Dita and her mother decide to leave the hut. April has arrived, but it continues to be intensely cold in Germany—a cold that hurts your teeth, numbs your fingers, and freezes your nose. Anyone who stays outdoors starts to shake.
“It’s better to die of cold than of disgust,” Dita says to her mother.
“Edita, don’t be vulgar.”
Many other prisoners have opted, like them, to move outside. Liesl and the two girls have found a bit of space by the hut where they can lean against the wall, and that’s where they stay, wrapped up in blankets they prefer not to examine too closely. The camp is closed, nobody goes in or out anymore, and there are only a few guards in the towers with machine guns. They should try to escape—if they are caught, at least they’ll die more quickly—but they don’t even have the strength to try. There’s nothing left.
As the days go by, everything collapses. The SS guards have stopped patrolling the camp, which has turned into a cesspit. There hasn’t been any food for days, and the water has definitely been cut off. Some prisoners drink from the puddles, but they soon writhe on the ground with stomach cramps and die of cholera. The weather is getting warmer, and the corpses are decomposing more quickly. No one remains to remove them.
Hardly anyone gets up from where they are. Many will never get up again; some try, but their legs, thin as wire, are too weak, and they collapse on the ground, which is covered with excrement. Others fall spectacularly on top of corpses. It’s hard to distinguish between the living and the dead.
Explosions from the battles are getting closer. The shots are louder, the impact of the bombs sends vibrations up their legs, and the only hope they have left is that this hell will end in time. But death seems to advance much more quickly and resolutely on its own front.
Dita hugs her mother. She looks at Margit, whose eyes are closed, and decides that she’s not going to fight any longer. She shuts her eyes, too; the curtain lowers. She promised Fredy Hirsch she’d hold out. She hasn’t given up, but her body has. And anyway, Hirsch himself also let go in the end. Or not? But what does it matter now?
When she closes her eyes, the horror that is Bergen-Belsen disappears and she shifts to the Berghof sanatorium of The Magic Mountain. She even thinks she feels a burst of that cold, clear air from the Alps.
Dita’s feebleness extends to her mind. Moments, places, and people she has known in real life get mixed up with others she has met in books, and Dita is unable to distinguish the real from the imagined.
She doesn’t know if the arrogant Dr. Behrens from the Berghof—who looked after Hans Castorp—is more real than Dr. Mengele; at one point she can see them strolling together through the gardens of the sanatorium. Suddenly, she walks into a dining room and finds the gentlemanly Dr. Manson from The Citadel sitting at a table set with a magnificent banquet, together with the handsome Edmond Dantès in his unbuttoned sailor shirt and the elegant and seductive Mme. Chauchat. She looks more carefully and sees that the person at the head of the table is Dr. Pasteur, who instead of carving the juicy turkey fresh from the oven so they can eat it, is dissecting it with a scalpel. Mrs. K?i?ková walks past, the woman she always called Mrs. Nasty, and she’s scolding a waiter who tries to give her the slip; the waiter’s face is that of Mr. Lichtenstern. A fatter waiter approaches carrying a tray with a delicious meat pie, but with unheard of clumsiness, he trips, and the pie sails speedily through the air onto the table, splattering grease over the dinner guests, who look at him with disapproval. The waiter apologizes, full of remorse for his blunder, and lowers his head in a submissive bow several times as he hurries to pick up the remains of the destroyed pie. That’s when Dita recognizes him: It’s that rascal ?vejk doing his thing! She’s sure he’ll mount a feast for the kitchen hands with those destroyed pieces of pie.
Her sanity is already as slippery as butter. It’s better that way. She knows she’s disconnecting from reality. And she doesn’t mind. She feels happy, just as she did when she was little. When she closed her bedroom door, the world remained outside and nothing could harm her. She feels dizzy, and the world clouds over and begins to fall apart. She sees the mouth of the tunnel.
She hears outlandish voices inside her head from another world. She feels she has already crossed the border and is on the other side, in a place where there are strong male voices speaking an incomprehensible language, an enigmatic gibberish that only the chosen ones know how to decipher. She’d never asked herself what language was spoken in heaven. Or in purgatory. Or in hell. It’s a language she doesn’t understand.
She also hears hysterical shouts. But those high-pitched shrieks … they are too laden with emotion. It can’t be the afterlife. They are from this world. She’s not dead yet. She opens her eyes and sees prisoners shouting like madwomen. There’s lots of noise, whistles are blowing, and she can hear the sound of footsteps. She’s so stunned that she doesn’t understand a thing.
“They’ve all gone mad,” she whispers. “The camp is a lunatic asylum.”
Margit opens her eyes and gives her a frightened look, as if they could still be afraid of anything. She touches her mother’s arm, and Liesl opens her eyes as well.
And then they see it—soldiers are entering the camp. They’re armed, but they’re not Germans. They are wearing light brown uniforms, totally different from the black uniforms they’ve seen till now. The soldiers first point their weapons in all directions but then they immediately lower them, some put them over their shoulders, and then they put their hands to their heads: “Oh my God!”
“Who are they, Mama?”
“They’re English, Edita.”
Dita’s and Margit’s mouths are as wide open as their eyes.
“English?”
A young NCO climbs onto an empty wooden box and shapes his hands into a megaphone. He speaks in rudimentary German:
“This camp has been liberated in the name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and her allies. You are free!”
Dita elbows Margit. Her friend is paralyzed; she can’t speak. Although she has no strength left in her, Dita manages to get up on her feet and rests one hand on Margit’s shoulder and the other on her mother’s. And finally, Dita utters the sentence she’s spent her entire childhood waiting to be able to say.
“The war is over.”
The librarian of Block 31 begins to cry. She cries for all those people who couldn’t survive to see this: her grandfather, her father, Fredy Hirsch, Miriam Edelstein, Professor Morgenstern.…
A soldier walks toward the survivors in her area, and he’s shouting at them in strangely accented German, saying that the camp has been liberated and they are free.
“Free! Free!”
A woman drags herself along the ground until she can embrace the soldier’s foot. He bends down smiling, ready to receive the thanks of the liberated. But the gaunt woman says to him with bitter reproach,