A Delayed Life

by Dita Kraus

  I pulled Margit’s hand. “Come, we can also try it,” I whispered. A few others also advanced cautiously, step by step. We came nearer. Nothing happened; it seemed safe. The stink was awful, but the women were pulling out turnips that were only partly rotten.

  Suddenly we heard shots. The guard had seen us. Perhaps he was watching us all the time and was only waiting until the targets came closer. Margit and I started running, but, as we had no strength, we fell and lay sprawled on the ground. Others had also fallen, but some of them never got up again, while Margit and I finally crawled away. The woman just in front of me was killed. I didn’t look; there were already so many corpses lying everywhere. It was impossible to know who was already dead and who had been shot now.

  The dead lay everywhere. There was no one to bury them. At first the corpses were collected and piled one on top of the other. Some were dressed, most were naked. But their nakedness was as inoffensive as that of small children, the genitals aroused no shame, the dead bodies had lost all sexuality. The limbs were just bones, fleshless, covered in skin, the knees and elbows like knots of ropes sticking out of the heap at incongruous angles. Most faces had open eyes, vacant and empty; one could not imagine that these eyes could once see. The chins hung unhinged, showing the cave-like interior of the blackened throats. Some of the dead had become so small that their clothes looked empty and only the shrunken head was proof that there was a body inside those rags.

  In the course of the day or two between the disappearance of the guards and the arrival of the British army, the camp grounds became covered with excrement and corpses. The weakened inmates had no strength to walk to the latrine and just relieved themselves wherever they sat. They also died there. In a short time there was no way to get around without stepping over the dead and it was almost impossible to avoid the patches of bloody shit.

  You who read this must be asking yourself: How is it possible to live through such horrors and not become insane? It is. Nature, it seems, has a way to protect man even from the ultimate of hells.

  I felt no sorrow, no pity. I felt nothing at all. I understood that what I saw was horrible beyond human understanding, but I felt no emotion. I moved about, stepped over bodies, sat with Margit and Mother and talked, saw women fall and die or heard a last sigh of the dying. But I felt no pain and no sorrow, not even for myself. I existed on the biological level only, devoid of any humanity.

  But no, I am wrong. There still remained friendship. Margit and I stuck together; we were a support for each other. And I still cared for my mother and tried to perk up her morale. I don’t remember it, but we probably still held some hope for rescue, as we heard the front coming closer.

  The emotions were not entirely dead; they were encased in some frozen place inside me, unreachable now, but somehow protected from total loss. I retained the knowledge of feelings like a past memory. An experience once lived recedes into a store of reminiscences but becomes dull, without taste and color. I was aware of the fact that what I saw was unspeakable horror, yet the knowledge failed to be accompanied by any vestige of emotion.

  On the last day, Margit and I were sitting at the far end of the enclosure, some distance from the watchtowers and barracks. The sun was shining, and it was warm. Around us there were no corpses, and we sat on the sandy ground soaking up the balmy warmth on our skin. There were other little groups of women, squatting here and there, but not close together, and I felt a rare awareness of privacy, unknown for years.

  We took off our clothes and checked them for lice. We did this slowly, following the inner seams where the lice usually hid. As we found them we squeezed them to death between the nails of both thumbs, a practice learned in the camps. When we finished delousing one piece of clothing, we spread it out in the sun and removed the next layer, again turning it inside out. We did this until we both sat baring our torsos to the sun, feeling a kind of bliss at the lightness of the naked body, at the contact with the clean sand, relieved that when we put our clothes on again there wouldn’t be any lice in them.

  We were awfully skinny. Not yet like the Muselmänner, but almost. Our breasts had vanished completely. How interesting is the economy of our bodies. First, back in the ghetto, we stopped menstruating, as if the body had decided that it was wasteful to lose blood when replenishment is uncertain. Then the layers of fat go, and when all of it is absorbed, the roundness of the belly disappears until it caves in and looks like a bowl with the hip bones for handles. After that the flesh itself starts vanishing, from the cheeks, from the arms, and from the legs. When I stood with my feet together I could insert my open palm horizontally between my thighs.

  No longer did we feel hunger. Instead there was a kind of weightlessness. Our thoughts were no longer concentrated solely on food. We hadn’t put anything in our mouths for a long time, two days, three days, I can’t remember. I felt somehow relieved, even elated. The sun was wonderful.

  There was a group huddled together some distance from us. Margit got up to see what they were doing. Something had drawn her attention and she became curious. The group consisted of Gypsy women. We had encountered them in Auschwitz; they were also here in Bergen-Belsen. The four or five women sat in a circle, and in the middle there was a depression in the sand, and from it there arose a wisp of steam.

  When Margit came nearer, they waved her away. She stopped a few paces from them, but they started shouting and made threatening gestures. They were guarding something in that hole and did not let her approach. Margit came back and sat down quietly. We looked at the Gypsies, and they too threw glances in our direction.

  And now we discerned also a smell coming from there. There was a fire and they were cooking something. It smelled good, it must be some soup. I felt drawn to it but was scared to get closer.

