B. B. | January 1945
For a long time now we have not been taken to the central baths where they used to make us take hot showers—under the impudent and jeering gaze of the soldiers in charge of watching over us. In spite of our extreme uneasiness, we were nonetheless glad to be able to be clean for a few days.
But now, nothing. No baths, no hot water. These are only dreams now. The only thing left for us is to take advantage of the camp’s wash-houses, infectious, frozen. We undress en masse, all together, cramped, jostled. No point in waiting “your turn” because there are too many of us and the spigots are always taken—unless, of course, the water is turned off. We undress hastily in the bitter cold, all of us, men, women, pell-mell. Nobody is embarrassed. No one pays any attention to the person washing himself next to him. Besides, sex has no meaning here. The important thing is to scrub yourself. Teeth chatter, the icy water burns the skin; it’s painful, but it doesn’t matter.
As for the constant hunger, our bodies have grown accustomed to it. It happens that someone who is tortured by the acute pain of hunger, who can’t stand it anymore, ends up eating his entire reserve of bread (three or four rations) all at once, or exchanging his clothes for one or two bowls of soup (offered by thieves).… And when he has swallowed this unusual quantity of wretched food, he feels ill, worse than before, his body protests violently. He’s left with nausea, and his hunger remains unappeased.
We receive our food more and more irregularly. The noontime soup gets distributed at five or six o’clock in the evening and the evening meal (boiled water or a little piece of synthetic cheese) has been crossed off the agenda until the following morning … or not at all. That’s why we sometimes go sixteen to twenty hours with nothing. And naturally, at the first distribution after such a long wait, famished bodies throw themselves on the vats; the sad consequences are inevitable a few hours later: collective diarrhea infests the whole area.
B. B. | January 1945
The camp has been permanently invaded by fleas and all kinds of vermin, not to mention dysentery, which has taken on unheard-of proportions. The latter is caused by overall intestinal poisoning that spreads rapidly. There’s no way to stop it and no cure. It literally devours the body and everything reeks, soiled and vile—the floors, the beds, the sinks, the yards, the toilets (communal holes)—a deluge.
Although we are consumed by this cholera, and dying from weakness, we all try as best we can to clean the area. A sad and useless task. It’s hopeless. We feel like we are nearly insane. So many exhausted, famished, half-dead bodies reduced to skeletons. And so much excrement.
B. B. | January 1945
Starvation is everywhere. We only manage to move with great difficulty. No one can walk straight anymore. Everyone staggers or drags their feet. Entire families die in a matter of days. The elderly Mrs. M. died quickly; two days later her husband died. Then came their children’s deaths, devoured by famine and fleas. One of them, a nearsighted young boy, couldn’t kill the vermin that had settled on his body because he couldn’t see them; they’ve burrowed deep into his skin and swarmed through his eyebrows. His chest is completely blackened by these thousands of fleas and their nests.
We have never seen such a thing; we never imagined such a thing could occur. The poor boy is completely destroyed and dazed by it; already he seems like an imbecile. People say that he was once an extremely intelligent boy. Today, his bony, thin body drags itself feebly from one end of the barracks to the other, groaning and wailing. Everyone avoids him. His brothers and sister dread his presence, his fleas, his howling, and take care not to go near him. The other night, he dragged his useless body from one bed to the other until the morning, begging people to make room for him. Everyone pushed him away in disgust. Besides, there are already two people in each bed. No one wants to be his “partner” and there are no empty beds. So young M. is dying with nowhere to rest his body.
Painful story. His case is not unique. There are thousands of similar cases in the camp. Especially among the elderly. Their fate is dreadful. A bleak, odious, undignified end awaits them all: this slow, painful process of death by the decay and rot of their own bodies.
