by Irene Butter
Was this what Opa and Omi last experienced? Were they separated before they were killed? When did their hands last touch, their eyes last meet?
“Stop it! That wasn’t here. Opa and Omi didn’t come here!”
She’s right, I repeated to myself, but the lines on Mutti’s face showed fear. Now she studied the growing distance between us and the men and boys.
We were shuttled through a large, double gate next to an ugly shack. Inside, a guard glanced at his watch with a yawn. Gnarled barbed wire wrapped around and stretched between poles. Large rolls of the wire curled through the snow to keep people from even getting too close to the fences. Shards of shattered skin-thin ice fringed the edges of twisted potholes. Mutti and I walked briskly, our group led by a tall woman guard. My head didn’t even come as high as her shoulders. She was huge, and I would have confused her for a man—she was so square and her jaw set so tightly—if not for the stiff skirt. She looked straight ahead as she kept a fast pace along the main road that ran down the middle of the camp like a spine.
Bergen-Belsen spread before us, as structured and orderly as school graph paper. It was bigger than Westerbork, with low row buildings and roads that angled off into paths. It seemed we walked forever in one direction. I turned around to see from where we had come. Dark forms shuffled. So many people everywhere, all moving as slowly as caterpillars nibbling the edge of a leaf. An old woman passed. She carried a glass jar of brown liquid, clasping it as if it were a baby. Was she wearing clothes, or was she just draped with cloth? Three girls stared. Their hair was pulled back, tight and dirty under handkerchiefs. They didn’t look at my face, but at my dress and our belongings. I clutched my rolled up blanket more closely and moved beside Mutti, grasping her sleeve.
“Reni, what?”
“How long will we have to stay here?”
“I don’t know,” Mutti said. “Your father is doing everything he can to help.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Stop asking questions. Don’t cause any trouble.”
“But I’m NOT. I’m just asking one question: How long will we be here? And where’s Pappi and…”
“Shhh!”
I got the answer I didn’t want. It looked like nobody left here. They just stayed, getting dirtier and thinner. The female guard stopped in front of a building and read off a series of names: “…Haas, Hasenberg, Holtzman, Kolb…” Our barracks.
A woman shoved past us and darted inside. Then another came from the other side and pushed us in the other direction. Mutti caught the energy, pulling me in. We skirted to the left and then to the right. It was dark and dank, with rows of bunks. The smell of sweat and sleep was so thick I could feel it on my tongue.
“The choice spots are in the middle, away from the cold walls,” Mutti whispered heavily to me.
She threw her jacket and other clothing onto two lower bunks just before another woman claimed one of them from the other side. The woman glared. Her high cheekbones widened her already square face. Mutti spread her blanket out and fell onto one of the bunks to claim our property in the flesh. She told me to do the same.
“I only see two of you,” the woman said, moving toward Mutti.
“These are for my husband and son,” Mutti said.
“This barracks is for women only,” said the woman.
“Not true,” Mutti replied, advancing on her.
“Mutti, I think it’s true,” I said, butting into the conversation. “Look, there are only women and girls here.”
Mutti kept her eyes on the square-faced woman.
“What’s going on here?” an approaching woman asked. She was older, with a tight, long face, hooked nose, small dark eyes, her dark hair piled high.
“Who are you?” asked the square-faced woman.
“I’m Mrs. Mandel. I’m the leader of this barracks. I’m in charge. Again: What’s going on?”
“She is claiming too many beds,” said the challenger.
“They are for my husband and son,” Mutti explained.
“No men, no boys sleep here,” Mrs. Mandel said. “Anything else?”
Mrs. Mandel glared at Mutti and the square-faced woman.
“No,” said Mutti, “… nothing.”
“Nothing,” agreed the challenger, and sat down on the bed.
“We will be reviewing the barracks’ rules to make sure ‘nothing’ happens all the time,” said Mrs. Mandel, who then swept her head toward the sound of another quarrel and stomped off.
The squared-faced woman smirked, and Mutti grabbed her coat off the bunk.
