by Irene Butter
The old woman was carried off in a wheel cart, and we never saw her again.
27
Camp Bergen-Belsen, Germany
Fall 1944
If Hitler was losing, why was Bergen-Belsen still growing? The guards moved Pappi, along with other men from the Star Camp, from road and trench work to building more barracks. I asked him if he liked not having to walk so far on the first morning of their new assignment.
“Work is work, for the Nazis, Reni,” he said.
“Is it easier, at least?”
“All work is hard here, don’t you agree? You are right, though. I don’t have as far to walk at the end of the day to see you.”
Beyond him, a man I knew as Mr. Cohen proclaimed in a loud voice intended for more than his wife sitting next to him: “It’s another sign they are losing.”
“Ja,” agreed a man in the next bunk, running his hands through his beard, “they are getting desperate. It is unfortunate, but the fact they are losing control of themselves in here only means they are losing control out there, too.”
“Oh, good,” retorted Mrs. Cohen. “The more they lose, the higher the stakes for us. What good is their loss if we are all dead?”
I looked at Pappi for confirmation.
He studied me as he buttoned his shirt. “You okay, Reni?”
“Yes,” I lied.
He let the lie go this time. Who was I to complain? Hanneli and Werner were right: suffering was relative. Our family was sick, but standing. I was hungry, but I had all my teeth. I could eat. We had not been beaten. We had not been carried from the Appell in a cart. I reached for the hem of Pappi’s sleeve.
“Your button is loose,” I said, rolling up his cuff with the button safely tucked away. “I’ll try to fix it later.”
He put his other hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be just beyond the fence, in those trees. I will look for you, and I will wave.” Pappi stared into my eyes. “And be very careful. The only thing worse than a smiling guard is a scared one.”
It was an old lesson worth repeating. We were like mice that had seen our companions caught by the cat. We twitched at the slightest sound and movement, and we knew the safety of shadows, whether to scurry or stay stock-still.
“I know you know, Reni,” he went on, “but please, you and Werner, avoid drawing attention and do what you are told. Please, for Mutti and me.”
He and the men marched off through the gates.
“Hanneli,” I asked later that morning, “can you watch the little ones? I want to see if I can see Pappi working.”
Hanneli glanced at the eight children lying or sitting on the barracks’ wood floor, and then back at me. The children moved little, except to ask for food we didn’t have. One picked at a knot on a floorboard.
“I think I can manage.”
In general, Bergen-Belsen was barren, alternating between hard-packed earth and mud depending on the weather, but there had not been time to clear the trees in the newest section with the newest barracks. Instead of being built in tidy rows like the rest of the camp, the new section had roads that curved through trees and barracks at odd angles to each other. It looked haphazard.
I walked to the barbed-wire fence. A guard tower stood to my left, jutting three stories into the sky. It was made up of four solid wood walls, widening at the top with a slight peaked roof to protect the men inside. One guard was looking toward the new construction. The other must have been sitting since I only saw the rounded top of a helmet.
My eyes followed the guard’s. In the distance, beyond the double fences, past the camp’s center highway rarely touched by prisoners’ feet, beyond the second set of fencing, I heard hammers and workmen yelling. Yelling workman all sounded the same, whether in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Westerbork, or here. The sounds of sawing carried on the breeze, along with a whiff of smoke, which could have been coming from the crematorium.
I glanced up at the tower to make sure nobody was looking my way, then back through openings in the wires into the old trees and new structures, the fresh barracks’ beams looking like bleached bones against the dense green trees. Shadows swallowed shadows. I followed figures closely, but could not discern one from the other. They all looked dark and hunched and drab even when they caught the sun, and not one waved at me. I walked back.
A week later, Hanneli said, “Those new women here look terrible.”
We were watching the little ones from the barracks’ stoop at midday. It was brisk, but the sun was shining. We kept one eye inside and another outside as the kids were spread out, mostly sitting and staring; a few were playing in the dirt. I had thin, little Henry in my lap. All he did was sleep now. His face was dirty, except under his nose where the snot ran. Pulling down my cuff with my fingers, I used a piece of my sleeve to wipe him clean. Then, I adjusted my weight to get more comfortable. I was beginning to feel bones that I didn’t know existed—knees, ribs, and hips. My clothes didn’t pad enough.
