The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  ‘Selected,’ was all Anne said.

  They are exhausted and sleep a lot, despite lice almost running off with their blankets. In this camp too, the creatures are everywhere; in clothes, on heads, in crotches. Sometimes Janny is completely mesmerized by the shaven skull of a fellow prisoner – it seems her skin is moving. Just when she thinks she has really lost it, she sees the living layer of lice crawling across the head of their hostess like a helmet.

  In the daytime they are put to work in a dusty barracks, where they have to remove the soles of old leather shoes by hand. They are given a bit of watery soup and a piece of bread in return. It is hard work and their nails and fingertips soon turn into bloody stumps; people around them die of blood poisoning. Anne and Lien drop out. Margot and Janny last longer.

  It is starting to rain again. Softly at first, an innocent pitter-patter on the tent, but the showers soon turn into wild waterfalls, pouring down on the canvas. The wind is howling across the grounds and tents are flapping like lashes of a whip. The floor becomes wet, the straw gets soaked and their blankets are dripping with water. On the night of 7 November, the storm really hits the camp.

  Towards the evening, when everyone must find a place to sleep again, Anne and Margot are outside in the rain, bickering. The tents are full of sick and confused women. Getting in and out is almost impossible; it is as if all the visitors of a stadium are using the same entrance. Once inside, it is not easy to get out before the next morning: it is dark inside the tent and hundreds of women are packed together. Going for a pee is no option, but the latrines – open pits full of diarrhoea – are too filthy to visit in the dark anyway. Not unlike stadium visitors, they apply a range of tactics. Some are always in front because they want the best places; others just let themselves be carried by fate. Janny and Lien have always used the same strategy: they watch people pushing and fighting from a distance and when the majority has settled, they enter the tent last and quietly find a place. But tonight the Frank sisters will not wait for them. The weather is terrible; they want to get into the tent as fast as they can.

  Janny and Lien stay outside in the cold, watching one stooped figure after another vanish behind tent cloths; the queues seem endless. When the tail end has gone, they slip inside. The tent is fuller than ever – masses of people are still arriving each day – and they must climb to the peak to find a place.

  It is dark and the usual coughing, groaning and arguing of the women is drowned out by the storm and the rain. The entire camp seems to shake to its foundations. Gusts of wind circle around the tent, pulling and pushing the side walls, hailstones pounding on the roof. Water is soaking through the cloth, on their faces, on the floor. At places the canvas is already sagging – they can almost touch it with their fingers. Janny and Lien huddle close together. When the lightning starts, everyone falls silent. Flashes shoot through the tent and light up their faces, distorted with fear. The thunder takes a rolling run-up and explodes above their heads with a loud bang – they are expecting the earth to split and their tent to vanish into the depths below. The women lie in their beds, petrified. Then a cry, an infernal noise, the sound of cloth ripping and wood cleaving, beds falling down, a blow to their head, and it feels like sinking under water. They cannot breathe, everything is black, voices sound far and muffled. The poles have given way, the canvas is torn and the entire tent, with a few hundred women, has collapsed.

  Pitch-black, flailing arms, a kick against a jaw, up, upwards, out of the canvas, oxygen. Rain batters her skull, a deep breath of air – and Janny is out. Where is Lien? Here, I am here. Away, quick, crawl over the heads and bodies, there is screaming and moaning under the tent cloth, they cannot see a thing.

  They manage to reach the open field; everything is trembling, their teeth are chattering. Wounded women everywhere, more tents have collapsed; a void in the landscape where the black silhouettes used to be. Lifeless bodies in the mud. The canvas on the ground moves like a Chinese dragon as hundreds of women try to make their way out on all fours. Janny and Lien were lucky; their beds were at the top, they were not buried by others and could crawl out of the tent through a tear in the cloth.

  Finally, the SS come running. Their shouting evaporates in the storm; all they can see are wide-open mouths. Those who have managed to save themselves are chased into the kitchen tent. They stand there for hours, pressed together, shivering, until the first watery sunbeams reveal the damage.