  We got up and started moving back toward the barracks. We made a wide berth around the Gypsies to show them we were no longer interested in them. But then we turned and walked past the group to get a glimpse of their food. Yes, there was a can serving as a pot, and inside something was cooking. We didn’t speak when we passed them, and they didn’t shout when they saw that we were not stopping.

  Margit didn’t say anything. After a while she asked, “Did you see it?” I said that I couldn’t make out what they were cooking in that can. She repeated, “You didn’t see what it was?” After a long while she said, “It was a liver.”

  I had forgotten the scene. The details begin coming into focus while I am writing this. What is prominent again is the absence of any reaction. There was no revulsion or horror, although the implication of what I had seen did register in my brain: I had witnessed cannibalism.

  I don’t know what I would have done if the Gypsies had invited me to join them. Today I hope I would have refused, but I am not certain. Margit and I never spoke about it again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Liberation

  It must have been the next day that the British arrived, because if it were later, I wouldn’t have been able to walk any longer. At first we heard a voice over a loudspeaker, somewhere from the direction of the camp entrance. Although this was something new, no one showed any curiosity; it was too much of an effort to get up from the ground. The voice came closer, repeating some announcement. There was a stirring in the neighboring compounds. The lying figures that were not yet dead raised their heads and listened. Some stood up and went to the fence, where they could see the central road. We heard shouts from the other compounds; something unusual was going on.

  And then I could see it, too. It was a green military vehicle with a white symbol on its door, but it was not the Hakenkreuz (swastika). A loudspeaker was mounted on the roof, and inside the car were soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms. The car was moving slowly along the road, and the voice repeated in several languages, “You are liberated, you are free. We are the British army, and we have come to liberate you.”

  Maybe they said it differently. My memory has blanks, especially of things that were spoken; I rememb
er much better the sights than the words. I can see the women clustered at the fence, those who still had the strength to become enthusiastic. The majority, however, lay apathetically, a few smiled weakly, understanding that this was something good.

  I did understand, but I didn’t rejoice. What I felt was a kind of relief: From now on all will be better; we will get food. But in the camps one didn’t raise high hopes. We had learned that the expectations of something positive had never been fulfilled. Each day, each month, each year brought only worse suffering. One just suspended any hope of improvement, the expectation of anything good had long ago been suppressed. It wasn’t only foolish but harmful. Because each new disappointment was harder to bear, the lower one’s spirit sank, the more effort was needed to raise oneself up and go on. It sapped your strength to be optimistic.

  Some women tried to open the gates to get to the road, but found them locked as before. Freedom was still something abstract, distant. We would have to wait patiently. This was also announced through the loudspeakers. “Remain calm. You will receive food, and the sick will be treated. We have to keep you in quarantine to prevent an epidemic. You will be sent back to your homes as soon as you are free of contamination.”

  Yet despite their goodwill, the British made fatal mistakes, which caused the deaths of many more victims before things began to improve. On the very first day they began distributing the food from their army supplies. They did not realize what their tinned meat and beans would do to the emaciated, starving bodies. The sudden glut was devastating, and those that vomited immediately were the lucky ones.

  My sensible, level-headed mother declared resolutely, “You two will not eat anything unless I approve of it.” Of the available tinned food, she allowed us to take two tins. One was dry powdered milk, and the other sugar. She explained to me and Margit that we must be extremely careful and eat only a spoonful from each tin with long intervals in between, to let our digestive systems learn to function again.

  So the three of us sat on the ground and licked the delicious mixture of sugar and milk powder, keeping it long in our mouths to let it dissolve slowly. We promised Mother we’d obey her guidance, despite seeing the others around stuffing themselves with the enticing goodies.

  The British army stumbled upon the Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945 as it advanced across Germany. They had no previous knowledge of what they would encounter and were totally unprepared to deal with the situation. I heard it from them many times. They knew no one would believe them when they described what they’d found. They had to document it all on film.

  They filmed the sights of the camp in the first days after the liberation: the burial of the bodies in the mass graves. The ceremonial incineration of the lice and typhus-infested barracks, watched by the troops and the former prisoners from a safe distance.

  I saw the film on television in 1986. I remembered the smell of the thousands of corpses, which I had forgotten. I was probably so used to it at the time that it had ceased to bother me. And now the pictures of the dead, just as I had seen them, with those twisted limbs and sunken eye sockets. Then there are the German civilians, together with the mayor of a nearby town, having been ordered by the British to witness their own atrocities. They are holding handkerchiefs to their noses and averting their eyes. They stare openmouthed, shaking their heads, repeating over and over again, “Wir haben nichts gewusst.” We didn’t know anything.

  It may sound wrong or politically incorrect, but I believe that many of the Germans really didn’t know. The camp itself was quite distant from any settlement, the road leading to it off-limits. No obedient German would try to go to a place that was VERBOTEN.

  The British ordered the male SS guards, wearing their now dirty and crumpled, formerly spick-and-span uniforms, to perform the disgusting task of burying the thousands of bodies. It gave me quite a bit of satisfaction to see those high and mighty Űbermenschen humbled and degraded, dragging the corpses by their arms and legs, some of them already decomposing.

