The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  It turns out this is not a new transportation; the women say they were in a different part of the camp before, with their husbands. All of them are relatives of diamond merchants who have been in Bergen-Belsen for some time but had put their fates on hold by paying. When they had neither diamonds nor gold left to bribe the camp commander and his officers, their men had been put on transportation. So far they had survived because they were together, but when the families were torn apart, the whole set collapsed like a house of cards. Their will to live has gone; it has left with their men on the trains.

  The sisters immediately get to work. Women are sent away to fetch water, the old people are helped onto a bed, the children are washed outside in the freezing cold, then rubbed dry firmly with rags. They try to find them some food. Sis Asscher is apathetic; her two sons, little Bram and Jopie, hang around her; and her daughter Truusje, born in Westerbork towards the end of 1943, lies in a filthy pram like a doll, her limbs spread wide. Janny catches Lien’s eye and knows they think the same. Liselotte. Kathinka. They shake off the thought and carry on. There is no time to lose.

  The new women and children are in such a bad way that Janny and Lien are appointed as full-time carers of the small barracks and move in with them. They ask Anne and Margot to come along, but Margot has diarrhoea and is not allowed to leave the block owing to risk of typhoid fever infection. Anne tries to nurse her older sister as well as she can, and Janny and Lien keep an eye on the girls. The Brilleslijper sisters are now responsible for the sick and the dead in their new, small ‘diamond barracks’, and they must get water and food for everyone and keep the barracks clean; for hours on end they pick lice from blankets and clothes, hoping to provide some relief.

  The group of diamond women also includes a Mrs Henriëtte van Amerongen. Janny and Lien tell her there is a Van Amerongen in their previous barracks too: Rachel. This turns out to be her daughter-in-law. They quickly get Rachel and although the reunion clearly does Mrs Van Amerongen good, it is not enough; she is too sick to recover and passes away shortly after. Janny and Lien close her eyes and carry her to the pile. They take her fur coat and wedding ring – before some stranger does – and give them to Rachel later that day.

  Each day at roll call, Janny has to tell the SS guards how many people really cannot walk or stand any more. At one such occasion, a female guard leans over Truusje Asscher’s pram and jumps right back again. The little girl’s belly is swollen like a balloon, her arms and legs sticking out like twigs. The startled guard writes out a coupon for a daily gallon of milk porridge. Truusje stops breathing that same afternoon, but Janny uses the coupon to feed many other children.

  In another barracks, the Germans have set apart Dutch children who might not be fully Jewish. Janny and Lien try to cheer up the Frank sisters and ask Anne and Margot to help them look after these children. Read to them, play with them, cut their nails, their hair – anything to drag the little ones through the day. Anne and Margot come along a few times, sing Dutch children’s songs and tell some fairy tales, but they soon feel too sick to leave their barracks. Margot can no longer stand on her feet and Anne is not leaving her sister’s side.

  In a final attempt to breathe some life into the girls, Janny and Lien take Jopie and Bram, Sis Asscher’s remaining children, to Anne and Margot, but the sisters will not play with them. They have withdrawn into a shadow world and are too weak to respond to the toddlers.

  Lien and Janny collect food to bring to the girls when they can, but one day they find their beds empty; Anne and Margot have been transferred to the sickbay. This is bad news; they will not receive any treatment there, but they will be exposed to more bacteria. Everyone in the sickbay is terminally ill with dysentery or typhoid fever.

  Lien and Janny go to see the girls, try to convince them to come with them, but to no avail. The sickbay is heated, so they are warm and they are allowed to share the same bed. Anne says she wants to stay with Margot. Margot does not speak any more.

  8

  City of Dead

  Janny stands at the edge of an enormous pit looking up at the stars above the Lüneburg Heath. A waxing moon is shining on the corpses below. She stands there, her shoulders hanging down, clasping the blanket between her fingers – it has just released the bare body of a woman, she must take it back – her short-cropped head lifted up towards the heavens. The smell of decay is pungent; it enters her nose even when she presses her lips and holds her breath. Flocks of birds circle above the bodies then dive into the pit. Janny stands still, stares at the sky and looks for a sign of the stars.

