“Oh,” said Gertrude. “It’s just my stomach. I think . . . um . . . I must have eaten something that disagreed with me.”
Irene hurried to help her mother get dressed. When Irene put on her clothes, the incubated lice eggs hatched. When they left the bathhouse, she and her mother had more lice on them than when they arrived. For a small moment, Irene savored the defeat of the infamous Nazi efficiency: it was no match for the tenacity of lice.
Before Irene left Bergen-Belsen, Hanneli Goslar, one of her friends, asked Irene to walk with her to the Dutch section of camp. They took some clothes and threw them over the fence to a bald girl with sunken, dark eyes and a dark stubble of hair on her head—Anne Frank.
Both Hanneli and Irene knew the Frank family from the neighborhood they previously shared in Amsterdam. Hanneli was a closer friend of Anne’s than Irene. Anne, eighteen months older than Irene, was two grades ahead of her, and Irene remembered Anne as the smart, popular girl in school, the one with charisma and style.
Irene no longer recognized Anne. The bright girl in Amsterdam with the shiny black hair and beaming grin was gone. This Anne wore no clothes except a blanket wrapped around her shivering body, which bore all the signs of starvation: the bony frame, the muscle atrophy, the feet swollen with edema. Anne spoke calmly but told them her sister, Margot, had typhus and was too ill to leave her bed; Anne, too, had the fever. She thanked them for the clothes.
Later, through the barbed wire, Anne told Hanneli that she believed her father, Otto, and her mother, Edith, were both dead. She said that she didn’t have the strength to live anymore. Another of Frank’s friends, Lise Kostler, visited her later and in the 1995 documentary Anne Frank Remembered said, “After her sister died, she was just without hope. But she didn’t know [that her father was alive] and so she really had nothing to live for.”
Irene’s hands and face felt cold that day at the fence. Clouds blotted the sun, and the sight of Anne, a frail shadow of her former self, brought the past into sharp relief. They both were born in Germany (Anne in Frankfurt and Irene in Berlin), and before the war, Irene’s father was a partner in a business that her grandfather had founded in Berlin. The Hasenbergs, enjoying a comfortable, protected life, ate meals together as a family, walked in the parks, and went to concerts. By 1936, with the Nazi persecution in full force, Jews could not attend public schools, go to the movies, or live in certain sections of Berlin. Synagogues were destroyed and Jewish businesses seized.
Irene’s father looked for ways to get out of Germany. He was offered a job with the American Express Company in Amsterdam and took it. The Hasenberg family became one of three hundred thousand Jewish families that left Germany between 1933 and 1939. In the beginning, the move was difficult for Irene. She did not speak Dutch on arrival, but soon became fluent and settled in at school. The family went to temple on Saturdays, and Werner was bar mitzvahed in Amsterdam.
When the Germans occupied Amsterdam after the invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the flow of mail between Amsterdam and Berlin stopped. John lost his job at American Express because the Nazis would no longer allow the company to employ Jews. It was a particularly sad day for Irene when she had to turn in her bicycle. Oddly, she never minded wearing the yellow star on her coat. In the beginning, Irene found her Dutch friends supportive. She felt proud to be a Jew, and the star was a symbol of her Jewishness. Initially, the practical difficulty was the Nazi requirement that she have it on at all times. In the winter, she pinned it to her coat, but when she took it off, she was starless. Finally she solved that problem by wearing the star stitched onto a vest over her clothes, but the risk was constant. She witnessed Jews stopped on the streets who had their stars ripped off their clothes by police and were then punished for not wearing them.
Irene’s father weighed the risks of going into hiding, along with Anne Frank’s family and the other twenty-five thousand Jewish families in Amsterdam. But John and Gertrude were ambivalent. It was hard to find people willing to hide Jewish families, and no amount of money could secure trust. Once families went into hiding, they could not buy food with coupons, but had to depend on the expensive and unreliable black market. Irene remembers her parents debating the issue. Aside from the fear of betrayal and the lack of food, both of her parents knew the penalty for defying the Nazis. If they were caught, as one-third of those families in hiding were, they would be shot on the spot or deported and killed in Germany. In the end, John and Gertrude decided to wait out the situation.
