A few rows from their bunk, two actual sisters ill with typhus are already losing the game of life. The younger sister, Anne, is shaking with fever in her bunk. The elder, Margot, is even worse. She’s lying immobile in the lower bunk, connected to the world by a wisp of breath that is fading.
If Dita had gone over to look at the girl who was still alive, she would have discovered that they were very similar: teenagers with a sweet smile, dark hair, and the eyes of dreamers. Like Dita, Anne was an energetic and talkative girl, a bit of a rebel and with an imagination. She was also a girl who, apart from her unruly and self-assured appearance, had a reflexive and melancholy inner voice, but that was her secret. The two sisters had arrived in Bergen-Belsen in October 1944, after they’d been deported from Amsterdam to Auschwitz. Their crime: being Jewish. Five months have been too many to avoid death in this wet hole. Typhus has no respect for youth.
Anne dies alone in her bunk the day after her sister. Her remains will stay buried forever in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. But Anne has done something that will end up being a small miracle: Her memory and her sister’s memory will bring them back to life many years later. In the secret place in Amsterdam where the two girls and their family hid, she spent two years writing notes about her life in the “house at the back”—some rooms attached to her father’s office, which were closed off and converted into a hiding place. For two years, with the help of family friends who supplied provisions, the family lived there, together with the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. Shortly after they moved into their hideout, they celebrated Anne’s birthday, and among the presents was a small notebook. Since she couldn’t have a close friend in the hideout with whom she could share her feelings, she shared them with that notebook, which she christened Kitty. It didn’t occur to her to give a title to this outline of her life in the “house at the back,” but posterity took care of that. It has become part of history as The Diary of Anne Frank.
30.
Food has become a rarity. The Germans give them only a few pieces of bread for the entire day. Every now and again, a pot of soup appears. Dita and her mother have lost even more weight than they did in Auschwitz. The inmates who have been there the longest and know this situation well are no longer skinny or emaciated—they’re just wooden puppets with stick arms and legs. Water is scarce and you have to wait in line for hours to fill a bowl from any tap that’s still dripping.
And yet another transport with women arrives at this jam-packed camp where there’s nothing but infections and sickness. They are Hungarian Jews. One of them asks for the latrines. What an innocent.
“We have bathrooms with gold taps. And be sure to ask Volkenrath to bring you some bath salts.”
Some of the women laugh uproariously.
There aren’t any latrines. They made holes in the ground, but these are already full.
Another woman from the transport, furious, turns to one of the guards who have just arrived and tells her that they are workers. They must be sent to a factory and taken out of this dunghill. She’s had the misfortune to say it to the least appropriate person. One of the veterans tells her it’s Volkenrath, the supervisor of the guards but the warning comes too late.
Volkenrath calmly adjusts her partially collapsed blond topknot, takes her Luger out of her belt, and rams the barrel against the woman’s forehead. She also gives the woman a look as rabid as a dog foaming at the mouth—the foam Pasteur dedicated himself to studying. The prisoner raises her arms, and her legs shake so much she looks as if she’s dancing. Volkenrath laughs.
She’s the only one laughing now.
The gun is like a rod of ice against the prisoner’s head, and warm urine begins to trickle down her legs. It’s not very respectful to wet yourself in front of a supervisor. They all grit their teeth and prepare themselves for the sound of the gunshot. Some women look down so they won’t see the head exploding into little pieces. Volkenrath has a heavy vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows running right up to her hairline. It is so noticeable and deep that it looks like a black scar. The knuckles clutching the gun are white from the fury with which she’s holding it. She’s angrily pushing the weapon against the woman’s forehead, and the woman is crying and peeing at the same time. Finally, the supervisor removes the gun; the prisoner has a reddish circle on her forehead. With a movement of her chin, Volkenrath sends her back to her place.
“I’m not going to do you the favor, Jewish bitch. No, it’s not your lucky day.”
And she lets loose a demented guffaw that sounds just like a saw.
A white-haired woman spends much of the night crying over the death of her daughter. She doesn’t even know what caused the death. In the morning, she kneels behind the hut and starts to dig a grave for the girl with her bare hands. She manages only to make a small hole a sparrow might fit into. The woman flops onto the muddy ground, and her bunkmate comes over to console her.
“Is no one going to help me bury my daughter?” the woman shouts from the ground.
There’s not much energy left, and no one sees the sense in wasting what little there is on something that can’t be fixed. Even so, various women offer to help her and start to dig. But the ground is hard, and their weak hands start to bleed. Exhausted and in pain, the women stop, although they’ve removed only a few fistfuls of earth.
Her friend tries to persuade her to take her daughter to the pit.
“The pit … I’ve seen it. No, please, not there. It offends God.”
“She’ll be with all the other innocents. That way, she won’t be by herself.”
The woman agrees very reluctantly. Nothing can console her.
The camp stinks. It’s filled with the excretions of those who have dysentery. They lean against the wooden walls of the huts and collapse onto the ground on top of their own excrement, and nobody lends them a hand. If a dead person has family or friends, they take the body to the pit. If they don’t, the body lies on the ground in the camp until some SS guard takes out her gun and forces prisoners to drag the body away.
Dita, Margit, and Liesl walk slowly around the camp, and the sight is equally devastating no matter where they look. Dita holds Margit’s hand on one side, and her mother’s on the other. Her mother is shaking, either with fever or horror, but it’s impossible to distinguish disease from degradation.
They go back to their hut, and it’s even worse: the sour smell of disease, the moans, the monotonous murmur of prayers. Many of the ill are unable to get down from their bunks; many of them perform their bodily functions right where they are, and the smell is unbearable.
Dita looks at the devastatingly gloomy bunks. Family and friends are gathered around, trying to give relief to the sick, but in many cases, the sick are suffering alone, fading alone, dying alone.