  Death marches still bring in masses of people, more than the camp can contain. In a barracks designed for eighty soldiers, over 1,400 women are crammed. Newcomers must fight the other prisoners for a place on the dirty ground. Many simply give up, allow their bodies the rest they so crave and fall to their knees on the spot.

  The body lice were always a problem, but owing to a lack of control and an abundance of new prisoners, the floodgates really open and a serious plague takes over the camp. Hundreds of thousands of tiny creatures go round the barracks to suck up human blood and spin a web of typhoid fever around each shack. There is no escaping the disease. It starts with a headache, nausea, pain in all muscles and glowing fever. After a week, a bright red rash covers the body and most patients will sink into a delirium. They end up in a mist between life and death, and in the winter of 1945, there is hardly anyone who makes it to the bright side of this haze.

  Lien too is sick and in bed. Margot has been ill for a while and is rapidly deteriorating. Janny paces between the barracks, tries to do what she can, and in between shifts checks in with the Frank sisters. Margot has a high fever and can only whisper. Anne does not leave her side, but she is feverish too, with glowing cheeks and large eyes. She tries to take care of Margot, but Janny can tell she has one foot in another world already. There is so little she can do to help them.

  Janny feels that she herself is sick too – the glowing cheeks, the blurry sight. It is a race against the clock. She must go on, rushes from one barrack to the next, tries to keep Lien clean, cuts off frozen fingers and toes, fetches water for the endless row of sick, pre-chews stale bread, but lives slip away like sand between her fingers. A woman in their barracks dies with her living baby in her arms. It is like working in an assembly line; she shuts eyes that no longer see, removes whatever other prisoners can use and carries bodies to the pits. A Sisyphean quest. Corpses are scattered across the camp like brushwood, limbs reaching for the sky. There is silence in the barracks and on the grounds, although the camp population has risen to the size of a small town.

  Suddenly, Anne appears before Janny. She wears nothing but a blanket wrapped around her bony shoulders. It is freezing, the snow has only just begun to melt between the trees. Janny draws her closer.

  ‘What are you doing here? Where are your clothes?’

  ‘Margot is so very sick.’ The girl can barely speak. ‘And the lice . . .’ She twitches her head and tickles with her fingers, thin as a spider’s legs.

  ‘Everyone is sick, Anne. Come here,’ says Janny as she begins to gather clothes and presses them into Anne’s hands.

  There is almost no food any more; sometimes the camp staff refuse to give them anything for days, but she hands Anne some of the last bread she had saved for Lien.

  ‘Take this and stay in your barracks. I’ll come see you as soon as I can. Now go.’

  Shortly thereafter, Margot falls from her bed and hits her head on the concrete floor; she does not wake up any more. Anne already assumed her father and mother were dead, and with her sister gone, she has no more reasons to stay. She lets go too.

  When Janny and Lien check in on the girls a few days later, they find their bed empty. They search between the piles of corpses outside and find their lifeless bodies. With the help of two other women, they wrap the sisters in blankets and carry them to one of the pits, where they lower them into the depth one by one.

  Ev
erything is blurred, as if the retina has been stripped from her eyes. Colours have disappeared and all she sees are silhouettes wandering across the field in shades of grey. Janny’s head is constantly pounding and feels too heavy for her neck. Days and nights melt into one, weeks and lives pass.

  Lien is slightly less ill, but Janny can barely stand on her feet. The camp is a runaway fair of insane, sick and dying people. From time to time the air raid siren sounds – it wails from the trees across the field but nothing happens, so prisoners have stopped looking up to see if the Allies have arrived to save them. Dead bodies everywhere, no one has the energy to clear them away. They are lying in gutters, on paths, in the barracks; hundreds of them, or thousands – there is no one who keeps score.

  Most people lie apathetic on their beds, hang against walls, or simply sit outside on the cold ground. There is hardly any food left – sometimes some turnip in water: hot, cold, often rotten. The Hungarian women tell Janny the craziest stories. That the Brits are already here but too afraid to enter the camp because of all the diseases. That the Germans have put explosives under the camp to blow it up with all of them in it. Nothing happens.