  The film goes on: The camp-burning ceremony. The bulldozer, excavating earth for one of the huge mass graves. Open-air makeshift showers, where naked former prisoners bathe, not minding being filmed. And here are the SS women, lined up in front of the barracks, those fat, uniformed, large-bosomed brutes. Next there is the British military vehicle with the amplifier on the roof, driving along the central road of the camp. And then one sees the faces of the women prisoners behind the fence, and could it be…? The girl in a dark dress with the bloated face, was that me? I think it was, and the shorter one just behind me looked like Margit; the face is not clear, but the hairline seems familiar. But the camera moves on too quickly.

  * * *

  A few days after the liberation, I started working with the British army. The familiar vehicle with the loudspeaker called for people who could translate from German to English and English to German. I volunteered to become an interpreter. Like everyone else, I was eager to have access to the soldiers’ cigarettes and chocolate. I got a white armband with the letter I, which I wore on my sleeve. It was sheer chutzpah on my part to claim that I knew English. The English I had learned with Miss Pollak at the age of ten didn’t prepare me for conversation in that language. German was no problem; it was my mother tongue.

  I was attached to an officer, who sat in the former Kommandatur near the main entrance of the camp. In the beginning I did not understand a word of what he was saying, but then he started speaking slowly, and that improved the situation. Like every one of them, he was extremely kind to me. All the officers and soldiers were still in a state of shock after what they’d found in the camp, and each of them wanted personally to alleviate the suffering and tried to compensate for what had been done to us. They gave us presents, anything they could think of, even money, which of course we had no use for. My officer, for example, took off his wristwatch on the first day I came to work and wanted to give it to me. I didn’t accept it; I was embarrassed. Instead I asked for cigarettes, at which he jumped up and opened a cupboard, which revealed a treasure of stacks and stacks of Woodbines, Craven A, and Navy Cut, the rations for the troops. He told me to help myself to as many as I liked, not only now, but whenever I wanted. I took two packets, which seemed to me a great lot, but I didn’t want to appear greedy. The knowledge that I could replenish my treasure every day was more wonderful than the possession itself.

  Of the three girls who had volunteered as interpreters, only I was placed in an office. Eva was attached to an officer, who was in charge of the burial of the corpses in the mass graves. He was driving around in a command car, and Eva had to interpret his orders to the Germans. I don’t remember the third girl’s name, only that she was a native of Brno.

  A few days after the liberation, Eva’s officer took both of us out of the camp in his car. We had to duck so that the guard at the gate wouldn’t see us. The prisoners were forbidden to leave the camp; the typhus epidemic was already raging, people were dying, and the camp was under strict quarantine. But Eva’s officer was young and reckless, and for the first time in years, we found ourselves beyond the fences, out in the open country.

  It was May, or maybe still April, and along the road the cherry trees were in bloom. There were little villages, here and there a lonely farmstead, the fields were beginning to turn green, and all around was such heavenly, pastoral peace, without a sign of war or bomb damage, that we thought, This cannot be true. Here we are, just a few miles from the worst hell human imagination can conceive, and for these people life has been going on as usual. The war passed them by, the seasons came and went; true, perhaps their men were drafted to the army, and maybe they had to hand over their produce to the government. But what was that compared to what we had endured?

  The officer stopped at one of the farms. A German hausfrau (housewife) came out, and he asked her for eggs. She didn’t understand, shrugged her shoulders and gesticulated with her hands.

  I spoke to her in German: “Er will Eier.” He wants eggs.


  She started wailing, “We don’t have any eggs. We are hungry ourselves.”

  But then the officer barked a command, and she fell silent immediately. Then she walked into the henhouse and came out carrying several eggs in her apron. Excluding the one I was given in the family camp in Auschwitz, they were the first eggs I had seen in four years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Bubi

  It was well known that most of the guards who had manned the camp vanished among the civilians to avoid capture, but a number of the personnel remained, and the British took them into custody.

  It was not clear whether they belonged to the SS. They had no insignia—removed, of course, to look more innocent in the eyes of the British. Their appearance lost its military, commanding stance, and they behaved toward the British in a submissive, almost cringing manner.

  They were put to work carrying the thousands of corpses, their disgust plainly showing on their faces, yet they dared not complain or refuse.

  The female guards were locked in some rooms of the same hut where I worked. It was my officer who was in charge of them. One by one they were sent in for interrogation, and my job was to translate his questions into German and their answers into English. It was slow work, not only because of my poor English, but also because they tried to minimize their responsibility, saying they were only carrying out orders from above; none of them admitted to having given any commands or having tortured or beaten prisoners. In spite of that, they remained much more self-assured than the men.

  My officer, whose name I have long forgotten, explained to me that what we were doing was only preliminary; we had to take down their personal data, their rank, and a short account of their career. Later they would be transferred to real prisons and charged at special war courts. And so every day, we processed a few, while I was undergoing a complicated process of change.