B. B. | January 1945
Death has moved in to stay. It’s our most loyal tenant. Always and ever present. Men die en masse due to vile treatment, hunger, humiliation, dysentery, and vermin. They fall, they collapse. Their number diminishes rapidly. Many of my acquaintances ended their lives in this manner. Every morning we find one or two corpses in the beds. One, two, three, four.… We end up confusing the living and the dead. Because in essence the difference between them is minimal; we are skeletons who still possess some capacity to move, they are immobile skeletons.
There is yet a third category: those who still breathe a little but remain lying down, unable to move. We wait for them to pass, to make room for others. It’s not surprising that we confuse them with the dead and that we lose count.
The epitome of wretchedness is when they make us change barracks. And lately they force us to move two or three times every month. All the misery, all the human decay, all the tattered clothes, the rags, the cumbersome and useless packages … the moaning of sick people too numerous to take care of, the death rattle of the dying thrown outside in the whirlwind of the move, in the hubbub of swearing, arguments, complaints. This entire immense tragedy suffocated till now in the foul depths of the barracks … all of this, at once, is exposed in the open air, in the mire and rain, in insanity. Thus, completely exposed beneath a pale, impassive sky, all this becomes infinitely more sorrowful and atrocious.
As a general rule, these moves cost us a surplus of several deaths over and above the norm. This forced dragging about is real torment for those of us who are relatively healthy, while for the sick and the aged it means certain death.
B. B. | February 1945
Typhoid fever rules over us. For the moment, it’s the children in particular who succumb to it. But the children die of other illnesses and we never know exactly of what. A diagnosis would be very complicated anyway. Two young girls, very cute, died one “fine” morning in a bed near ours.… Just like that, one a few hours after the other. Their mother, a very pretty and simple young woman, had watched them and taken care of them like a she-wolf with her babies. Seeing them dead, she was gripped by such violent pain that her screams were ear-splitting. Then she started to sing lamentations, inventing lines with incredible talent, and to chat softly with her two dead little girls. Now she drags herself around, her hair disheveled, constantly in rags, horribly neglected, madness in her eyes. Life clearly has no more meaning for her....
B. B. | February 1945
I was on duty two nights in a row in the older women’s barracks. Since nearly all of them are sick, they never leave their beds. These two nights were dreadful. The first thing to say is that the work is done in complete darkness because of the bomb alerts, and that it amounts to calming the women’s anguish, distributing bedpans, then emptying them in the nearby toilets. The air is completely foul.
These sick old women lie down, slowly dying; they rot alive. I don’t know how else to say it. And yet, they show such a will to live, it ’s unbelievable. They never stop lamenting and asking for help. Sometimes, they really get on my nerves. For the most part they are women who come from well-to-do bourgeois milieus from Western Europe (Holland, Belgium, France), and in the past they were accustomed to living in comfort, surrounded by attention. They are totally incapable of understanding their current situation, completely unaware of the current reality … which makes them impossible sometimes. Yet they seem so wretched!
I thread my way between the narrow beds, crumpling their lace, an entire ocean of useless and smelly lace, relics of their former luxury. And I do my best to straighten up the places where they lie, to help them wash their faces. These living corpses, these jaundiced faces of ghosts struggling in spasms of agony—it is all truly horrible, and everything takes place in utter darkness.
I am a permanent prisoner of wretchedness and horror. The first night, three of the patients died. I had to lay out their corpses and cover them. A corpse is heavy, and I have hardly any strength left in me.… Nonetheless, dealing with the dead didn’t frighten me in any way. We see them in every corner of this place. We “live” together; we are numb to it.
The second night, I waged a genuine battle with a crazy woman, Frau Polak. I had to subdue her to stop her from scaring and hitting the other women in the dark, as she was in the habit of doing. Three times during the night, she jumped from her bed and each time, I had to stop her. This is not simple at all. She has a way of imploring you, of moaning—it’s appalling. Moreover, she does not seem stupid if you discount her bouts of insanity. She’s just a horribly unhappy woman. People say she used to be quite intelligent. But then, after a series of “unexpected” misfortunes from which the war did not spare her, she slowly and progressively began to lose her mind … and today she’s completely mad. The only thing she ever does is to explain something to me and to try with all her might to convince me her arguments are sound. There’s nothing mean in what she says. It’s just that everything she says bears the distinctive mark of despair and entreaty. On the other hand, there are three genuinely hysterical women among the sick who are frankly frightening.