  It is less cold outside, or perhaps this is the fever warming up her bones. Janny steals aspirins from the pharmacy and eats them all; she must stay on her feet to get water for Lien and herself. Lien is her only chance to survive – without her sister she does not want to go back home.

  Another air raid siren, aircraft, shooting from all sides, they do not know if it comes from the Germans or the Allies. Guards flee and suddenly it is completely silent in the camp. A couple of prisoners take a look in the SS barracks and soon reappear in the doorway; they are gone! People begin to scream, run, portraits of Hitler are ripped from walls. Janny can barely move any more, she is watching it all from a distance. Two towering mountains of turnip are discovered, starving prisoners pounce on them and all the vegetables are gone within minutes. The notion that they really are about to be liberated unleashes a beastly fury in some. Fires are lit everywhere, red flames shooting up in a grey landscape. Prisoners put SS jackets on to get warm and are swiftly attacked by others.

  Suddenly more shooting, someone calls: the Krauts are back. The whistle for roll call, followed by the usual shouting of guards, urging them to hurry. In a dreamlike state, Janny drags herself to the roll call place. Her head is spinning and light – it feels as if she is floating.

  Camp commander Josef Kramer is there. He and his men are suddenly wearing white bands around their upper arms and are acting kind in a very strange way. Prisoners approach from all sides, distrustful, and try to hear what he has to say. Kramer steps on a platform, beckons them, grimacing; Kommen sie her, kommen sie, meine Damen. Come here, come, my ladies. There is whooping, someone calls: This is no roll call, the Brits are at the gate, stop listening to him!

  Janny just stands there, people running past her at all sides. Kramer is beaten and kicked by people in uniform, his white cuffs are ripped off and he is thrown into a jeep. As Janny sees it happening, she feels a warm glow spread across her body from her belly. Moon men in rubber suits are moving towards her. Then she passes out.

  It is 15 April 1945. The British liberate Bergen-Belsen. Across the camp site they discover 60,000 emaciated prisoners and 13,000 unburied corpses in various stages of decay. Emergency hospitals are set up at lightning speed to start a rescue operation for the survivors; in the following weeks another quarter of them will die.

  9

  The Final Journey

  Janny leans her head against the window and looks outside, takes in everything she sees and tries to breathe. They enter Amsterdam from the south. Spring adorns the streets with colours she had almost forgotten existed. Violet, fuchsia, apple green and an infinitely blue sky. She stares up, sees the faces of Father, Mother and Japie appearing in the heavens, the red bricks, between leaves on the trees. There is no escaping it. This is the season they love. The city waking up from hibernation. Windows are opened, cotton sheets flutter in the breeze, Waterlooplein is buzzing. Work was always easier for Joseph and Fietje when the sun reappeared. Would they be elsewhere in this city, staring at the same sky? A stabbing pain at her temple, her sight gets blurry. She presses her eyes shut and forces the image of her parents and Japie away. Do not think about it. Not now.

  Noorder Amstellaan, Apollolaan.

  The stately houses on Apollolaan, the broad avenue around the corner from the posh Jansen sisters – would they be alive still? A succession of robust wooden front doors on both sides of the green flashes past the car window. Bob and Eberhard in their Sunday best, visiting the Jansen sisters for the lease, The High Nest, their life in the forests, the resistance work in Amsterdam, the failed assignment at Roelof Hartplein, the betrayal. She remembers standing at the three-forked road: Van Baerlestraat, J.M. Coenenstraat, Roelof Hartstraat. Her brisk pace, Robbie clinging to her hand. It was a beautiful day then, too. It seems like one hundred years back in time, a flash of a film she once saw. Not her, not her own life, less than a year ago.

  Janny glances at her hands, resting on her skinny legs. Blue veins pushing against translucent skin, the space between her thighs could fit a football. The car zooms on. Her stomach tightens, she feels sick but she cannot swallow.

  The crossroads of the axes Apollolaan-Stadionweg, the steel and glass of the Social Security Bank, the building is still there.