Mrs. Mandel kept her promise soon after, reviewing rules upon nitty-gritty rules to us new arrivals. We had to keep the barracks clean, make our beds, and we had to report quickly to the Appell, or roll call.
A voice asked about the men and boys.
“They are in other barracks,” said Mrs. Mandel.
Another voice asked if we could see them.
“You will see them tomorrow.”
What about tonight?
Mrs. Mandel glowered.
“Listen closely,” she said, “This is not Westerbork. You don’t ask questions. I’m in charge. I will tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it. You will leave these barracks when I say so, unless you need the toilet. You will not go anywhere until after Appell. You will see your boys and men. Tomorrow.”
She continued to stare. Nobody said a word. She walked away.
I realized why Mrs. Mandel seemed familiar. She reminded me of Fräulein Rottenmeier, the strict and nasty housemaid from Heidi.
The other women—the ones who were here when we arrived—came over to look for familiar faces, and to tell us what they felt we needed to know. Every day started with Appell, where everyone had to line up in rows outside to be counted by the Germans and Kapos.
“What’s a Kapo?” asked Mutti.
“Prisoners who are forced to work for the Nazi Germans,” said a woman. “They supervise the forced labor here. They can be terrible. Terrible.”
“Some Kapos are decent, considering their work,” added another. “The Germans choose them. To refuse is to be punished. Some figure out how to serve the Nazis while helping us. Others are less…subtle. They become more like the Nazis.”
I didn’t understand all her words, but I understood enough. Be careful: the Kapos can be bad. Even if they were prisoners like we were.
“Mandel?” asked Mutti.
“She is a favorite of the camp commandant, and she plays favorites herself, though not in the same way. Avoid her bad side.”
“Avoid any side of her,” said another.
“The Appells are serious?” asked Mutti.
“Very. It is not just individuals who are punished for mistakes. We can all be punished. Hundreds of us, if they choose, even for one person’s mistake.”
Women went on to further describe the Appell. The Kapos and officers didn’t call names, and we were not assigned a number. The Nazis just counted us over and over, as if we were coins to be deposited. The tiniest problem—a whisper, a wrong glance—meant we would stand longer. Problems larger than tiny ones could mean a beating.
Later that night we climbed into bed. Around us, the women talked about recipes and food, and what they would eat when the war was over. I thought of our family meals together, and I asked Mutti if we would bunk again with Pappi and Werner.
“Reni, at least we are in the same camp as your father and brother,” said Mutti. “We will see them very soon. Trust me.”
“I do,” I said.
It was Mrs. Mandel I wasn’t sure about.
21
Camp Bergen-Belsen, Germany
Winter 1944
Just like on the train, I felt like I had no sooner fallen asleep than I awoke to shouts of “Raus, Raus. Schnell!” “Out, Out. Quickly!” I sat, spinning my head from side-to-side at the thought of rabid dogs lunging toward me.
“You are to report to Appell in a half hour,” Mrs. Mandel
barked. “It is five-thirty-one a.m. You now have twenty-nine minutes.”
A voice from two bunks away asked about breakfast.
“Westerbork pampered you. There’s no breakfast here. That is why I let you sleep in. Move.”
I was so nervous putting on all my clothes and getting a drink of water that I suddenly realized something just as Mrs. Mandel announced we had eight minutes.
“I have to pee,” I said to Mutti.
She pulled in her lips. Her eyes widened.
“Please. I have to go badly,” I almost whined.
“Be quick. Very quick.”
I waded through the swelling sea of dressing women and girls. Some were all ready, and lingered by the door.
The brunt of the outside cold knocked the grogginess out of me. I walked at a quick pace, keeping my eyes on the ground after almost falling on the dark patches of ice. The women had told us that each of the barracks had a couple of single toilet stalls, but they were broken and filthy, used only by the sickest and most desperate who couldn’t make it outside. The working latrines were separate buildings. There was a line to get in, and I took my place at the end, burying my hands deep into my jacket. I fidgeted with the growing hole in my right pocket as I looked ahead to see if the line was shortening, and I glanced back at the barracks where there was shouting.
A woman leaving the latrine hissed: “Don’t be late! We will all be punished.”
