Diary of Bergen-Belsen

by Hanna Levy-Hass

  As of early 1944, the largest group of “exchangeables” in the camp consisted of Dutch Jews—3,670 in all. From January 1, 1944, until July of that year, the number of “exchangeable” Jews grew from 379 to 4,100. However, in March 1944 the camp was transformed from a “detention camp” into a “concentration camp”—another link in the murderous assembly line that sought to add more and more numbers to its death production toll. In any case, “exchangeable” Jews were kept in a separate area of the camp. Unlike “orderly” extermination camps such as Auschwitz, where the killing was methodical, Bergen-Belsen produced death by means of terrible crowding, starvation, thirst, illness, epidemics, and the absence of any sanitation.

  Conditions at the camp had worsened by the time Hanna Lévy arrived in summer 1944. By January 1945, conditions were rapidly deteriorating under the command of Josef Kramer. Between January and mid-April 1945, nearly thirty-five thousand people had died there—18,168 of them in March alone. Another fourteen thousand died between the camp’s liberation date, April 15, and June 20.

  Countless bodies were heaped in piles throughout the camp. About four days before its liberation by the British army, camp authorities forced inmates—the ones who still stood on their own feet and resembled walking skeletons—to dig huge pits outside the camp fences and dump the bodies there. The inmates, in teams of four, were required to drag each body by means of cloth or leather strapped to the ankles and armpits. Under the watchful eyes of SS guards and the whiplashes of the Kapos (inmates-in-charge, usually criminal prisoners), about two thousand living skeletons buried the dead to the strains of incessant dance music played by two prisoner orchestras.

  The British, whose charge of the camp was established by an armistice agreement with the local German Army commander, had no notion of what they would find at the camp: piles of bodies in various states of decay, sewage ditches filled with corpses, still-breathing skeletons lying next to the already dead on bunks in the barracks, hastily filled burial pits. Behind the camp an open pit was found, partly filled with bodies. The barracks, each meant to house about one hundred human beings, were crammed with six hundred to one thousand people.

  But my mother was no longer there. Another of the death industry’s caprices: between April 6 and 11, about seven thousand Jews were loaded onto three trains destined for Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. My mother was on one of these, ill with typhus like all the others. This is what she told Geisel:We were no longer fully conscious of what was happening—everything was hazy. Sometimes we were allowed to get out of the cars, and since the Germans themselves did not really know what to expect, the guards did not watch us too closely. We used to scramble down the railway embankment and pick blades of grass, which we boiled and ate. We were at the end of our tether, and our bodies were like skeletons.

  The train moved on. Many died inside its cars and occasionally the bodies were hurled out. Out of the fog in which everyone found themselves, the living would occasionally disembark to dig for potatoes, which they knew the Germans had stored under piles of soil. When the less weak dug and found some, others pounced on the potatoes. Then the German soldiers burst into this starved crowd and trampled everyone with their boots, beating up whoever held onto a potato. At one stop, some Yugoslav prisoners of war, who were working in one of the villages nearby, showed up. They yelled in Yugoslav: “Tu Jugoslovena ima li?” (Are there any Yugoslavs here?) Not “Serbs,” not “Bosnians,” not “Croats.” “Yugoslavs.” How wonderful it sounded, that simple phrase. My mother and a few of her fellow Yugoslavs responded immediately. But they noticed that their countrymen turned their eyes away, afraid to direct their gaze at the emaciated figures. Eyes averted, the Yugoslavs invited them to come along and take a few potatoes. Only my mother and another young woman felt strong enough for the trek—two or three kilometers—to gather potatoes for themselves and the others.

  Returning with a whole sack of potatoes on her back—she had no idea where she found the energy to haul it—she discovered to her surprise that the other young woman had vanished and their train was gone. She was all alone. As a young girl, I loved listening to her tell how she hid behind some bushes and watched the soldiers of the glorious German Army run for their lives, away from the approaching Red Army. But I do not know if that happened on the same night or later.

