The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  At night her head crackles as if a thousand insects walk inside her skull with their crawling feet; she hears them ticking against the bone. She makes herself crazy, mumbling the names until she falls asleep, almost deliriously:

  Moesbergen

  Krikke

  Punt

  Hiemstra

  Boellaard

  Days turn into weeks as another uncertainty gnaws at her: how would Lien be doing, Jaap, Father and Mother, all the other residents? What happened to Kathinka? Bob’s note says ‘the children’; does he mean all three of them? Or have the Germans taken Kathinka? Her fellow prisoners are suffering under similar questions about their beloved ones and it does not do the atmosphere in the narrow cell much good. They quarrel about the tiniest things. Some lose their self-control while others keep making themselves smaller. Aunt Betty from the Amsterdam Jordaan is in their cell too. She is highly offended to have been arrested – she merely has two Jewish grandfathers – and airs her anger day in, day out. But each morning when they get a cup of water to wash themselves, Aunt Betty cries: ‘Girls, don’t forget the fannies!’ and they cannot help but laugh.

  Meanwhile, in the centre of Amsterdam, a mile or so away, another group of Jews is found who, like the residents of The High Nest, saw the end of the war glistening on the horizon.

  On 4 August 1944, the SD discovers a large shelter behind a revolving bookcase in a canal house at 263 Prinsengracht, with eight people in hiding. The premises house the Dutch head office of Opekta, a German company producing pectin – an ingredient for, among other things, jam. On 6 July 1942, the Jewish director, Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their two teenage daughters, Anne and Margot, went into hiding in the annex of the business premises, a small space spread across two floors. They were soon joined by a colleague, his wife and child, and another refugee. They hold out for over two years, but on that summery Friday morning, a group of Dutch SD officers shows up at 263 Prinsengracht for the house search that will lead to their discovery.

  11

  Westerbork

  Westerbork. Judendurchgangslager – Jewish transit camp. The camp may seem more than a temporary accommodation, with a hospital housing almost 1,800 beds and 120 doctors, a dental clinic, a daycare centre and a school, an administration office and a camp shop, where people pay with special camp money, but no one is expected to stay here.

  Ironically, the camp was established in 1939 as Central Refugee Camp Westerbork, a safe heaven for Jewish refugees from other European countries. After the SS took over in spring 1942, it became the gateway to the many concentration camps across the border. Dutch contractors built an extra number of very large barracks, each 275 by 32 feet, within the existing camp, so that at the height of the war there are twenty-four draughty wooden sheds, filled to the rafters with people.

  In order for the deportations to run smoothly, days in the camp are modelled on normal life: the Germans maintained the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, the Jewish camp police. These ‘Jewish SS officers’, as they are called, were often young men, wearing green uniforms and a band around their upper arm: OD. A controversial honorary job, life-prolonging but maddening. In the first few years the OD is assisted by Dutch military police, but officers from the Amsterdam police force have come in their place, just before the residents of The High Nest arrive.

  The crucial task of the Jewish camp staff lies with their administrative department. Each week, camp commander and SS-Obersturmführer Albert Gemmeker gives them the number of people to deport and the administrative assistants then draw up the dreaded transportation lists. Gemmeker himself does not select or deport a single man, woman or child; he leaves it up to the Jews.

  When trains from Westerbork started running east in July 1942, there were weekly transportations on Monday and Friday. Towards the end of the year, 39,762 people had been deported, most of them ending up in Auschwitz. From early 1943 until Tuesday, 15 February 1944, a new transportation left each Tuesday, week after week. The desired outcome became visible; the Jewish community was drying up and trains from Westerbork became less frequent. Trains would leave every ten days, on Wednesday, Friday, even on Sunday – with less and less people on board. No longer well over 1,000, or even 2,000, as in previous months, but 809, 732, 599, 453. In 1943, 50,919 people were deported from the Netherlands.

  Between June 1942 and September 1944, a total number of 107,000 people – Jews, Sinti and Roma, resistance workers and homosexuals, men, women and children – were taken in ninety-three transportations by Dutch National Rail; removed from Dutch society and taken straight to the German border, with utmost efficiency and logistic vigour.

  Each time the rhythmic pounding had evaporated and the train had moved beyond the horizon towards the east, the square terrain on the heath was clouded by an eerie atmosphere. A toxic mixture of relief and despair. From the moment the train had left the camp, the tension gradually grew until, in the days just before the new lists were disclosed, it literally made people sick. By the time the names were announced per barrack, those who were told to pack almost felt liberated. The preceding uncertainty was perhaps crueller than the verdict itself.

  The betrayal of The High Nest, the past weeks in Westerbork, worrying about Eberhard, Kathinka – they still don’t know what happened to her – and about her sister in the Amsterdam prison – it has all left Lien completely dispirited. Each night, after a long day at the filthy tables of the battery workshop, it takes all of Fietje’s energy to instil some courage in her eldest daughter. Because they are in the Strafbaracke (punishment barracks), they are not allowed to work outside the camp. People in the punishment block have offences to their name, committed in Westerbork camp or before. They are the ones who tried to hide, to escape, the ones who, one way or another, dared to violate German rules.