I thought about running back, but I didn’t want to pee myself. That would make me really cold.
“Move. Move. Move,” I prayed.
As quickly as people burst from the latrine—smoothing down their skirts and buttoning their jackets—others rushed to take their place. Finally, I was in. The stench almost made me gag. I held my nose. How could this be so much worse than Westerbork? There was a long bench with two rows of holes running down the middle, set at a crisscross so that if you leaned back you wouldn’t bump the person behind you. I scanned the seats in the gloom to see which one was cleanest, wanting to stay away from anything damp or lumpy. Then in one graceful act, I pulled down my leggings, lifted my skirt, and sat. I gathered what privacy I could, moving my skirt to keep covered and warm. I looked ahead and down so as not to catch the eye of my neighbor. There was very little sound; only occasional moans. I had to go so badly, I hardly cared.
I breathed through my mouth. Werner told me that smells were actually little bits of actual stinky things in the air. I didn’t like the idea of breathing in tiny pieces of poop, especially through my mouth, but it was better than the smell coming into my nose.
I closed my eyes and listened to the guard yelling orders, somewhere out beyond. I tried pushing out the pee. Nothing. I counted and relaxed, producing a small leak. More yelling and my pee dammed up. I did math exercises in my head to get started again. Three-plus-three-equals-six, plus-three-equals-nine, plus-three-equals-twelve…a dribble turned into a stream…plus-three-equals-eighteen, plus-three-equals-twenty-one, and so on, up to thirty.
Nobody was left in the latrine but me. When was I last alone? I peered into the murky corners where the floor met the wall, the walls hit the roof, and where the roof peaked. I wanted the aloneness to last. All the lightless corners seemed to tug at me, offering something, anything other than what we were facing.
Yells. I needed to get out. There was no paper. No sink. No water to wash my hands. Disgusting. I pulled down my skirt and ran outside, joining the tail end of the last stragglers who included my very worried Mutti.
“Thank goodness, thank goodness, Reni. Don’t ever do that again,” she said, shaking and visibly upset.
We hurried together to the gathering Appellplatz; as we entered the square framed by the barracks, I gasped. There were hundreds of people. All bundled up, scurrying, and being pushed and prodded into straight rows.
“Oh, oh,” Mutti whispered. “Look for your father and Werner. They must be here, too. There are so many. So they must be here.”
Guards and Kapos writhed between us, forging us into columns five deep. Mutti and I were toward the back. I scanned my eyes left and right, but I was too short to see much. A guard moved toward us, and I dropped my glance. It was so cold. To keep warm, I pulled my fingers into the palms of my gloves and balled them together, feeling the jagged fingernails that needed filing. I moved my toes up and down, up and down. A guard counted as he paraded between us; after he passed once, he passed through again, counting again. And again.
“Dirty Jew,” a guard yelled at someone.
“Stand straight, dog. You stupid Jew, is standing still too hard for you?” yelled another.
Who are the stupid ones? I thought. You have to keep counting because you can’t get it right the first time. I pushed down my words, afraid that my face would betray me, or my thoughts would burst from my mouth like a pheasant flushed into the blue. Rather than think about what not to do, I focused on the coat of the person in front of me. I counted the rows of bleached stitching, lost count, and started again. A fragile snowflake landed on the black wool. I expected it to melt or blow away, but it stayed. I kept counting rows, and checking back, and always the flake remained, looking like a lovely, lonely, shimmering star.
We stayed there for hours, standing and doing nothing. New guards replaced the old. I pretended the man in front of me was Opa leading me to our garden, around Berlin and Amsterdam, and even to the Alps like Heidi’s grandfather. That’s so far! How will we get there? I asked. Why, the Henki Express of course, Opa replied, surprised that I hadn’t thought of it. I followed my Opa’s coat on all sorts of adventures: to plant seeds, milk the goats, hike hills, and slide down trails on sleds with great rounded rails like the horns on mountain sheep. The Appell ended. I thanked Opa and told him I was looking forward to our next trip.