  That night she went back to the village where the prisoners of war had been working and to the farm where she had gathered the potatoes. Over the town hall a white flag was already waving, although the Red Army had not yet arrived. My mother said she feared the woman: afraid of her revulsion at seeing someone who “no longer looked human”—a filthy skeleton crawling with lice. The woman invited her to stay the night, but my mother preferred to sleep in the barn or cowshed. She did not know what the woman would do, or what her chances were to stay alive. “I was like a terrified beast.” But the next day, some soldiers of the Red Army occupied the village: nothing more was needed, for no one in the village fired a shot or offered any resistance. She heard soldiers speaking Russian and joyously ran toward them. They yelled at her to keep her distance, not realizing she was one of the few in the village who felt “liberated” rather than “occupied.” In her ears, even their shouts rang like divine singing.

  This all happened before Germany officially surrendered on May 8. Hanna Lévy spent some weeks wandering along roads filled with people just like her, of all nationalities, liberated prisoners of war and other types of prisoners, all homeward bound: to Russia, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, some on foot, others on carts, but most walking. Once she found a group of Italians who had been taken captive and sent to German labor camps, and, feeling safe with them, joined them for quite a stretch of the way. Speaking no language but Italian, they welcomed her fluency in German and Italian. They obtained food, clothes, and nightly shelter in villages. She spared no words to describe the pleasure of their company. “Communists, workers, good people,” she described them to Geisel in the late 1970s. “Bit by bit I began to look human again,” due to food, showers, rest, freedom.

  She then began to pick up the pieces of her life, and the mission seemed possible thanks to her firm conviction that barbarism must be replaced by a totally different and new era of civilization. An important component of this new civilization, whose outline was still rather vague, was the emergence of transnational and nonreligious identities based on the common denominator of the ideology of equality and the common rejection of any form of hierarchy and discrimination: economic, national, or religious. Thus, the company of these Italians was so natural and good for her, and as such it etched itself in her memory.

  They walked most of the way to Dresden. There, after a break in their trek, they stole a train. That was the advice they had received upon asking how to get out of the ruined city, how to escape from the Germans, whose sense of victimhood—not their national affiliation, not even the question as to what they had done and what they had known—struck my mother, and kept her at a distance. “Steal a train,” people said. “That is the only way to get home.” And so they did. They found a train car, attached to it a steam engine headed for the border, and off they went.

  I do not recall hearing from her, when I was a child, about this train theft. I learned of it only much later, in the interview with Geisel. But this is exactly the kind of story she liked telling me, and the kind I loved hearing: a mischievous tale that evokes a smile, that begs knowing all the details, a vignette befitting an Italian film. And I had thought her many silences contained just all the unbearable, inconceivable thoughts and specifics. Such as how her mother, Rifka, and sister, Rosa, were taken away from their home in Belgrade.

  She once blurted a few words about how—when she came back to Belgrade—neighbors told her how her mother and sister had been dragged out of the house by Nazi police or by Croatian fascists; I no longer know which. She told me clearly, during my childhood, that she would not repeat what she was told. This was, in other word
s, her declared intention to keep silent. According to information she eventually received, they were both murdered in Auschwitz. Only a few years ago, after my mother’s death, did I learn from her 1921-born nephew Jasha that it was not in Auschwitz but rather on Yugoslav soil that they were murdered, choked to death in a truck. In spring 1942, Jews—especially women and children—who were kept in a detention camp near Belgrade (most Jewish men had already been murdered one way or another) were loaded onto trucks. The children were offered sweets and adults were told they were to be relocated, no longer to suffer hunger or cold. Exhaust pipes from the engine were routed into the cabins and the trucks drove and drove until they arrived with their dead cargo at pits that had been dug in advance.

  My mother also kept her silence about the fate of the rest of her family—her father, Yakov and other sister, Serafina (along with her husband Mauricio and son Marcelo); and another brother, Braco, who lived in Zagreb: her father starved to death in his hide-out in Sarajevo; her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew were caught and sent to one of the stations of the death industry. Her brother, a lawyer in Zagreb, was shot to death early in 1941, having been active in a Jewish resistance group.