  Camp life is deliberately structured as it would normally be, so people are not aware this is the waiting room for the extermination camps and will not kick up a fuss, but conditions are still abominable. In The High Nest they had been under great stress too, always anxious for discovery, betrayal, but they had all the home comforts as well as quiet, space and fresh air. Even when they were hiding with over twenty people, they could always seek solitude; in one of the rooms, the gazebo, the shed, the forest. In Westerbork, everyone is packed into overfull sheds that swell like corpses in summer. Every inch is taken up by people, trapped in a stench of sweat and bodily gases. They are stacked up in triple bunk beds, people gazing at them, breathing upon them, everywhere they turn. Laundry is hanging out to dry underneath the ceiling. In Westerbork there is no place to be alone; each bit of self-determination has been taken from them. Even when they put their head underneath the blankets for a hint of privacy, the tickling of flees and lice reminds them that there is none. Those days are over. The only question that keeps them going is: how much longer still?

  From behind the fence between the punishment block and the other barracks, Lien can overlook the rest of the camp. Sometimes she sees Jetty, Simon or one of her other former housemates on the other side; they aren’t forced to wear overalls with a white band with an S for Strafgefangener, convicts, like Lien and the rest of the Brilleslijper family are. Those with an S are at the top of the deportation list. On Lien’s side men and women are separated, but across the fence they are not; they even have special family barracks, small ones, where people can live with their families. They can buy groceries at the camp shop and people in the regular barracks are also more likely to be sent to Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt instead of Auschwitz, camps where prospects are said to be better. Rumour even has it that from Bergen-Belsen, a camp on the German forehead, the Red Cross can move you further up, towards Sweden, where Jews are exchanged for German prisoners of war. Some wealthy families have paid a small fortune to end up on such an exchange list – the results are as yet unknown.

  All prisoners are keen to work; not only because anything is better than idly watching time pass by until the next train arrives or departs
, but also because everyone knows that the least useful ones go first. Lien is lucky that she and Mother were placed in the battery workshop. Sam Polak, younger brother of Ben and Hans Polak, their close friends from The Hague, helped them to get the job. The work is filthy and heavy. First, they split the batteries with hammer and chisel, then they pry out the tar and the carbon stick, which they throw into separate baskets, and finally they must use a screwdriver to remove the metal cap, which they chuck in a third basket. After a while their fingers have become so black that it is impossible to tell where the battery stops and their hand begins.

  What’s worse is the nasty dry cough caused by toxic chemicals flying around and nestling in their lungs. Coughing fits that fracture ribs slip out of the barracks through cracks in the wood and float across the heath, even at night. But at least the prisoners can talk in the workshop and every day not spent on an eastbound train counts – ruined lungs or not.

  Lien fills her days with working, worrying and waiting. Everyone in the camp is anxiously anticipating new transportations from Amsterdam. Sometimes someone suddenly stops in the middle of the grounds, looks at the dry soil with bated breath; was that a vibration of the track? Is there a train coming? They so wish for the last undiscovered ones to make it to the end of the war, for them to outwit the Germans.

  Unfortunately, as the years of occupation go by, it seems as if people get better at finding hidden Jews. Even with liberation in sight, Dutch Jew hunters feel the need to keep on searching, all by themselves, and Dutch civilians still feel the need to turn in neighbours, friends, strangers. All this is deeply humiliating, incomprehensible, but there is optimism in the camp too. Other prisoners, who have been in the camp longer, tell Lien that only one transportation left Westerbork towards the east in April. The next one wasn’t until May. Another one in early June and the next is not due till the end of July. And so the softest of whispers starts to spread through the camp: we are going to make it.

  In the Brilleslijper family, they each have a different way of dealing with the situation, with the stories reaching the camp. Japie has met a girl and after a few days of exchanging furtive glances, he is now brave enough to walk the main camp street with her. His eyes twinkle behind his dust-covered glasses for the first time in a really long while.

  Fietje keeps her spirits up, like she always has, and each night in the women’s barracks she tries to give courage to her eldest daughter. They have endured so much already and the children are safe; they must keep the faith. It really cannot be long now. But Lien will not have any of it and she is not the only one. Joseph spends his days in the overheated barracks; his eyesight is too poor for him to be allowed to work with the other men in the cable-repair workshop. He mumbles and grumbles to himself and fulminates at the Jewish supervisors, how filthy and corrupt they are to do this work and get privileges from the camp staff. Being guarded by his own people here has taken his last bit of faith in humanity.

  One late afternoon, Lien is walking towards the punishment block, tired and filthy from working on the batteries, squinting her eyes against the bright sun, when she suddenly spots her father in the distance, sitting in the men’s barracks. No more than a dark shadow, shoulders hanging, thin little neck. She thinks back on the time when her parents went to see operas – at the Carré Theatre, the Palace on Frederiksplein, the Flora Theatre on Amstelstraat. Her father always seemed four inches taller when they came home, his chin up, his chest puffed out. He was so impressed by Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that he memorized Shylock’s monologue and recited it time and again in their tiny apartment upstairs:

  And what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

  Staring at the shadow of the man her father once was, Lien realizes that the worst humiliation is not that his humanity has been taken from him, but knowing he will probably never revenge the wrong that has been done to his family.

