Bergen-Belsen

We were not dressed, like the other prisoners, in striped clothes and were allowed to wear our own clothes. 

The Star Camp was divided into two parts, one for women and one for men. A barbed wire fence separated them, and the gate closed at 8 p.m. I was with Father in the men’s part, but during the day, the families could meet. As difficult as our conditions of incarceration were, our situation was relatively good because the families were kept together.

The Germans wouldn’t let us be idle. In the morning, we had to arrange the beds in an exemplary way, like a matchbox with a smooth, stretched blanket on top, as demanded by the SS guards. If your bed was not made to their satisfaction, you were punished … the cancellation of your portion of food.

After the inspection of the beds in the barracks, there was the daily and hated roll-call on the “Appellplatz”, the square for roll-calls. There we had to stand in rows of five people waiting to be counted. It took an hour, two or three hours, every day and in any weather, sometimes twice a day as punishment. In the sun and dust, rain and mud, snow and frost, we stood there until the daily count of the number of prisoners satisfied the Nazis.

We usually got a thin watery soup made of turnip (a kind of beet) and sometimes with a floating piece of potato and a chip of meat. Very rarely were we given pumpkin soup or noodle soup. The daily bread was a slice three centimetres thick of compressed and sour German bread.

Once a week, we got twenty-five grams of margarine, and sometimes, they gave us a tablespoon of jam or a small triangle of smelly cheese. In the morning, there was an indeterminate hot drink called coffee. Of course, it was a coffee substitute.

We suffered from terrible hunger, lost weight and many couldn’t hold on and starved. As a result, at the end of the war, when I was released at the age of fifteen, I weighed only twenty-six kilograms.

They did not return before 6 p.m. Most of them, including Annelie’s father, Dolf, and her brother, Joost, worked on the huge pile of shoes next to the camp. They had to take apart the old shoes. 

Others worked in the kitchen, like Annelie’s mother, Liesje. Some labor battalions were particularly hated, such as the hard work of rooting out roots and tree trunks in the forest. Children, mothers with young children, old and sick, and officials stayed in the camp. 

Father was out of work because at Bergen-Belsen, he had to have his thumb amputated as a result of a gangrenous infection he got in Westerbork.

Everyone was entitled to a full ladle of soup, but there is a fuller ladle.... and above all, there is a thicker portion of soup…

One day we got cheese. It was an extraordinary thing – yellow cheese triangles with big holes. Something very special. Mother picked out the nicest pieces and put them aside for the hut’s inmates, who left early in the morning with the labour detachments and had yet to return. Someone claimed Mother took them for herself. Mother explained but to no avail... There was an argument. I stood there, heard the accusations, and saw Mother crying.

Since we left home, it’d been over a year. The few clothes we had were wearing thin and were far from clean, and the shoes required repair. There were no problems supplying repair materials. Friends who worked on dissembling shoes gave me everything I needed: leather in different thicknesses, and nails, especially crooked parts that had to be straightened. 

I initially fixed the family’s shoes, but later I worked occasionally for others as well. And then I could charge payment and get a slice of bread or soup in exchange for my job.

He went to the judge and complained about a man who refused to pay him a portion of soup in exchange for fixing a pair of shoes as they had agreed in advance. 

The judge investigated the matter, interrogated the man, interrogated Chanan, and ruled: the soup intended for the shoe owner should be given to Chanan.

She was in a terrible state of sickness and malnutrition… And you ask yourself: Where does one get to the point where one has to say, you can’t judge anymore, leave it, do nothing… 

On the other hand, this despairing situation wherein you try to maintain order, to protect the rights and property of everyone... So some effort was made to do justice, to keep the law. I don’t know if there was any punishment or whether they were satisfied with saying, ”you shouldn’t have done that.” Because how can you ask someone like that to return what she took? It was a perfectly impossible situation.

It was a nerve-wracking and very exhausting process. At first, there were many people on the list, and then the process stopped. When it resumed, it became clear that all sorts of people had been removed from the list. They were very disappointed.

Grandma Netta was from the beginning on the list of exchange, and luckily, she remained on it.

The whole group was moved to a separate compound, next to us, on the other side of the barbed wire fence. Then, one morning, on 30 June 1944, they were no longer there... I wasn’t worried, I knew they were on their way to Palestine.

They were on their way to bomb the German cities. It gave us great pleasure; we knew that the defeat of the Germans in the war was our only chance of survival. Somehow, we heard about the American and British Invasion of France on 6 June 1944 and the Russians’ advance towards the evacuated camps in the East.

It took us a long time. They would hand out portions of bread which were like a very thick slice that we would cut thin, thin across... We saved bread for a while, each of us a thin slice every day, finally we mixed everything with water and margarine and some sugar and made a birthday cake out of it decorated with jam drops.

We kids played. There was also someone who gave lessons. Chanan made and fixed shoes, Father fixed flashlights, Mother knitted, Marion worked as a nurse.

We washed the laundry with cold water and a clay lump-like “soap”. I remember how the shirt I put on the barbed wire fence froze, and how I carried it like a plank back to the hut. It made me laugh a lot.

Some small handmade present, little dolls of red and blue wool, embroidered handkerchiefs, a little scarf each, a tiny tablecloth with two napkins, ribbons for our hair... It was very festive; I have a very good memory of this celebration, the “togetherness” and the feeling of being “celebrated”!

The girls also read us a song they wrote. I kept it, and when we left Bergen-Belsen, I took the song and the gifts that Ruth received with me. I didn’t take mine because we could only take very little with us.

