Annelies полностью

Except. Except there is one spot in this wretched cesspool where life is permitted. It is the Sternlager, the Star Camp, the Free Camp, where the so-called privilegierte Juden are held. Jews whom the SS think might still be valuable as hostages. There’s food in the Sternlager, bad food but food nonetheless. The inmates wear their own clothes in the Sternlager, instead of Kazet stripes or castoffs from the dead; their heads have not been shaved, and whole families have been kept intact. The barbed-wire fence that divides this paradise from what’s called the Kleines Frauenlager is tightly crammed with straw, but there are points of desperation where the straw has been torn away. Points where a portal has been opened between life and death.

It is through such a portal, no larger than a fist, that Anne has been reunited with her dearest Hanneli. Her dearest, dearest Lies. While Anne was snug in the Achterhuis, hidden from the German death grip, Hanneli had filled her nightmares. Her sleep had been shredded by dreams of her sweet Lies trapped behind the cruel barbed wire of a Nazi camp, her clothes in rags, freezing, starving, and begging for mercy while Anne slept tucked under thick blankets in an attic hideout and ate enough food to fill her belly. Anne had wept for her. Cried out her name. But in Bergen-Belsen nightmares are turned inside out, and it is Hanneli who receives Red Cross parcels and Anne who shivers in sickened misery on the opposite side of the wire.

A winter darkness bereft of stars. Anne stumbles across the snow-smeared ground toward the fence. It is so intensely wonderful to see Lies, and so intensely horrid. To find her alive, still a human being, Anne is enraptured. And for a moment, as she peers through the fence’s portal at Hanneli’s pale, oval face, she loves Lies with every inch of her being. Hanneli alive! But in the next instant, Anne’s mouth runs bitter. They sob together as their fingers touch through the barbed wire, but Anne can see the horror reflected in Hanneli’s tears. She knows what her friend sees. Anne has been reduced to a diseased animal, filthy, infested with lice and scratching herself bloody, her eyes swimming with fever, her head shorn, naked but for a horse blanket clutched around her body, her louse-infested rags discarded. Anne cries that she is freezing. That she is starving. That the lice are driving her mad, and Lies cries with her. For her.

“Anne, what are you doing in this place? Why aren’t you in Switzerland?” Hanneli demands, as if maybe Anne has tricked her somehow. Anne can only cry as she admits the truth.

“That was only a ruse,” she sobs. “Really we were hiding in the rear of Papa’s office building. The whole time.”

“Oh, my God. All this time in the middle of Amsterdam?”

“Until we were arrested. Lies, I am so cold,” Anne moans. “And there’s nothing to eat here. We’ve all been left to starve. Do you have some food you can share? Please, Lies. I’m so hungry. So hungry.”

“Yes, yes, I’ll get you something, I promise. Come back here tomorrow night, and I’ll have something for you.”

So a night later Hanneli has bundled up a parcel from the Red Cross packages and heaves it over the wire. But there are many rats on Anne’s side of the fence, animal and human alike, and a very large specimen of the human variety scurries out of the darkness and snatches the bundle from Anne’s hands. She screams, and then she weeps. She weeps not just because she is starving but also because Lies is so beautiful. Because her dear Hanneli has something that she will not share with her loving friend Anne. Something she cannot share.

Hope.

The next night when Anne meets her at the tiny hole in the fence, Lies has another parcel for her and manages to toss it over. This time Anne snatches it up before any rats attack, and she tears it open with a wild appetite. But there is no hope for her in Hanneli’s offering. Only Red Cross rations. A few Swedish knäckebrod crackers, some dried prunes, and a hard cookie. Holding back the cookie for Margot, she sobs as she devours the rest in front of Lies, as her friend watches through the portal. She sobs. The angel of death is following her, she tells Lies. Stealing her life from her, person by person, until soon she will have no family at all. No one.

11 FURIES

This is the Site of

The Infamous Belsen Concentration Camp

Liberated by the British on 15 April 1945

10,000 unburied dead were found here.

Another 13,000 have since died,

all of them victims of the

German new order in Europe,

and an example of Nazi Kultur.

—Sign erected on the Lüneburg Heath by the 11th Armoured Division, British Army of Liberation

Your furies have passed over me; Your terrors have cut me down.

—Psalms 88:17

1945

Displaced Persons Camp (DPC)

BELSEN

(Camp No. 2)

Under 81 British General Hospital Staff, RAMC

Typhus Block / Women’s Ward