The Librarian of Auschwitz(108)
“I’m from Auschwitz,” says one woman. “Nothing can be worse than that.”
The other women don’t say a word. She doesn’t convince them. They’ve discovered over the years that horror is bottomless. They don’t trust anyone—once bitten, twice shy. But the worst of it is that they’re going to be proven correct.
It’s a short trip from Hamburg to Bergen-Belsen, but the train takes several hours before it finally stops with a grinding of gears. They have to walk from the platform to the entrance of the women’s camp. They are escorted by several guards from the women’s section of the SS, who shove them violently and shout swear words at them. There’s a steely meanness in their eyes. One of the prisoners stares at a guard, and the guard spits in her face so she’ll turn away.
“Pig,” mutters Dita under her breath. Her mother gives her a pinch to stop her talking.
Dita wonders why the guards are so angry with the prisoners, given that they are the ones who have been humiliated and deprived of everything, given that they’ve barely set foot in the camp and haven’t done anyone any harm, given that all they’re going to do is obey and work feverishly for the Reich without asking for anything in return. But these robust, well-fed, and well-dressed guards prove to be furious. They taunt the prisoners, hit them in the ribs with their clubs, insult them with obscene phrases, and generally show themselves to be irascible toward these docile new arrivals. Dita is surprised by the irritation of their aggressors, their display of indignation toward people who have done them no harm.
When the prisoners have lined up in formation, the supervisor appears. She’s tall, blond, and has broad shoulders and a square jaw. She moves with the assurance of a person used to being in charge and instantly obeyed. She informs them in her booming voice that they are forbidden to leave their huts after the seven o’clock curfew under pain of death. She pauses and eagerly searches out a glance from any of the inmates. Their eyes are all fixed straight in front of them. Then one young woman makes the mistake of returning her glance. The supervisor takes two strides and plants herself in front of the girl. She grabs her violently by her hair, drags her out of the line, and throws her to the ground in front of the group. Although it appears as if no one is looking directly, they all see. She hits the girl once with her club. Then again, and again. The girl doesn’t cry out; she only sobs. After the fifth stroke, she’s not even sobbing, and barely moaning. They don’t hear what the supervisor says when she puts her mouth to the girl’s ear, but the prisoner gets up, dripping blood, and stumbles back to her place in the line.
The name of the supervisor in charge of the guards at Bergen-Belsen is Elisabeth Volkenrath. After training as a warden at Ravensbrück, she moved on to Auschwitz, where she forged a solid reputation for the ease with which she ordered executions by hanging for the slightest misdemeanor. She was posted to Bergen-Belsen at the start of 1945.
The path they take goes past several fenced-off areas that enclose a range of compounds about which they’ll learn more later on. They include a camp for the male prisoners; the “star” camp, for inmates destined to be exchanged for German prisoners of war; the “neutral” camp, for several hundred Jews who hold passports from neutral countries; the quarantine camp to isolate prisoners with typhus; a camp for Hungarians; and the feared prison camp, which in reality is an extermination compound where sick prisoners from other labor camps are interned, forced to work under extreme conditions, and exploited until they die a few days later.
Eventually Dita’s group reaches the small women’s camp, which the Germans have had to set up in a hurry on some barren land next to the main camp because of the huge number of female detainees who have arrived at Bergen-Belsen over the past few months. It’s a temporary camp with prefabricated barracks, no plumbing, and no waste pipes, just four thin, wooden walls.
In the barrack to which Dita, her mother, and about fifty other women have been assigned, there’s no dinner, no beds, and the blankets smell of urine. They have to sleep on the wooden floor, and there’s barely any room for them, not even on the floor.
Bergen-Belsen was originally a camp for prisoners of war under the supervision of the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but the pressure from the Russian troops in Poland has caused prisoners to be rerouted there from Polish camps, so the SS has taken control. New transports arrive constantly, and the installations are overflowing. Overcrowding, lack of food, and poor sanitary conditions have caused prisoner deaths to skyrocket.
Mother and daughter exchange looks. Liesl grimaces bleakly at the sight of their new hut companions, all so emaciated and sickly. But even worse is the fixed expression of many of them, the absent look—most of them are so listless that you’d think they’d already given up on life. Dita doesn’t know if her mother’s expression is a reaction to the starving prisoners or to themselves, because this is exactly how they will look very soon. The veterans hardly respond to the disturbance caused by the latest arrivals. Many don’t get up from their improvised beds made out of piles of old blankets. Some couldn’t, even if they wanted to.
Dita stretches out her mother’s blanket on the floor and tells her to lie down. Mrs. Adler does as she’s told and curls up. She puts her face on the blanket and encounters an army of jumping fleas, but she’s unfazed. It doesn’t even matter anymore. One of the new arrivals asks a veteran what sort of work is done in the camp.