These nights spent in this hellish barracks have set my nerves on edge. I felt suddenly as though I had aged ten years. The shock was so violent that it took me several days to recover from it.
B. B. | February 1945
The new regime under the direction of the criminals has only encouraged the corruption that has long been rampant in the entire camp. It’s only natural, of course. When the great change of power occurred, when control of the camp passed from the hands of the Jews to those of the Kapos, the main thieves and those who had reigned as masters over the rest of us for several months became suddenly silent, withdrawn. But that only lasted a short while. They were lying in wait and quickly figured out that things were going to take a good turn for them. Better than ever, even.
The terrain turned out to be ideal.… And now here they are, back on the attack: they rapaciously steal everything that falls into their hands and torment the others disgracefully. They were quick to come to an agreement with their new masters, the Häftlinge; with their help they have organized an intense black market and, on condition that the Häftlinge return the favor, have become their righthand men in the bloodthirsty attacks on the internees. This is what goes on under our very eyes in our barracks. And it’s exactly the same in the other barracks. Traitors, villains who deserve to hang.
They are constantly chewing on something; they gorge themselves on the finest delicacies completely inconsiderately, under the moribund gaze of a crowd of famished corpses. Degenerate monsters. … They have overstepped all bounds. “Fate” has smiled on them and they are crazed. They insult everyone, fear no one, have no hesitations. They brutally beat and threaten all who dare make a comment, to report them to the Kapos. The first chance they get, they take revenge by delivering the “nuisances” to the mercy of the Kapos who arrive every morning to send people off to forced labor. And the scoundrels hasten zealously to facilitate this heinous process for them. It’s thanks to them that the Häftlinge always succeed in finding new victims for the work details. Those famous Kommandos of terror and death.
There are no words to describe the cruelty of these decadent traitors, these abject serfs in the pay of criminals, these gravediggers thirsty for human blood.…
Everyone thinks only of himself. No one feels anything for anyone else. Many women have given in. Young girls who’ve known nothing of life or its foundations have heedlessly seized what these pitiful circumstances offer them and have yielded. Carousing, flirting, drinking, dancing, singing, laughing out loud, wearing silk stockings and beautiful dresses—this is their lifestyle here, in league with the Kapos.
Hunger crushes the spirit. I feel my physical and intellectual strength diminishing. Things escape me, I can’t think properly, can’t grasp events, can’t realize the full horror of the situation. Only once in a while, in moments as brief as a flash of lightening, a clear and precise thought crosses my mind and I wonder: what is this dark, perverse, underhanded force that succeeds in hurling humanity as a whole into such absurd and abominable conditions?
B. B. | February 1945
I share my bed with Mrs. G., a fairly corpulent woman in her fifties who has been literally immobilized by disease, hunger, and nicotine. Confined to her bed, heavy and inert like lead, she never gets up. All day long, I don’t know what to do with my body; I can’t get the slightest space in this damned bed to rest my slowly atrophying limbs a little. Breathing has become nearly impossible for me, too.
In the evening, I sink into our shared, damp hole on the lowest level of a bed whose two upper levels are occupied by three adults and two children. Our bed is right next to the wall, or rather, those worm-eaten planks that rain seeps through ceaselessly. The window and the door are also nearby. The dampness has penetrated everywhere, soaking everything, clothing, bodies, blankets.… Things aren’t damp here, they’re drenched. Water and mud everywhere, inside and out. And along with them, the air saturated by the suffocating odor exhaled by those suffering from typhus and the stench of urine. Is this a bed? Call it what you want, but not a bed. A muddy swamp.