  The grounds are covered with debris, wood, clothes, people. Wounded women wander around, groaning and disoriented; they had not seen the shelter in the kitchen tent at night. The entire Zeltlager is wiped off the map. There is no extra water or food, no medical assistance. From the kitchen tent they are transferred to the shoe barracks, where they find Anne and Margot. The girls are shivering with cold but unharmed. They embrace, stare at the mess around them: tables full of dismantled shoes, piles of rags, a thick layer of dirt covering the ground.

  They have stopped believing that their move to Bergen-Belsen is their salvation.

  The survivors of the storm night are put in a small women’s camp. Guards build a broad hedge of barbed wire and straw bales, so they are cut off from the Star Camp next to them. Coming too close to the fence and speaking to someone on the other side is punishable, let alone throwing goods or food. Severe punishment awaits those who are caught; from sitting in the frosty cold for a day, holding a stone above your head, to being shot. Still, people reach out to the Star Camp prisoners, who are better off than they are. A warm jumper, a can of food, to some, is worth risking their lives for.

  There are very few barracks in the new women’s camp. Some women are accommodated in other parts of the camp, but new transports keep arriving and there simply is not enough space for everyone. In the evenings they just have to wait and see if they can find a place to sleep, people who cannot find a bed in time are shot. There is such chaos that Janny and Lien cannot find the Frank sisters for days.

  It gets worse every day. In Birkenau, the weakest were picked out as they deteriorated and the strongest, including the sisters, remained. Here, they must witness the deterioration, each small step in the process, until some woman breathes her last while she lies right next to them. The small crematorium roars, spitting black plumes of smoke, but it is not enough. Each night hundreds of lives extinguish all across the immense camp and each morning the bodies are piled up outside the barracks. Large groups of new prisoners report at the gate every day, but despite all the new arrivals, the camp population does not grow fast.

  Rations become smaller, clean water is scarce and the pits filled with shit, shared by tens of thousands of prisoners each day, are a focus of infection; typhoid fever, tuberculosis, dysentery. The person you talked to in the evening can be outside the barracks on the pile the next day. There is no getting used to it.

  One thing quickly becomes clear: you do not stand a chance on your own. Janny and Lien look for familiar faces to form a group with, and they find Anne and Margot and a few other women. From that moment on, they make sure they stay close together.

  There are three pairs of Dutch sisters in the barracks: Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, Anne and Margot Frank, and Annelore and Ellen Daniel. Two more women, who were both on a more recent transportation, will join them: Sonja Lopes Cardozo and Mrs Auguste van Pels. Sonja is only nineteen years old and has been on the same journey as the Brilleslijper and Frank sisters: she was caught in hiding, was sent to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz, where she left her parents and her older brother, Matthieu, behind. She has no idea if they are still alive. Her parents are Greetje van Amstel and Lodewijk Lopes Cardozo, who lived at Kerkstraat in Amsterdam, acquaintances of Janny and Lien before the war. Sonja is a cheerful and intelligent girl, of whom they all grow very fond. She never complains and always tries to lift their spirits; she carves puppets out of bread to give to others – it never fails to make them smile.

  Auguste van Pels was hiding in the annexe with the Frank girls and, alr
eady in her forties, is the oldest of the lot. Some think she is Anne and Margot’s mother, because they are so close. Also in their barracks is Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder, a Jewish woman with a socialist background, who worked for the resistance. She was in Westerbork camp with the Brilleslijper and Frank families, then ended up in Auschwitz too.

  The women keep an eye on each other, cheer each other up, find food to share. There is always someone on the lookout for something to eat; when you are not at the front of the queue, your chance for that day is gone.

  Anne and Margot share the bed below Janny and Lien, and together they try to fill the empty hours by telling each other stories. Children’s stories, fairy tales, jokes, memories of Amsterdam and, of course, elaborate discourses on meals. Some women in the barracks hate it when others talk about food; it makes them nauseous and they storm out, swearing. But not the four sisters. They man a phantom kitchen like master chefs, put menus together and describe in great detail which dishes they shall eat when they get home.