Everybody ran to the latrines and the barracks where they clustered around the stove and buried themselves under blankets to warm up. Once the worst of our shivering had subsided, Mutti and I prepared to search for Pappi and Werner, but they found us first. I recognized Pappi’s familiar frame, and ran to him as he rounded the corner to our bunks.
“Oh, sweet Reni,” he said and cupped my face in his hands. “You have no idea how good it is to see you.”
“Oh, yes, I do.”
He hugged me and hugged Mutti.
“Hello, little sister,” Werner said and even gave my arm a little squeeze. I squeezed back hard, grabbing him across the chest, and gave him a big kiss. Pappi said that there was little chance of living together, but we were allowed to see each other.
We also agreed on an Appell meeting place so we could stand together. Pappi said some roll calls would be relatively short, others long. Sometimes, there would be several in a day. The Appells were going to be hard, but they were routine, and at least we would be together as a family.
“Nothing is certain at Bergen-Belsen, except the Appells,” Werner said, having already pieced together a truth from what he had heard.
But the more the four of us shared what we had each learned and observed in the past day, the more we realized that the lack of food, hard labor for Mutti and Pappi, and the cold were also certain. There was little heat in the barracks. Some had small woodstoves, but they mostly rested like useless relics because there was so little firewood, and two hundred barracks’ mates wouldn’t all fit around it anyhow.
Werner had talked to other boys his age—he was now fifteen—and had learned a lot in a short time. Bergen-Belsen was about one-and-a-half kilometers long, west to east, and half as wide, forming an equilateral rectangle. We were in the Star Camp—a camp within the camp—named for the fact that we didn’t have to wear the grey and white striped prisoner’s uniforms, just the Star of David sewn to our clothes. There were several thousand of us, mostly rounded up from the Netherlands. The Star Camp was in the middle of Bergen-Belsen, almost entirely surrounded by other smaller camps. The camps were all sectioned by barbed wire. So everywhere we looked we just saw more camp, except for a small
section looking east over fields, a road, and a line of deep green trees beyond. It was the one scene free of camp buildings and prisoners.
To our west was the Small Camp, about the same size as the Star Camp, and to the east were a few camps for Hungarian Jews, prisoners of war, and others. The west fence ran along the edge of the road that formed the spine of Bergen-Belsen. The road was lined on both sides with a ditch and on one side with a row of poles, each with a high-placed light like the head of a shower. At the east end, we were told, was a small crematorium where the dead were turned into ash, one body at a time. All the low buildings, some with chimneys pushing smoke skyward, reminded me of a large farm. High barbed-wire fencing fanned out from wooden watchtowers that looked like four-legged monsters ready to chase down prey.
The camp officials gave jobs to prisoners who had passed their fourteenth birthday, so that included Werner, but not me. My parents were assigned—Pappi called it “recruited”—to work outside the camp. They left after morning Appell, Pappi to dig trenches and Mutti to work in a drafty factory. Werner was assigned to take apart old shoes so the parts could be re-used.
No matter how hard they worked or how exhausted they were, Pappi kept a clean face. He still had his shaving kit: a wooden box with a notch for the razor, and a package of blades that he swapped out and sharpened. When the shaving cream ran out, he frothed up soap. When there wasn’t soap he rubbed his face briskly. Then he pulled the blade slowly over his face in short strokes, using his free hand to rub and feel for stubble since we didn’t have a mirror. Mutti reminded him how much she preferred a smooth face, and how handsome he looked. After running her fingers over his cheek, she combed the hair back from his high forehead and pushed down a few strands near his temples.
“What are these grey things?” she asked. “Are you aging?”
“Hmmm, signs of wisdom no doubt.”
“What does your wisdom tell you?”
“That we’ll all get out of here.”
“Good, because I don’t ever want to see another pair of old underwear again.”
My Mutti’s work was to cut up and repair used soldiers’ underwear, separating the parts that could be saved and piecing them together again. She risked punishment if the guards felt the tiniest scrap was being wasted. Pappi’s work sounded harder, as he worked in all weather, scooping, carving, and pushing the earth to make long troughs along roads, fields, and fences.