  A few members of the family survived: the eldest brother, Mihael, whom the Italians had caught and exiled along with his wife Rosa and son Jasha to a detention camp in Italy, which actually saved their lives; a sister, Erna, who was married to a Catholic Croat in Sarajevo (she was the one who eventually told me about the fate of some of our murdered family members); and a sister, Cilika, who had emigrated to the United States.

  The untold story of how her mother and sister were taken away explains perhaps why my mother did not insist on repossessing the home that had been their property. By law she was entitled to evict the tenants who lived in it during the war, but she declined this legal fight and gave up the home itself with its empty rooms. Her family had been murdered—would she now make an issue of four walls? Property had no priority for her as she began putting the pieces of her life back together. Work did. She had hoped to resume teaching but was asked to work for the new Yugoslav government, supervising the French broadcasts of Radio Belgrade. Later she was moved to the governmental office, where she translated into French various official documents and publications. These positions guaranteed her wages, stability, social status.

  For three years she experienced economic security. Then, contrary to all her expectations of herself, contrary to all her plans, in late 1948 she migrated to Israel, about half a year after the state was founded. Why? Here is the explanation I formulated over the years, having followed my mother as a child, as an adolescent, and finally as an adult, this question always hovering in the background.

  During those three years in liberated Belgrade she realized that putting the pieces back together was not merely more difficult than she had imagined, but rather it was impossible. Yugoslavs, on the whole, paid a heavy price for the war and the struggle against their Nazi occupiers. At first glance one would think everyone was similarly busy reconstructing their lives. But soon enough, a great difference became obvious between the fate of Jews under the occupation, and that of non-Jews (except for the Roma, who were murdered in a fashion similar to the Jews).

  An entire community had been erased, whole families wiped out, a centuries-old culture gone up in smoke with full intention. For the Slavic nations, the Nazis had planned inferior status, that of slaves in their future racist “new world,” but they did not act to exterminate them. The various modes of murder that the Germans exercised clearly differentiated among national groups. To her dismay, she discovered that these differentiations persisted.

  Here and there, among her former schoolmates and their families whom she met upon her return, she felt a sort of wariness or impatience with what she had experienced as a Jew. But of that, too, she did not speak much to me—an occasional sentence, as though outlining a sketch. She printed the diary she had written in a tiny notebook in Bergen-Belsen and distributed it. She realized people were not overwhelmed or even interested. They advised her to look ahead, toward the future. Not to dwell on the past. And under the glorified Yugoslav partisans’ post-liberation myth, whoever did not take active part in their fight but was “merely captive” did not deserve any special attention.

  Not only in Yugoslavia, but also in other European societies that had borne several years of the Nazi yoke, a generation grew up internalizing some of the anti-Semitic Nazi ideology. The Jews who came back felt this soon enough. A young clerk—I no longer recall whether at the population registration bureau that my mother visited upon her return, or at some other public office—said to my mother, genuinely bewildered, “But you are a guest in Yugoslavia!” (meaning “What are you doing here? You do not belong here. You are here temporarily.”) Had this been a single foolish outburst, I suppose it would not have offended my mother the way it did. But gradually she realized she was facing an enormous void, made up not only of her own personal and collective bereavement, but also of people’s refusal to acknowledge the uniqueness of Jewish-European loss.

  And this is the answer to the two biographical questions I raised earlier: this painful tension—between her feelings and experiences as a Yugoslav, a Jew, and a communist (essentially, one who cares deeply and attributes prime importance to any liberation struggle) and the lack of political and emotional acknowledgment of her own personal as well as collective grief—sowed in her the seeds of restlessness that would manifest itself first in her emigration to Israel and later in her various “escapes” (as she herself called them) from Israel for varying lengths of time.