  One day they dream away about the stately Café Américain in Amsterdam; the four of them ordering generously from the menu in the restaurant. While the others picture themselves entering the gorgeous café with its vaulted ceilings and, eyes closed, swallow their saliva, Anne suddenly bursts into tears. She knows the chance they will ever return to Amsterdam is getting smaller every day and even the most beautiful castles in the air cannot help them to escape this reality any more.

  Towards the end of 1944, their barrack fills up with women and girls deported from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Russia; they are Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners. The language barrier makes it hard to communicate with them. One morning when Janny is at roll call, a Hungarian girl addresses her in broken German. She is visibly panicking, but Janny cannot make out what she wants. A little while later the girl returns with a friend and a suitcase full of things. Janny understands that their barracks is about to be deloused; the girls will have to give up everything they brought with them. Would Janny please look after their belongings? Without thinking, she takes the suitcase and hides it with Lien in the highest bed. The Hungarian girls, much relieved, return to collect their suitcase that evening and they want to pay Janny for her favour. The trade in the camp is lively; the mediums of exchange are a piece of bread or an onion, a warm jumper or underpants made from a piece of blanket. But Janny refuses; she has done nothing special and is glad she was able to help.

  The hidden suitcase marks the start of an alliance with a group of Hungarian political prisoners, who will help her and Lien whenever they can. A few of the women work in the SS kitchen and slip her something extra now and again. An onion, a potato, some sauerkraut for Lien, who is suffering from diarrhoea, and even a mug of milk once. The stuff is sour and lumpy, but these are the lifelines that save them from the piles of the dead. Perhaps even more important than food is the new information the Hungarian women have. With hand gestures and in broken German, Janny sounds them out and at night she reports to her Dutch girlfriends in the barracks. The Allied forces are coming, Hitler is almost forced to his knees and if they hang on for a little, really, just a little longer, they will get out of here alive. Whether it is truth or fiction, no one knows, but they have nothing else to live on.

  On 1 December 1944, Josef Kramer becomes the new camp commander of Bergen-Belsen. The sisters remember him from Birkenau. With his hulking body, his face like a broad-headed frog and his pursed lips, he was the brute beside Mengele, the delicate Angel of Death. Mengele selected with velvet gloves, while Kramer was in charge of the trip to the gas chambers. This former accountant from Munich, uninspired by keeping the books, lit up as soon as he joined the SS and, over the past ten years, had made a glorious career in the concentration camps. Starting out as a guard, he climbed the ladder, all the way up to camp commander. When Kramer arrives in Bergen-Belsen, not a single prisoner on the site could have lifted a finger against the Nazis, but he introduces a reign of terror nonetheless. From torture and setting dogs on people to executing entire groups on the edge of mass graves, Josef Kramer will go down in history as the Beast of Bergen-Belsen.

  From January 1945, more than 2,000 people die in the camp per week. Each morning about 300 new bodies are piled up outside the barracks and it is impossible to burn them. Pits appear outside the camp, as large as public swimming pools, in which the victims of the dying Nazi regime will disappear; their graves anonymous but their remains forever bound to the Lüneburg Heath.

  7

  The Party

  Janny sees her sister and the Frank sisters deteriorate; their close-cut heads and protruding cheekbones look like skulls. The Hungarians say the Allies make rapid progress; they must keep themselves alive until the troops call at the gates. Janny comes up with a plan to celebrate Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Hanukkah all at once on the last evening of December. Everyone is enthusiastic; the preparations alone lift their spirits. From that moment on, they save a crumb of bread each day and her friends in the SS kitchen give Janny two handfuls of potato peels. Anne fixes a clove of garlic, the Daniel sisters miraculously ‘find’ a turnip and a carrot, and Lien sings songs for the guards, earning some slices of bread and a spoon of sauerkraut. On the morning of the big day they all keep something of the brown morning sludge in their tin cups, to have something to drink as well.