One day John met a businessman, a friend of his, on the street in Amsterdam. He told John that he’d recently secured false South American passports for his family from a broker in Sweden. He gave John his contact and explained how to go about the secret transaction. No money was involved; the man wanted to help save the Hasenberg family. John immediately had passport photographs taken of himself and the rest of his family and sent a letter to the broker as if the two were old family friends, saying, “We haven’t been able to write you for a long time. You probably wonder what the kids look like. I’m enclosing the pictures.” Months passed and the passports did not arrive.
After February 22, 1941, when Germans arrested hundreds of Jews in Amsterdam and deported them to concentration camps, the Hasenbergs, like every other Jewish family, lived in constant anxiety. One day Irene was in class when she heard the principal call out her name. She left the classroom and discovered her father had been arrested because he’d applied for a tram permit. Her mother had also been arrested. Irene and Werner were taken to a Jewish theater in the center of Amsterdam, from which all the seats had been removed. Hundreds of Jews were seated on the floor, which was covered with red carpet, and moans filled the stale air. Irene and Werner saw their parents and rushed to their side. The family stayed in the theater for three days, expecting to be deported at any time, but then they were released.
When they returned to their apartment, they had to break open the seals on their doors. Irene never knew why her family was released, but by then her father was working for the Joodse Raad, the Jewish Council, which had a small amount of influence. He worked with a team of people who went into the homes of arrested Jews, packed up their hastily left belongings, and shipped them to camps. Sometimes people were arrested on the street and went to camps with only the clothes on their backs.
The Hasenberg family knew the day would come when they, too, would be arrested. Night after night, the Wehrmacht, the Dutch equivalent of the Nazi SS, rolled into the Jewish section of Amsterdam in large trucks to round up more Jews in razzias—military raids. From loudspeakers on the trucks Nazis barked orders for the Jews to stop on the street. Other Nazis broke down doors. Irene remembers the screams of families pulled from the streets or out of houses and loaded into the trucks. John told his family their arrest was only a matter of time.
Gertrude packed rucksacks with clothes for all four of them, and a Gentile family offered to keep their photographs. For about a year, the Hasenbergs lived with the certainty that at any moment they would be taken.
On Sunday morning, June 20, 1943, the Nazis blocked off the Hasenbergs’ neighborhood and began a house-to-house search. The day was hot, but all four of the Hasenbergs dressed in several layers of clothes. They grabbed their rucksacks and bags of food. They joined a crowd of hundreds of other Jews in the street and began the slow march to a large square, where they were loaded into trucks and taken to the train station. All Irene remembered of that walk is that it was hot and long. Her clothes were drenched with sweat.
About midday, they arrived at the station, and Irene and her family were loaded into a cattle car with sixty or so other people. Irene heard the snap of a lock being bolted. The cattle cars had no drinking water, and two buckets were for human waste. Everyone, even those old and sick, sat on luggage. Babies cried. The only light came from small slits. Then a whistle blew and the train jolted forward. With a mixture of shock and perverse relief, Irene thought that at long last what she had imagined as the
worst had happened. In the crowded cattle car, she felt utterly terrified and humiliated.
After an eight-hour trip, the train stopped late at night at the Westerbork Transit Camp in the northeastern Netherlands. Everyone on the train was taken into a large room and told to take off all their clothes. They were inspected for lice, and anyone infested had all the hair shorn off his or her body. Irene gasped, as she had lived a sheltered life and had never seen anyone naked. She had seen only two movies: Hansel and Gretel and Snow White. Nothing had prepared her for what she saw that night: hundreds of naked bodies, young and old, with Nazi inspectors probing them for lice.
For the most part, the Nazis turned over the day-to-day running of the camp in Westerbork to the Jewish security service. Irene’s mother was assigned to a sewing circle and her father did hard labor. The camp was built around a railroad track, and every Saturday long trains came into the center of Westerbork, and their arrival is one of Irene’s most vivid memories. The trains, spanning the length of the camp, sat empty through Monday. Everywhere Irene walked in the camp, she saw the long, hideous cattle cars and was filled with a sense of doom.