“Yes, the women are so sick,” I agreed. “I heard they all have diseases.”
“It seems like we’re all sick,” Hanneli said.
A couple of boys tossed small stones on the floor of the barracks, and I took note to remember to clean up when they were done.
“I guess there is healthy sick and sick-sick,” I said.
A small girl, Sara, came up to us. Her hands were balled in her eyes; I wondered how she could see to walk. Muddy fists and cheeks were streaked and wet. I shifted Henry again, who didn’t wake up, and made room in my lap. Sara leaned into me, smeared her face in my dress, and quieted. I wanted to say she stopped crying from comfort, but she probably just ran out of energy.
“You know what it means, right?” Hanneli said. “It means less food, less space, and more problems. You’ll see.”
The outburst was un-Hanneli-like. Gigi came over and leaned into her sister.
“Bah,” Hanneli continued. “I’m hungry. Sorry. I am blaming these women when it’s not their fault.”
Still, there was truth in what she said. The ill newcomers came so quickly that there wasn’t time to build them all new barracks, so they got huge tents. Instead of the straight, evenly spaced barbed-wire fence posts, tree trunks, stripped of their bark and branches, had been hastily thrust into the ground. Between them barbed wire was stretched and nailed, patterned in irregular rectangles. Very un-German.
A short section of the new women’s camp neighbored our Star Camp. The women cooked over fires under tarps that had been rigged up over branches. Smoke hung like a fog. A few shirts and skirts were draped here and there to dry on the fence, their owners guarding them with darkened, hollow eyes. Even on the warmer days they dressed in overcoats to keep their thin frames warm. Hanneli and I watched the tent city grow. I hated the thought, but it made me more thankful. The new arrivals were in rags. Every time I thought we had it bad, I glanced over my shoulder at them. We were cold, but they were no doubt colder. We suffered—they more. I never thought such a big space could feel so crowded. I remembered my first impression of Bergen-Belsen: that we were like tiny marbles being tossed onto a vast dizzying plain. Now, ten months later, there was no space between us.
My family was shuffled to another barracks, this one with less space than the one before. The huts were noisier with more people, a growing number of sick ones, and more time spent indoors because of the cold. It was a constant chorus of coughing, sneezing, and sighs. There were so many children, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a child laugh.
Keeping clean was a continuous challenge nearing the impossible. Toilet paper didn’t exist, and even coarse scraps of paper and soap continued to be rare. I cleaned our clothes in cold water with no soap. I washed myself in splashes of cold water. I fought my thick, dark hair and its itchy, lice-infested scalp with frigid water. We used sticks, frayed at the ends, as toothbrushes. The smell of close bodies and mouths barely scraped clean was normal.
Watching the children with Hanneli became easier as they
mostly just slept now, which was good considering our own low energy.
“I would do anything for a warm bath,” I said. “To get clean and warm.”
“Food first, then a good cleaning,” Hanneli said, “in a large tub where I could sit for hours. Washing and washing all of, all of this, away.”
“And getting fed while in the tub,” I continued. “As long as we had enough bubbles to cover us.”
“I wouldn’t care. Just feed me.”
“Really?” I asked. “No bubbles? You would let people see you?”
“Well, maybe a couple of bubbles in just the right places.”
A smile escaped me.
“I want to be served pancakes and breads,” I dreamed, “and butter and jams. And tea. And no turnips under any circumstances.”
“Not even a turnip pancake?” Hanneli asked.
“No, not even the tiniest bit, even hidden in ice cream.”
Hunger was the ache in every moment. Sleep was our lone escape. I awoke from the same dream, born of constant craving. I was the pet dog of a wealthy family. The family enjoyed huge dinners heaped on silver platters. There was lamb or beef, different types of vegetables, fruit and bread, and pies and ice cream galore. I sat patiently under the table, alert and waiting. At the end of the meal, they scraped the leftovers onto a plate and lowered it down. I wagged my tail and gulped down everything at once, slobbering everywhere.