  The Tower of Labour. German searchlights on the rooftop. Janny looks at her sister, catches her eyes and knows they are thinking the same. Lien sits bolt upright beside her, wearing a warm rabbit fur coat, swapped for her daily ration of cigarettes in the refugee camp in Soltau, near Bergen-Belsen. Her hands lie motionless in her lap. Neither of them is able to speak.

  Turn right, onto Beethovenstraat, cross the water, second to the left.

  They sway from one side to the other, along with the car. Their shoulders touch briefly and they both back away. The city feels different – emptier, quieter – but when they drive over bridges it seems nothing has changed. The water has kept on flowing as if the world were not standing still. They have heard about a hungry winter claiming thousands of people’s lives. Severe cold, no heating, the west of the country cut off from the rest. But the water in Amsterdam still flows.

  Jacob Obrechtstraat. Narrow houses with arched windows make way for wide blocks with rectangular frames.

  Janny shifts on the back seat, moves her feet, her fingers rubbing hard over her palms. She tries to swallow again but her mouth is dry as dust. She can see the little square in the distance, she can make out the Concertgebouw, almost. ‘To the right,’ she hears her sister tell the driver. He turns the wheel. ‘Number 26.’ She points.

  Johannes Verhulststraat 26. Haakon and Mieke.

  The car stops. Narrow houses, their entrances under an arch, balconies supported by heavy ornaments. Janny cannot move, stares up at the stairs leading to the front door, black spots dancing in front of her eyes. The car door slams shut, Lien runs up the steps, rushes down again with a note in her hand, turns a quarter, sprints across the pavement and stops a few doors further. Janny cannot take it any more. After what seems like an eternity, Lien reappears with a second letter in her hand, runs back to the car and falls down next to her. She shoves the paper into Janny’s face. Letters move across the page. Janny pushes it away.

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Let me.’

  The man behind the wheel reaches into the back and takes the letter.

  ‘There was a note for us on the door,’ says Lien. ‘In case Lientje and Janny come here; three doors down, with Jopie Bennet, is a letter for you from Eberhard.’

  Lien is gasping for air as she speaks. She has not fully recovered yet, neither of them has. They weighed less than four and a half stone when the British came. The driver reads out: ‘Bob lives at Amstel 101 with the two children, I live in Oegstgeest with Mr Blomsma.’

  Lien grabs Janny’s hand and squeezes it. The corners of her mouth go
up, trembling.

  ‘There you go, Sis.’

  Janny tries to smile back but she cannot. Her body has shut down.

  Amstel 101. Why? Whereabouts is that? She cannot think.

  The man does not know the way; he is not from here. They have met him in Enschede, just across the German border, where they were accommodated in an old school building. They were not expected there and not welcomed – yet another miserable step along the long journey home. So many people on the road. So many trucks going everywhere and nowhere. Only twenty miles per day. Stop, delouse, register. It was as if the Netherlands did not want them back.

  One day the Dutch tricolour was pressed into their hands and when their vehicles crossed the border, they all burst into the national anthem. Everyone in the truck was weeping and finally, yes, finally, they were given a warm welcome. Children cheering on the side of the road, waving flags. But it was not for them; it was for the soldiers crossing the border in similar lorries with lollipops, chocolate and other sweet treats. The children slunk off with long faces and they just stood on the truck with the flag in their hands.

  In Enschede they were deloused for the hundredth time and registered for the thousandth time. Then they were put in a room with Dutch Nazi women. When one of them started yelling at the sisters, Janny had had enough and she called the people in charge to order: ‘Welcome to Enschede? You take us to a stinking, empty school, make us sleep on straw, again, and what, for goodness’ sake, do you feed us? Turnip! Enough of this, dammit!’

  But it did not make a difference; going in or out of North and South Holland was forbidden owing to infectious diseases. It was late May already, but they were not allowed to go anywhere. Things sped up a few days later when they ran into an acquaintance of Jan Hemelrijk. They got permission to leave on Sunday and this man, a dentist looking for a lost relative, was kind enough to take the sisters and two other women home.