  In Yugoslavia this tension appeared politically as well in the power struggle between Tito and Stalin. The Soviet Union supported the founding of the Jewish state. Yugoslavia did not. Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko delivered a quasi-Zionist speech at the United Nations, and linked the founding of the state directly to the Holocaust. This was a liberating speech for many Jewish communists. It solved for them the contradiction between their experience as Jews and the ideological discipline that forced them to minimize the historical significance of that same experience. This was the same discrepancy between seeing Israel as a part of an “imperialist project”—the analysis Hanna Lévy heard from her friends and acquaintances, which on principle she tended to accept—and the understanding that Israel had become the refuge and personal rehabilitation for those whom Europe had rejected in so brutal a fashion.

  Then, in Israel she would rediscover how loss and bereavement had not vanished, could not be swept away. That perhaps there were no pieces to put back together, but their absence was indeed a constant in this new life. In Israel, too, she faced alienation and exclusion: in its early years, the Zionist ethos had no sympathy for the diaspora Jews who had “gone like lambs to the slaughter,” as it were. The “new Jew” preferred to present the founding of the state as a “resurrection after the Holocaust.” This contradicted and silenced the survivors’ initial sense that the Holocaust was not something that had an end and was somehow “resurrectable.”

  In those first years it seemed that activism in the Israeli Communist Party, which Hanna joined as soon as she stepped onto Haifa’s shore on December 31, 1948, would resolve discrepancies. Holding onto the utopian vision, the belief that the socialist revolution was on its way, incessant activism with this vision, this faith (writing on behalf of the party, translating, distributing newspapers and pamphlets, demonstrating, holding meetings)—all these alleviated her grief somewhat, filled the constant void she felt in her heart, numbed the sense of a vacuum. No, this was not a conscious, pragmatic choice for therapeutic reasons. Actions toward a meaningful, purposeful future of just relations among humans compensated for the incessant feelings of senselessness and pointlessness that were born of personal and mass bereavement, death, and sporadic survival experienced by her and people like her.

  For her this meant choosing a life of dissidence, of constant opposition to the Israeli government and z
ionist ethos. But this was no easy choice, either socially or economically. Because of her communist activism, for instance, she could not be employed as a teacher in Israel in the 1950s. Her dissidence (and the personal sacrifices it entailed) and utopian belief in the possibility of a different future were perhaps factors that kept her from admitting sooner than she did the oppressive nature of “socialism on earth.”

  She did not seek extenuating circumstances for her choices. “I am not convinced,” she said two or three years before she died, “that I can define myself as a communist.” (“Communist” had long ceased to be her party affiliation, and she had not been a party member since the early 1970s). Today I understand her to have meant the quasi-religious rigidity, the lack of any doubt, the messianic faith in a “happy ending” doctrine posing as an “exact science,” the fear of contradicting the “leaders,” and especially the suppression of information about the goings-on in the “socialist” countries. But she did not become a faithless cynic.

  From the early 1970s on, she gave up her Communist Party activism for feminist activism, which was then making its first inroads in Israel. Her early attraction to socialist feminism, and her resentment of male dominance in the Left as well, equipped her to begin to ask questions about so-called socialist regimes.

  Feminist activism made her feel at home, even if for a short time, in other places where she tried to settle down. In late 1982, nearing seventy years old, she packed her suitcase, picked up a few books and her walking stick, and went wandering in Europe. The date is no coincidence, although I am not certain she was conscious of its relevance at the time: It was shortly after the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila (September 1982). The massacre itself was carried out by the Lebanese Christian Phalanges, but these acted under the watchful eye, inspiration, and protection of the Israeli Army that on June 5, 1982, opened an all-out war against the Palestinians in Lebanon. All the antiwar demonstrations in which she took part, all the interviews she gave, all the pamphlets she handed out, which were signed by her group of survivors and ex-fighters and which demanded a halt to the merchandising of the Holocaust (the Israeli government then compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler in order to justify the war)—only increased her feelings of helplessness and collaboration with oppression done in her name.