At midnight on Mondays, the barracks leaders in Westerbork came in to each barrack, turned on all the lights, and read off the names of people who were scheduled for transport. Those whose names were called would be sent to their deaths in the Auschwitz or Theresienstadt concentration camps. On those Mondays when Irene’s family was not called, she lived in despair because she always knew someone on the list who was going the next day. Anne Frank and her family arrived in Westerbork in August 1944, fourteen months after Irene arrived. In September, the Franks’ names were called.
The Nazis forced the Jews to decide which Jews would be sent to their deaths out of Westerbork and to live with the guilt. More than one hundred thousand Jews transported from Westerbork were killed in gas chambers in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
While in Westerbork, Irene contracted hepatitis and was hospitalized for two weeks. The separation from her brother and parents was difficult. Many people around her in the hospital were dying. Some were demented—their angry, desperate screams frightened Irene.
Soon after their arrival in Westerbork in June 1943, the Hasenberg family had come close to being transferred to Auschwitz. A friend of John Hasenberg’s, a man he served with during World War I, spotted the Hasenberg name on a train list to Auschwitz. The man had influence in camp and managed to get the Hasenbergs off the list.
Soon after, John received an unexpected piece of mail. In the envelope were four passports stamped with the magic word Ecuador. John and Gertrude stared at the falsified passports in disbelief. Not only had the broker kept his promise, somehow the mail had been forwarded from their home in Amsterdam to Westerbork. Immediately the status of the family changed; John realized they wouldn’t be transferred to Auschwitz.
In February 1944, Irene and her family were transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was more crowded, and conditions were much worse. In Westerbork, primarily Dutch Jews administered the camp; in Bergen-Belsen, the SS ran the camp and meted out vicious punishment. The prisoners were crammed into smaller spaces than at Westerbork, and women and men had segregated barracks, which meant separation and uncertainty.
As the Russians approached Auschwitz, some of the prisoners there were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Other transports came from Albania, Greece, and Hungary, which meant that prisoners in Bergen-Belsen had less food. At night in the barracks, the women would lie in the dark and describe recipes for their favorite foods—stuffed breast of veal, goulash, vegetables of all kinds, cakes and cookies. Each woman would try to outdo the others in these nighttime fantasy feasts. During these nights, Irene thought to herself that there was no word to describe the physical pain of hunger. “True hunger is a painful, ever-present feeling that is impossible to comprehend,” Irene said. “It’s a gnawing, hollow feeling.”
During the day, she cleaned the barracks and did the laundry. There was no soap, only cold water. When mothers left the barracks to go to work, Irene and other young teenagers cared for the smaller children. Werner did hard labor alongside his father.
Under conditions that were barely survivable, Irene and her family spent eleven months in Bergen-Belsen. “Every night I went to sleep hoping that I would wake up in the morning,” Irene recalled. Finally, on January 21, 1945, after the Hasenberg family passed their medical examinations, they assembled at the center of the camp with a group of about three hundred other Jews in Bergen-Belsen who were on the list for exchange.
Near evening, a train flying a Red Cross flag rolled into camp. Irene and Werner steadied Gertrude as they walked up the steps into the heated train, John following behind. As the train moved slowly out of Bergen-Belsen, the Hasenbergs were silent. Irene stared out the window.
The train, headed for Switzerland, was forced to make numerous stops. Allied pilots had bombed many of the tracks and they had to be cleared. At times the train sat on the tracks for hours, unable to move. In the compartment, both Gertrude and John were in great physical pain. They struggled to stay upright in their seats. Werner and Irene, both suffering from malnutrition, did their best to take care of their parents.
On the second night of the four-day journey, John got up to go to the bathroom. He was too weak to walk by himself, so Irene walked with him.
“We’re almost free now,” she whispered.
“I’m not gonna make it,” he replied.
