mirror for me. I must now imagine my face. There were a few girls with mirrors at Auschwitz, but Anne never had the clout required to obtain such an item. Even a glance into the glass was too expensive. A half crust of bread was the price. Four potato peels. A contraband cigarette. Who could afford it? Anne must stick to her memory of herself: the young girl in the mirror she remembers from their days in hiding. The dark-haired, ugly-duckling type who showed up in the glass above the lavatory sink. Though she knows that such a girl and such a face no longer exist.
A party of flies light on her blanket, while one more hops onto her forehead and then her nose, though she doesn’t bother to brush it away. German flies, of course. The führer’s flies, here to torment Jews. But really, flies are like dead bodies. She no longer takes note of them. In the barracks blocks, the flies were as thick as paste, even in the cold. Hundreds of women packed together, spilling shit and blood and fluids: it was a fly paradise.
Anne turns her head at the surprise of the tromping of boots. The Red Cross sister has returned. She has preserved her frown, of course, but perhaps because she is still young herself, this nurse, she knows the value of the small pocket mirror that she bears, even if it is split by an awful crack down the middle.
“Mirror,” the nurse declares, as if confirming the definition of the word. But now Anne is hesitant to take it. A flash of fear sours her belly. How foolish of her to ask. How stupid! Why on earth should she want to see her face, when it can only be the face of a corpse? She should simply turn away. She should simply turn away and glare into dead space, and she is about to do just that when the Red Cross sister decides to help her out. Opening Anne’s bony hand with her own, the young nurse places the cracked mirror in Anne’s palm.
The split reflection that Anne meets in the broken glass is haunted. Skin blotchy with disease. Dark cauldron eyes retain the cruel hunger she no longer feels in her belly. Her head was shaved by the English this time, and lice scabs dapple her skull. Whatever beauty she might have grown into is gone. Stripped away. She is hideous. If she had the strength, she would fling the mirror to the floor and let it crash to pieces. But since she doesn’t, she simply lets it drop from her palm and stretches her neck with a muted moan of disgust, oblivious to the buzzing squadrons of the führer’s flies.
* * *
• • •
At night she finds Margot sitting on the edge of her bed, but she does not scream or shout out for help. For an instant the smallest pinprick of hope stabs her. But there’s really no fooling herself. There is no life remaining in her sister’s gaze. Margot has simply followed her from the mass graves into the hospital block. Her hair is matted, her lips cracked. A purpled rash from the typhus colors her neck, and her eyes hang open like swallowing caves. The yellow star is pinned to the dirty brown pullover that she wears over striped Lager britches. Oddly, the apparition is comforting. Typhus had broiled Anne’s brain with fever and taunted her with such appalling hallucinations. The dead calling to her from the corpse pits. Grasping the air with their skeletal claws. Demanding food they could no longer consume. Demanding a future they could no longer comprehend. But now she gazes back at her sister’s face.
You can’t just lie here, Anne, Margot tells her. You have to get up.
Anne manages, carefully and very slowly, to prop herself onto her elbows.
They won’t send you back home till you can walk.
“And where,” Anne wonders dimly, “is home, exactly?”
Where? Don’t be silly.
“Amsterdam? I should consider Amsterdam my home still? Without you, without Mummy, without Pim?”
You cannot be sure about Pim, Margot tells her. There is still a chance.
“No. Pim is gone,” says Anne flatly.
You don’t know that for certain.
“I do. How could he have lived through Auschwitz? He was old, Margot. Fifty-five years old. How could he possibly have survived a selection?”
So you’re the authority on life and death?
“You know very well how things worked. The Germans made it perfectly clear—the only way out was ‘up the chimney.’ They probably gassed Pim on the very first night.”
You don’t know that for certain, her sister repeats more forcefully.
“And what do you know for certain, hmm?” Anne frowns. “You’re dead.”
I know this much: As long as you remain lying here in this bed like a lump of self-pity, you will remain a lump of self-pity. I know that you must stand up and walk. That’s what I know.
