She increased her pace, wanting to be in the hut before the skies opened up. Later at night, lightning and thunder shook the barracks as a deluge came down with strong gusts of wind. Mindel huddled closer to Laszlo, shivering each time a squall blew through the cracks in the thin wooden wall. To make matters worse, the wind howled as if ghosts and other creatures were coming to destroy them.
“It’s just the wind, Mindel,” Laszlo consoled her.
“But it’s so loud and scary.”
They kept silent for a while, until he whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes.”
“There’s another transport going to Switzerland and I’m going to sneak onto it.”
She gasped. “You can’t. The SS will kill you if they find out.”
“They won’t catch me. I have talked to a man from the repair crew. He knows the people in the Hungarian camp, and he says there’s a foolproof way to get onto the transport.”
“Please don’t go,” Mindel begged him. She was afraid for him, but also for herself. Despite being under Mother Brinkmann’s care, how would she cope without Laszlo? “I will miss you, and Paula will, too.”
“Then come with me.”
“I can’t.” The entire idea seemed much too daunting to even entertain it. As bad as being in the camp was, who could promise her that this Switzerland wouldn’t be worse? No, she’d rather stay with Mother Brinkmann and the other children.
“Think about it, we’d have so much fun in Switzerland. I heard they have loads of chocolate there.”
Chocolate? Mindel’s mouth watered as she thought back to her last birthday, when she’d received two pieces of the rare treat, together with a raspberry cake. It seemed like an awfully long time ago.
16
In the early hours of the morning, the raging storm abated, and the prisoners were called outside for roll call. On the way to the assigned assembly space for her hut, Rachel passed the temporary tent area.
She blinked several times to make sure what she saw wasn’t a hallucination. Where the night before there had been hundreds of tents, now nothing remained but muddy earth, shredded tarpaulin and desperate women. She hadn’t personally spoken to any of the newcomers, but rumor had it they came from a camp ten times worse than Bergen-Belsen.
According to the accounts of the new arrivals, people there, in Auschwitz, were selected straight from the train ramp – one line for those who could work and another line for those who had to die. Even after experiencing unthinkable cruelties at the hands of the Nazis, and the SS especially, she had difficulties wrapping her head around the news.
It seemed too outrageous to be true, but then, what was normal or even decent where the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews was concerned? Rachel shook her head, as if she could shake the horrendous images from her mind. After being kicked out of the camp hospital, she’d been lucky enough to be selected for a work detail inside the camp, which served her just fine in her quest to find Mindel.
That evening after work she returned to her barracks, only to find out that the women from the destroyed tents had been assigned to the already overcrowded barracks. Last night she’d shared her bunk with one other woman, but now she found two more persons in there.
“These are Margot and Anne Frank,” her bunkmate introduced the newcomers with a sour face. “The capo assigned them to our bunk.”
So, there was nothing they could do about it. Rachel didn’t welcome the idea of having to share the small bunk with three other women instead of just one, but she put a good face on the matter and said, “Hello. I’m Rachel.”
Margot and Anne turned out to be about her own age, eighteen and fifteen respectively, and came from the Netherlands. They had quite an odyssey behind them and compared to the physical appearance of the two girls, Rachel and her bunkmate looked in the pink.
Apart from shoving more people into the already overcrowded huts, nothing else changed. There wasn’t more food or other provisions like blankets. The same barrel of soup per hut that had not sufficed to satiate a hundred women was now used to feed three hundred. A gnawing and growling stomach was Rachel’s constant companion, and together with the itching and biting of the lice, fleas and bedbugs, it kept her from sleeping despite her complete exhaustion.
Anne and Margot confirmed the rumors about Auschwitz, and what they recounted seemed to come straight from Dante’s sick mind in his description of the ninth circle of hell. In all of her seventeen years Rachel had never believed that she would witness such evil.
A lifetime ago, Rachel had sneaked Dante’s book from her father’s library and read it hidden beneath her blanket…memories of better times returned and for a moment she allowed her mind the luxury of drifting away and forgetting everything around her. For a short while she wasn’t in Bergen-Belsen, where the stink of human excrement and burned corpses lingered everywhere, but on the farm, inhaling the scent of freshly cut grass, feeling the warm sun on her skin while she milked the cows, tasting ripe, sweet strawberries on her tongue.
“Hey, get out of my way,” someone grunted and elbowed her.
Rachel blinked a few times, but reality had snatched her away from the dream and as much as she tried, she couldn’t get back to that wonderful place she missed so much.
Days in the camp were filled with hunger, pain, and boredom. She wasn’t sure whether she preferred the horrible work in Tannenberg or the equally horrible tedium here. At least in the factory she hadn’t had time to think and worry.
Good news was rare, but the Auschwitz women brought news that the war was as good as