Darkness became cover for what became known as bread thieves, whose numbers were growing. The clothing thieves you could watch out for, but the bread thieves struck at night. Back in Amsterdam and Berlin we had more than we knew, cradled in comfort and with enough food to fill the bellies of all our visiting family, or anybody who visited. We would have been so mad had a thief broken into our home and stolen our silver, but all we really would have lost was an heirloom—a family memory—and a pinch of pride. Now, the stakes were higher and for so much less.
I heard about a parent who stole from kids to feed her own children. Pappi had said that stealing from the deprived to feed the deprived was immoral. And Mutti had instructed us with an added shake of her head that we were never, ever, to steal from someone like that.
Still a silent question haunted me: Did I want Pappi, Mutti, or Werner to die in the name of doing the right thing? Mutti was getting weaker. She drifted from work to bed to work like a ghost. She seemed to be working less and sleeping more. She spent more time going to the latrine. She wasn’t alone. Often, the sick couldn’t make it to the latrines so they used the backed up toilet at the end of the building, or went in bowls by their beds. The rising stench was like disease’s advance horse, as if we could smell the coming typhus, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, and polio.
I shuddered and told myself she was strong and would recover. I had put a piece of bread under my pillow to save for our breakfast before bedding down, and I reached for it with my fingertips just to make sure it was really there. I tapped the bread one more time, pulled my pink blanket more tightly around me, wished away the bread thieves, and closed my eyes until morning.
A week later, I was en route to hang wet laundry on the fence when I spotted a long pile of clothes in a shallow ditch. They looked old and dirty and it seemed unlikely to be of any use, but it was worth a look. It wasn’t stealing if they were abandoned, I figured, and I seemed to be lucky enough to be the first one there. I stopped. Something didn’t make sense: the shoes, the gray smooth skin hugging a skull and hands. I stared into something timeless and empty. Did I know this person? The face didn’t look like a man or a woman, an adult or a child. How could a face be so faceless? The body was still. Not even the thinnest clothing moved.
I ran as fast as I could back to the barracks, clutching the damp clothes, and forgetting about drying them. I had to get as far away as possible. My mind went back to the old woman at the Appell. Even if the old woman had died, and in my heart I felt she had, I had never… really…been certain. Never like this. This time was for sure. The taut face, eyes, hands, and feet would be in my dreams. I just knew it. I shook under my blanket in my bunk until my breathing slowed. Help, I thought. Pappi. Mutti. Werner. My whole family was at work. There was no one. I lay still, willing my mind to think of other things: Switzerland and Opa, running on the beach with Werner, playing with Vera, Heidi getting knocked over by a goat.
My promise to myself was to not tell Mutti or Pappi what I’d seen. They had enough to worry about, and I had to start acting like a big girl. I heard other people talk about the dead body—it turned out to be a man—and they didn’t seem upset. But I couldn’t help myself when Mutti asked if I was okay. Mutti listened to me when she got back. She only said she was sorry. I was glad we were sleeping together.
Over the next weeks, as winter drew closer, there were more dead. Through the spring and summer, I had known that a few people had died each day; few enough that I’d only heard about it. But those numbers marched steadily upward through the fall. Outside, bodies were in ditches, by buildings, and sometimes hanging on the fence. Inside, families tucked their dead in their bedding until they were piled in carts to be wheeled to the crematorium. I had not seen the crematorium, but had heard it described: a wooden shack, like a garage, with a metal chimney jutting heavenward like an accusing finger. It burned all the time, but the lone oven could no longer keep up. Ashes and bodies were buried in a nearby pit. Not a graveyard, but an expanding hole.
“They are talking about having to dig more pits,” Werner said.