That night, he fell asleep on Irene’s shoulder, and sometime during the night he died. Irene shook him but there was no response. For several hours, she and Werner held him in their arms. Gertrude seemed confused, unable to comprehend what had happened. John was the first person to die on the train. Over the next few days, others from Bergen-Belsen, headed for exchange and freedom, died as well.
In the morning, a nurse came by and declared John dead. His body was wrapped in a blanket and left off at the next town on a bench near the train station. The indignity of it—their father left in a strange town with no funeral rites—did not yet penetrate Irene or Werner. After all they had endured, they were too numb, perhaps in shock.
When breakfast was distributed throughout the train, Irene and Werner heartily ate the first real meal they had eaten in more than a year. An acquaintance from Amsterdam, a man who knew their father, approached them to express his condolences for their father’s death.
“How can you eat when your father has just died?” the man said.
Irene and Werner stared at him, unable to say a word. Both thought to themselves, “How could he speak to us like that?” With their father dead, they had to fight for their lives. They were literally starving and had to survive. They continued to eat their breakfast in silence.
The Red Cross train stopped in several camps to pick up Americans who were held in internment camps. The real Americans, as Irene thought of them, filed onto the train, some weeping with relief. The reality of the exchange was not yet clear to Irene. “It was like we were commodities,” she said. “I didn’t yet understand that my life would be saved.”
On February 3, the train passed from Konstanz, Germany, across the border into Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Swiss authorities boarded the train with food and water. Irene focused on her mother—watching her chest rise and fall—to make sure she was still alive.
Once the Swiss had checked off names for the exchange, the train continued to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where they disembarked. Irene slept in a barn on a bed of hay soiled with urine and feces, but at least there was food. Compared to Bergen-Belsen, the conditions were manageable. Werner and Gertrude were immediately admitted to a Swiss hospital. Werner’s feet had been frostbitten, and he needed surgery to avoid gangrene. In Bergen-Belsen, he had stood too many hours in the cold in shoes too small for him during the daily roll calls.
Gertrude’s condition was critical. Someone at the hospital called a priest to say prayers over her because they thought she was dying.
An elderly Jew from the train told the doctors to stop the priest from praying, explaining that in Jewish tradition prayers aren’t spoken until after someone has died.
In early February, the Swiss authorities, flooded with refugees and eager to be rid of them, put together the list of everyone—Americans, prisoners of war, and the Jews from Bergen-Belsen—who would return to America on the MS Gripsholm, the ship that had carried Ingrid and her family from America, which was scheduled to leave from Marseille on February 8.
The Swiss authorities placed Irene, now an official displaced person (DP), on the list for the train bound for Marseille. Her mother and brother, also DPs, were scheduled to stay behind in the hospital. In a year and a half in concentration camps, Irene had not been separated from her family. She told the authorities she couldn’t leave her mother behind, who might not survive, and wouldn’t travel to America without her older brother.
“Here in Switzerland we are free, right?” said Irene. “I won’t go without my family.”
But the Swiss gave her no choice. On the day the train left, Irene boarded with assurance that if she went on to Marseille, the Swiss would find a way to bring her back to her family in St. Gallen. It was a ploy to get her on the train. The moment she sat down, Irene regretted her decision and wished she had sought out a place to hide in St. Gallen.
The train was filled with Americans who had been trapped in Germany. Many had been housed in abandoned German army barracks and had subsisted on little food and lived in fear for their lives. However, compared to Irene, an emaciated concentration camp survivor, the Americans looked reasonably healthy and were naturally in good spirits on this day.
An American woman, horrified at the sight of the sickly and despondent Irene, sat beside her on the train. Irene explained that her mother and brother were in St. Gallen in the hospital and that she didn’t know if she would ever see them again. The American woman picked up Irene and placed her on her lap. Even though she was fourteen, Irene sat and buried her face in the woman’s shoulder. The woman rocked and hugged Irene as if she were an infant. The woman whispered to Irene that everything would be all right, that she would take Irene with her to America and care for her until her mother and brother could make their way to the United States as well. Irene relaxed in her arms.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Page 22