  In the evening they gather with their Dutch group on the upper beds below the roof of the stone barracks, the food displayed between them. They are all there: Janny, Lien, the Frank sisters, the Daniel sisters, Auguste, Sonja. They talk excitedly, eat and tell mouth-watering stories about the things they will do when they get home. Anne is dreaming away at the prospect already; the first thing she wants to do is eat at the posh restaurant on the corner of Leidsestraat and Prinsengracht: Dikker & Thijs. More women from their barracks gather around them, curious to see what noise is disrupting the usual downcast mood. The cold, the pain in their bones and the absence of their loved ones are briefly forgotten as they celebrate their festive dinner, sitting cross-legged on the wooden beds. Then someone begins to sing an old children’s song:

  The little cart drove on the old sandy road

  Clear was the moon, wide was the road

  The little horse walked with delight

  It found its way, alone, through the sand

  As the driver was sleeping so tight

  I wish you safe home, my friend, my friend

  I wish you safe home, my friend.

  They all sing along, slowly swaying to the music on their beds. On to ‘Constant Had a Rocking Horse’, followed by ‘Clink, Clank Clock’ and ‘The Little Sun is Leaving Us’. They clap along like a nursery class at singing lessons, pronounce the Dutch words as if they have never heard anything more beautiful before. Some women in the barracks are annoyed by all the merriment and hiss at them to be quiet – in French, in Russian, in words they do not know but do understand the meaning of. It does not matter; the energy that had left their bodies ages ago flows through their limbs and makes them light-headed.

  Then suddenly the Czech women react more fiercely than the rest. They lean forwards from their beds, their fingers pressed against their lips.

  ‘Shh! Shh!’

  Janny and the others are startled and stop singing. They are friends with this group and do not understand what is wrong. Four Czech women begin to sing and the rest of the barracks falls quiet too. It is beautiful. They sing in four-part harmony, the melody perfect, the Dutch broken:

  Constant had een hobbelpaard

  Zonder kop of zonder staart

  Zo reed hij de kamer rond

  Zomaar in zijn blote . . .

  Constant had een hobbelpaard

  Constant had a horse to rock

  It had no head nor tail

  He was riding through the room

  Just in his naked . . .

  Constant had a horse to rock

  And so they sing on. The tension in the room is broken and the Dutch group below th
e roof bursts out crying, relieved they no longer have to bear up.

  It is early 1945, Death is wielding his scythe and all Janny can do is put out fires with thimbles. She and Lien try to save anyone who can be saved. Almost everyone in their small women’s camp has become too sick, too weak to work. Anne, Margot, Sonja, Auguste – they stay in the barracks, hotbeds of bacteria. Lien feels ill too. At night, ice water leaks through the roofs on their beds, and in the morning they wrap the dead in their own wet blankets and throw them on the pile outside.

  Janny has volunteered to work as a nurse again and, without asking, raised Lien’s arm too when the SS were looking for more candidates: they are now nurse and nursing assistant. They get to wear a white band around their arm, have access to the camp pharmacy and can move around the site more freely. Janny walks around like a busy working ant, gives orders, delegates. Her body is shrinking and her head feels heavier each day, but she holds on to the promise she made to her mother and her children: she and Lien will make it out of here. They need water for the sick to drink and also to wash bodies and clothes with. The pump is no safe place – too much chaos, too many people – and on the way back to the barracks, others may hit the water out of their hands. Janny puts together an escort of women to accompany her, so she can safely get water. They walk up and down with mugs and cups and pans, keep people clean, try to rinse the dirtiest clothes and dry them outside in the freezing cold. There is a typhus epidemic, but they have nothing to fight the disease. To give her patients at least some sense of humanity, Janny steals handfuls of smelly stuff from the pharmacy to get rid of lice and fleas.

  One morning Lien asks her sister to come along to a small block in their own part of the camp, which has just been filled with new arrivals. To Janny’s surprise, the women squeezed together are all Dutch. There are some old people and a couple of very young children too. She knows a few of them, such as Marianne ‘Sis’ Asscher and her three little ones. The children are in a bad way and some of the women can no longer stand. There is no moaning, no crying, just staring with large eyes that barely register a thing.