  One day Sam Polak comes to Lien and asks her to accompany him to the gates of the family barracks; someone wants to see her. Lien is alarmed. In all those weeks they have not heard from Janny – but no news is good news and each day without a train from Amsterdam is another one gained. She hopes her sister will not come to Westerbork but will stay in Amsterdam until the liberation. Reluctantly, she follows Sam to the gate.

  To her surprise she sees Lily approach from the other side, young Anita holding her hand. Lien’s tight face breaks into a smile as her hands automatically reach for her friend. But there is a fence between them and Lien drops her arms again. The women are six feet apart, facing each other, glad to reconnect but saddened by the circumstances.

  The last time they saw each other was in the House of Detention at Weteringschans. The Amsterdam prison was a repository for people dragged out of hiding and leading figures from the resistance. The morning Lien had said goodbye to Eberhard, 13 July, he was again taken to the SD headquarters for questioning and she was thrown into a cell with five other women and a young girl. She could not care less. She had lost her child and her man would be facing the firing squad that day.

  The cell door shut behind her with a metallic ring and Lien found herself a place between the other women. One of them took pity and began to put courage into her – although she had herself and her little daughter, eight years old but nonetheless imprisoned with them, to worry about. They were Lily and Anita, and as long as they were in the same cell, the women clung together.

  Carolina, ‘Lily’, Biet-Gassan, had been married to Samuel Gassan, from a renowned family of diamond-cutters. Two years before, in 1943, Lily had divorced Samuel and he had escaped the Germans just in time to flee to Switzerland. All the while Lily and little Anita had been hiding, first crammed into a tiny side room with another family, in the house of a family with five children. They had to be dead quiet day and night, so those five would not notice the illegal sleepover. After a while, mother and daughter moved to a boarding house, and there they were betrayed and arrested.

  Lily and Lien gave each other courage at a time they could no longer draw on their own reserves. Lien cheered Anita up by recounting the fairy tales she would read Kathinka before bed. She sang songs to the girl, very quietly so the guards would not hear. Lily, in turn, did something for Lien that perhaps would save her life.

  Lien spoke about Eberhard, the father of their little daughter, Kathinka, whom she had not been allowed to marry because of the Nuremberg Laws. To stop Jews from escaping deportation, on 25 March 1942, a ban on all mixed marriages was introduced in the Netherlands too: Jews could no longer marry non-Jews. This made Lien and Kathinka outlaws, whereas Janny, who had married Bob before the new measures, was now the mother of two Mischlinge.

  Before Lien had finished her sentence on the impossible marriage to Eberhard, Lily grabbed her hand and leaned forwards.

  ‘We must get you a false marriage certificate as soon as possible. You might stand a chance. I know someone!’

  Lien stared at her with bewilderment.

  ‘You are going to write down this story and then we have to smuggle that letter outside, get it to someone who can go and see Nino Kotting for you. I know him; he is a great lawyer, here in Amsterdam. Nino has helped countless Jews this way.’

  Lily had a bit of money and the right contacts; she knew exactly who among the guards was no Nazi, and she arranged for Lien to be given a piece of paper and a pencil. Lien got to work. She addressed her letter to her dear friends, the Stotijn family in Amsterdam, and tried to phrase her message as briefly and cleverly as possible.

  My dearests!

  This is my last chance to write to you. Please try to pick up my English marriage certif
icate and take this to Mr. Kotting. Try to get me out of here, look after the child and send me a package with clothes, food, etc. I have nothing, please help me. J [Janny] is at Avw [Amstelveensweg prison]. Try to have my S [Strafgefangene] removed too.

  Greetings to you all and lots of kisses, Lien

  At four o’clock one morning, the women were taken from their cell and brought to a tram. When Lien walked past the tram driver, she dropped the unstamped letter into his bag as inconspicuously as possible.

  From Centraal Station, the journey continued across the rails, eastwards, further and further away from civilization. On the wasteland of Westerbork the train came to a halt. Lily and her daughter Anita were led to the family barracks – probably as a result of her wealth – and Lien had to go to the other side of the fence, where the Strafgefangene lived. She did not know if her last cry for help had found its way, or whether it was for ever lost between the papers of an anonymous tram driver.

  But now, Lily is standing opposite her on the other side of the fence and Lien hopes for good news from the lawyer.

  She has come to deliver a very different message. Lily has spoken to Lien’s old friend, Ida Rosenheimer – the pianist who accompanied her when things became too dangerous for Eberhard and one of the first to warn her about the end goal of the Nazis: the gas chambers. Unfortunately, Lien had never believed her. Lily has come to tell her that Ida and some other friends in Westerbork have raised money to free Lien from the Strafbaracke, get her to their side of the fence and place her on the list of the privileged, the ones who will be deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

  Lien listens, touched that her friends can think of another person even in these conditions. Then she quietly shakes her head.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m staying here. I won’t leave my little brother and my parents. Also, I’m not sure if Janny is coming – if she is, she will certainly end up at this side of the fence too.’