I had never thought about what happens to your body when you die. I had assumptions. One was that you were put in your own grave. Another was that you got a gravestone with your name and a little information. Friends and family could come by and pay respects and be sad and remember good times. I became hardened to the point that a dead person was as normal as a fallen leaf, but I was bothered by the lack of respect. There didn’t seem to be any of that when so many bodies were dumped into one unmarked hole.
Death itself became a living thing. Before Bergen-Belsen, death was only an idea, like Switzerland or Africa, something you would think or talk about, but was unknown. Then death started soaring closer, like a rare bird you might glimpse from time to time, and finally it just came and went as it pleased, like dozens of pigeons you paid no heed. Death was daily, and like all daily things, it was tied to little things. It could be as simple as just not being able to get up. The only difference between the living and the dead was a movement, even the tiniest. Death was just a posture you couldn’t change. Twitch a finger, or sit up in a handcart and—poof—it was gone.
I became used to the lifeless piles, though I refused to scavenge their clothes. I simply let the dead—nameless and quiet—become part of the landscape.
28
Camp Bergen-Belsen, Germany
November–December 1944
One cold November night a storm blew in. The heavy rain was deafening on the metal roof. Wind screeched through the tiniest cracks and rattled the windows in their frames. Pappi had developed a bad cough. His sudden loud rattles jolted me from dozing off again. I snuggled closer to Mutti for comfort, her slow breathing calming the tempest.
The next morning the earth was drenched. Flurries raced here and there as if uncertain what direction to take. I looked over at the women’s camp. The storm had collapsed tents. People picked through the debris, gathering what they could from puddles, piles of garbage, and slimy, smelly mud. I felt compassion for these pitiful women, and I felt grateful. I had my family. I had Hanneli. We had a solid roof. I could get up and out of the soaking ground. We weren’t on that side of the fence.
Pappi awoke the next night hacking and sweating, peeling back the blankets. As much as I was concerned by his constant cough, I came to fear not hearing it. If I awoke in the night and it was too quiet, I’d train my ear in his direction, not breathing until he cleared his throat, or I was convinced I heard his breathing.
“I’m worried about Pappi,” I said to Werner.
>
“I know. We’re not used to seeing him so weak.”
“Maybe he should go to the infirmary,” I said.
“Are you crazy?” Werner asked. “Do you want to kill him?”
Then he couldn’t get out of bed. Werner and I talked with Mutti, who wasn’t sure what to do, so we decided to ask a friend of my parents, Mr. Wolf. Mr. Wolf was a teacher, at least he had been before, and was most notable for being a dwarf, except that he never seemed short. Werner told him we thought that Pappi probably had pneumonia, and we were considering the infirmary.
Mr. Wolf’s gaze passed over Pappi before looking up at us. “Mr. Loewenberg died there,” he said. “In the infirmary.”
We knew this already. It had happened a few weeks before. Supposedly, he had joked up until his end. I wondered where Mrs. Loewenberg was now scrounging up smokes.
“I know. I’m sorry,” said Werner. “What does that mean for Pappi?”
“The infirmary is not good, but we must take your father there.”
We told Mutti.
Werner bit his nails.
“He will be okay in the infirmary,” Mutti said from bed. “Remember what Pappi says: We are valuable because we are tradable. He will get extra care.”
Pappi didn’t get extra care. No medicine. No additional food. At least he wasn’t working.
“And I have my own bed,” he said between coughs. “See, I can spread out my arms and not bump anybody.”
“You are spoiled,” I said.
I stayed by his side, giving him all the bits of bread, soup, and water that we could get and he could manage. Mutti was too tired to visit, and Werner couldn’t get time away from tearing apart shoes. I didn’t like the looks of the infirmary. Instead of being open like the barracks, a narrow hall stretched down the middle with vertical paneling that made it look like it went on longer than it did. Doors opened to patients’ rooms. All the beds were full with the sick curled under gray blankets. Some people were even on the floor and in the hall. Everyone’s lips seemed thin and dry. If they weren’t whimpering, crying, or coughing, they stared. Everything was the color of least resistance. Blues, greens, golds, and reds all became gray. I vowed to keep my pink blanket bright.