I chose two books by Cissy van Marxfeldt. The books were “Joop ter Heul’s Problems” and “Joop van Dil ter Heul”. The books were about a teenage girl growing up, who had many problems, but they were completely different from the problems I experienced in those years. These were amusing and carefree books. I read them over and over again in Westerbork and in Bergen-Belsen.

It was the first of the four volumes: “The High School Days of Joop ter Heul”.

The most beautiful memory of this book that stayed with me was one afternoon. There were alarm sirens because of allied planes passing by and my mother couldn’t go to work outside the camp. I read her a passage from the book, and she listened. A while later, when the siren ended the alarm, she was forced to return to her work in the kitchen. My mother was a very active and positive woman, yet very stressed. She was understandably affected by the tension and horror before and during the war. She was often impatient and nervous, and that hour we spent together was a surprising and special gift that I will never forget.

People were added to the camp in an almost constant stream: to our compound and to the surrounding compounds. Amidst the mighty mess, the four of us actually got settled quite well. We decided it would be best to have a small one and a big one in each bed: Mother and Ruth, Marion and me. We ended up pleased with our new place. We had two upper beds next to each other and adjacent to the wall. Above our heads, there was a bit more space, and we also had a nail: storage place for the night. We didn’t enjoy our “luxury apartment” for a long time, though: after about a week, Ruth fell critically ill and was hospitalized in the hospital hut.

After a few days, Mother let me visit her. When I stood in front of her, I felt like she was behind glass, I saw her, but she didn’t see me.... There was no contact. She died shortly after that visit.

The cart went through the opening, and turned left. We stood close to the barbed wire fence to the right of the gate. Father said Kaddish.

Chanan, Marion and Mother couldn’t accompany Ruth because they had to work or were sick. Not many years ago we talked about it, Chanan, Marion and I, but we didn’t remember... What I do remember is that Mother got typhus and was moved to the hospital barracks shortly after Ruth died. Marion and I slept together in one bed.

One Saturday night Rabbi Meir returned home from the synagogue. He wanted to know where his two sons were. Bruria, his wife, asked him, “If the person who gave me a deposit asks for it back, should I give it back to him?” Rabbi Meir replied: “Of course!” Bruria told him: “God asked our two sons back.”

“When you were born,” Father told me, “we only expected one child. And we were surprised; we got two daughters! Now we’ve been asked to give back one girl.” And so, he tried to comfort himself, emphasizing the happy twelve years Ruth lived with us.

That day, or a day or two later, when Father and I were walking together on the roll-call field, I caught myself humming. I was shocked – not nice! I’m not supposed to sing; Ruth just died... Father noticed what I was going through and said, ”Sing! That’s how you should remember her.” I immediately adopted that advice, and since then, it has been accompanying me my whole life.

After a year in the camp, at the beginning of the second winter, it was evident that he was growing weaker and weaker. The extreme weather, the cold, the snow and the mud, in addition to the constant hunger, severely affected him. Ruth’s death caused him great grief, and his health and mental state gradually faded, and Father became indifferent to his surroundings.

During the final and difficult months, the two of us slept together, with our few possessions, on a 60 cm wide upper bunk. The daily roll-call was held in the narrow space between the shacks after the area of the Star Camp had been limited to a minimum during the autumn. Together we stood there for many hours, in all weather conditions. During this time, I took care of Father, cut his hair, and conducted, for both of us, a constant battle against bedbugs, fleas and especially lice. Father was 41, and I was 14.

We suffered badly from cold and snow. The sanitary conditions in the camp deteriorated below any level that can be described, a filth that has not yet been seen in this world. The quality of the food and quantity, which was not enough anyway, deteriorated further. The kitchens couldn’t handle the workload because of the number of prisoners in the camp. The food arrived at unexpected times and sometimes not at all.

In the end, even drinking water was only available at times. The lice caused the outbreak of a typhus epidemic that claimed many victims. Drugs were not available.

Piles of dead people lying there in the middle of the camp, and I remember… It’s a terrible thought… I remember they put them in a certain order, layer upon layer, crisscross... and that I suddenly thought, “It’s just like loaves of bread.” Maybe because I kept thinking about bread all the time because there was nothing to eat. You couldn’t believe it, you couldn’t...

Most of the dead, these piles of the dead, were not inside the Star Camp, but behind the fence, in front of our eyes.

He died of general exhaustion caused by hunger, cold, diarrhea and hard work. Occasionally there were penalty drills at the roll-call field, where the men, after a grueling day’s work, had to run around the field. Father never complained but once said he felt terrible about what his kids had to experience. I remember trying to reassure him.

For weeks I knew he was going to die, because sometimes in the evening, when we went together for a little walk between the barracks and looked at the stars, our only refuge, he was for a moment “gone”. I knew, from my experience with other people, that this was the result of exhaustion and that he didn’t have much time left to live.

I can still see it clearly. He was lying on the bottom bed, and I was holding the spoon with the handle tilted downwards, which made it difficult for him to eat, but Father always stayed patient with me and didn’t complain. He was a gentle man with a wonderful sense of humour, and I felt very good with him. He never yelled, and he was very moderate. He had a strong love of nature; we went for long walks or bike rides and worked together in the garden. Bergen-Belsen had no nature, only shacks, mud and sand.

It was the last and worst month in the camp. Almost no food and water, many diseases and many dead. It was only later, in the Netherlands, that I realized the magnitude of the loss and realized the deep sadness that accompanied me for many years. I could barely bear it until it diminished a little when my life circumstances improved.