“Run! Mindel! Run!” a boy shouted.
She didn’t know who’d shouted and didn’t care either, she simply obeyed and her little feet moved her away from the vicious SS man as fast as they could. Panting, she reached her hut, dropped on the first available bunk and lay there face-down. Too exhausted to move, she stayed curled on her side, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming of her beloved parents, who’d been taken away by the mean mayor Herr Keller, leaving Mindel and her three siblings to fend for themselves.
That kind girl Lotte had given them food and shelter, but Herr Keller had discovered them again. Tears flowed as she hoped her brothers were still alive and safe. As for Rachel, despite not having seen her since she first arrived in Bergen-Belsen, Mindel clung to the idea that her sister was still somewhere around. She missed her so much. She missed her entire family so much.
“Mindel, are you alright?” Laszlo interrupted her sleep.
“Yes. I’m so tired. And my back hurts.”
“I saw the guard whipping you. Let me have a look.” He pushed up her dress and hissed in a breath. “It’s only a stripe, not even blood. You’re lucky.”
“Why did he hit me? I bumped into him by accident. I didn’t mean it!” Mindel asked, trying to keep the whine out of her voice.
“It’s just the way they are. Mean.” Laszlo lay down and she turned and hugged him tight. He truly was her best friend.
After a while she whispered, “Do you think my sister’s still in one of the other compounds?”
“Hard to say. Adults have it so much harder than we do. They have to work.”
“I need to find her.”
“You tried that, remember?”
“I asked every single person in the compound. Maybe I can sneak across the fence and ask around there?”
“Don’t do that. You’ll only get into trouble,” Laszlo said, before they both fell asleep until the grown-ups returned from their work detail and the owner of the bunk shooed them away.
10
The Tannenberg camp had a new commandant, even more sadistic than the previous one. He loved interminable roll calls and delighted in making the tired women stand still for hours after they returned from their grueling twelve-hour shifts at the Rheinmetall factory or on road construction.
Left and right, depleted women collapsed and the vicious guards beat them until they either managed to get back up or died trying. Rachel’s own life was hanging by a thread, because she’d swayed and buckled several times already, but every time she had managed by force of sheer willpower to stagger upright again.
This night, she was even more tired than usual. The acid taste in her mouth forced her to gag every so often and the stabbing ache in her stomach urged her to lie down and curl into a ball. Instead, she pushed her shoulders back, somehow finding the strength to stand up without locking her knees. That was a mistake many of the women made, thinking it would keep them upright, only it usually rendered them unconscious.
“Oh no, not die Schwarze,” whispered her neighbor.
Rachel glanced to her left and inwardly cringed, her cracked hands clutching her skirt. Susanne Hille, called the black, because of her pitch-black hair, was striding down the line of women, an evil sneer on her face. She was the youngest guard, maybe twenty years old, but cruel beyond anything Rachel had ever witnessed before, certainly worse than all of the male guards taken together. Her trademark was to randomly strike the inmates with the wooden baton she always carried in her hand.
The vicious thing about die Schwarze was that she never targeted the women who’d fallen, but those visibly hanging by a thread, trying to keep upright. Like Rachel today. Her heart stopped beating as the despised guard entered her row. With that sadistic smile on her lips, she walked down, inspecting the women, until she lunged with her truncheon at the second one in the row.
The high-pitched shriek pierced through marrow and bone, and Rachel involuntarily winced, only to bite the inside of her lip. All the while, Susanne Hille continued her walk, picking new targets every couple of prisoners.
“Not the selections,” her neighbor once again whispered.
Rachel again glanced to the side and watched as Susanne Hille began selecting women from the line. They were shoved to the side and would later be marched away. Where to, nobody knew. The one thing Rachel knew was that nobody ever had seen a selected woman again.
Rumors had it they were returned to the main camp at Bergen-Belsen, but others were not so sure. A group of Jewish women who’d been transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen were sure they’d “go through the chimney”.
Rachel did not believe this. Naturally there was a crematorium at the main camp to burn the corpses, but unlike in Auschwitz – if these women were to be believed – nobody had ever been taken to the showers and gassed in there.
Still, she’d rather not find out what happened with the unfortunate chosen ones and kept herself as motionless as she could, while her thoughts wandered, pondering what could have made a young and pretty woman like Susanne Hille act so callously toward her fellow human beings. What could make any of the SS guards act the way they did?
Naturally, she didn’t find an answer to her philosophical musings and shrugged, pulling up instead a picture of Mindel in her mind’s eye. Her sweet little sister. Would she ever see her again? Was she even alive? Probably not.
But despite knowing better, Rachel clung to the idea that one day she’d hold her in her arms again. One day, when the Nazis had lost the war and the Jews were free again.
From the information the newcomers brought, there was no doubt that the Nazis were on the losing end, as also evidenced by the Allied planes crisscrossing the sky high above them, with rarely a Luftwaffe craft seen chasing them.
11
The very