Anne looks into Margot’s face and feels a keen edge of loneliness saw into her. “Do you hate me, Margot?”
Hate you?
“For what I did.”
But she receives no answer from her sister. There’s a noise from down the corridor, a door slamming, and when Anne looks up, her sister has been reabsorbed by the dark of the room. A deep exhaustion creeps into Anne’s heart, and she lowers her head back onto the flat pillow. For a moment she drills a look through the darkness above her, but then her eyes sink closed, serenaded by the gaping snores and tormented groans of the surviving remnant as it slumbers.
* * *
• • •
In the morning a clatter of bedpans wakes her. She breathes in deeply as she sits up on her cot and ever so gingerly slides her legs out from under the bedclothes. Her legs are little more than sticks, but she has feet that touch the wooden floorboards. She gazes down at herself. Her skin is pockmarked with scabs. The Red Cross nurse appears at her bedside and, clucking noisily, shifts her back under the covers. She is, of course, too weak to resist. She cannot conceive of resisting anything at all. But when the nurse exits the ward, she tries again. Slowly she grips the wooden headboard as firmly as she can manage. Her legs feel brittle, and her body burns as if her papery muscles might shred, but marshaling all her puny strength into the effort, she rises. At first it is too much. Twice she plops back down onto the hard mattress. The third time her arms shiver with the strain, but suddenly she feels a lightness fill her and she lifts herself from the bed, as if she is a balloon on a string floating upward. Her legs tremble as they take on even the negligible weight of her body, but they do not snap. A tingle of dizziness washes through her head, but then she feels the meek comfort of the warm floorboards on the soles of her feet.
She is standing.
12
SURVIVORS
There are many resistance groups, such as Free Netherlands, that forge identity cards, provide financial support to those in hiding, organize hiding places and find work for young Christians who go underground. It’s amazing how much these generous and unselfish people do, risking their own lives to help and save others.
—Anne Frank, from her diary, 28 January 1944
The reemerging Jews can thank God for the help they received in that form, and feel humble. Much better people might have been lost because of it. . . . There can be no doubt that Jews, specifically, because of German persecution, were able to enjoy great sympathy from the Dutch people. Now it is appropriate for the Jews to restrain themselves and avoid excesses. . . .
—De Patriot, Dutch newspaper, 1945
1945
Amsterdam
Stadsde
el Centrum
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
October
Five months since the entry of the First Canadian Infantry Division
* * *
Arriving at Centraal Station
Amsterdam might have been liberated, but peace looks no different from war. The city’s wartime face passes by the train compartment’s window, the grim façades of buildings on dull parade. Hulking carcasses of locomotives rust on abandoned rail spurs. The clouds are as thick as mud, all part of the drab landscape that stretches from one end of the continent to the other, as if color is now rationed along with milk and bread and coal. A fretful rain speckles the window glass as the train creaks along, following its fractured timetable toward Centraal Station.
She has organized a notebook. It is only two cardboard covers sandwiching the thinnest, flimsiest, poorest-quality paper in the history of thin, flimsy, poor-quality paper, but it should still hold ink. And she has organized a fountain pen, too. Organizing is much different from stealing, you see. To organize something is to obtain a vital item to fill a vital need, and need, she has learned, trumps all. The pen is lovely. A sleek red Montblanc with a nice thick nib. However, there’s a problem. It is being quite stubborn, this Montblanc, on one essential point: It refuses to form words. It refuses to even touch the page with its nice thick nib. The pen remains in her hand but suspended above the paper.
Once she believed she had a gift. To be a writer. She believed that God had a plan for her, and that plan centered on her diary. But all those words, all those pages, are gone. Lost, along with any belief in God’s Grand Plan. Stripped from her like her ambitions when, on a clammy August morning, the Thousand-Year Reich came pounding up the steps of their hiding place. Surely she must realize that she’s been so completely ruined since that day, that if she attempts to write a sentence, the pen will simply blot and smear the paper with a slur of ink.
Annelies Page 10