Climbing out of this hole in the morning, my face is completely swollen, my eyelids are sealed, and it takes an hour or two for me to be able to open my eyes and see clearly around me. Each time I wonder if I’ve gone blind. This is certainly not a bed, it’s a tomb—a tomb built for two.
B. B. | February 1945
On the twelfth of this month it will be a year since we were arrested in Cetinje. Vain hopes and foolish predictions filled most of our time. In the beginning, we rejoiced because we were nearly convinced that everything would be over soon. Enormous deception, because in those days the war was at its height. So now we have become skeptical. These long, fateful winter months, dominated by anguish, famine, vermin, terror, and death, offer no encouragement.
Oh, hunger, hunger … is there anything in the world more appalling, more demeaning for man? I am haunted by these faces of animals in agony, crowding desperately around a few vats containing lukewarm, fetid, bitter water that is called soup.… Because now, what we get by way of soup is water in which a few pieces of already rotted rutabagas have been boiled. This is often done two full days before they distribute it. The vats are immediately filled, then hermetically sealed (so as to “keep the soup hot”) to be opened only one or two days later at the time for distribution. So the entire contents quickly spoils. And we are served.…
There was a time, we remember, when rutabagas, whether boiled or raw, delighted us. We were as hungry as bears. Now, our hunger has only become fiercer. Our bodies have been demolished by it, we all drag ourselves around like rags; men literally drop to the ground from exhaustion and end up dying of hunger, simple as that. And yet, no one touches that soup anymore, no one is able to swallow it. As soon as it arrives, it gets thrown on the trash heaps that accumulate rapidly everywhere and give off acidic fumes.
Fascinating and strange news sometimes reaches our ears … but now it seems like it has nothing to do with us. Sounds from another world, from beyond our graves.…
All that we know, all that we see is the slow, uninterrupted flow of long processions of miserable creatures, thousands and thousands of internees flocking here from the various camps the Germans were forced to evacuate. There is no doubt about it: the Germans are beating their retreat, dragging their victims with them. And piling them up in here. Rumor has it that we, too, will end up being removed from here, that the Allies are close by and the Germans will soon evacuate this area and send us elsewhere. All these rumors, all this uncertainty, along with the possibility that in the end they will kill us all (and Kramer’s presence serves as a confirmation of this), it all adds up to such moral torment th
at more than once we have felt on the edge of insanity.
And the wretched lines follow one after the other, endlessly, all along the road … skeletons. From the other side of the barbed wire, we watch them pass by, wondering who they are. And what will be done with them? What is wanted from us? How will they end up? And we? What is happening? What are they waiting for? What about the British? What do they want? What are their plans? They control the situation—are they making a game of the whole world, maintaining the state of affairs that best suits them? Otherwise, they could have defeated Germany a long time ago.…
These human lives, the torture, death, and putrefaction of slaves, what difference does all this make to them? None. Freedom. A bluff, as long as this works for them. Exploiters of the common people, they are, favored, privileged in the current hierarchy of nations. That’s why things are as they are. The only thing that counts is the policy of the USSR and faith in the triumph of the new society. Otherwise, what good is all this? Is war a part of human nature? What does it all mean? If there is no true victory, if the whole world doesn’t become socialist, then what good is all this? More massacres, more putrefaction? I am beginning to despair for mankind.
We want so many things, we hunger for so much. Is this really our end? And what about the Jewish question? Where and how will this hellish drama end? In our Jewish homeland? Where and why? How? What form will it take? Where are our destinies truly to end? Never before have such thoughts tormented me. Never before have I asked myself such questions. And now, I have the feeling that this is something eternal. An incurable wound. Our beloved Slavic homeland, how we love you. But will you want us? Will we be strangers for you, too? I feel like I’ve lost my mind, indeed, what idiocy, what absurd questions.
Diary of Bergen-Belsen Page 8