Not sure whether she’d withstand walking for days or weeks on end, Rachel all but wept with relief when the group arrived at the train station. Not even the cattle cars waiting for them could put a damper on her mood. As long as she didn’t have to walk, things weren’t half bad.
Somehow, she climbed into the wagon and huddled together with the lot of tired, hungry, and dirty women. The stench of unwashed bodies, human excrement, urine, and death was all around her and she feared she would never get the smell off her skin again.
She must have collapsed from sheer exhaustion, because the train suddenly stopped, the doors were opened and SS guards forced them to disembark with their incessant “Schnell! Schnell!”
But fast wasn’t in Rachel’s vocabulary anymore. Everything she did was slow, since this was the only way her emaciated body managed to do any task. The woman in front of her wouldn’t move, despite the generous whiplashes from the guards. Frantic lest she become a victim of their wrath herself, Rachel shoved her aside. The woman fell onto the ramp with a dull thud and looked up at her with lifeless eyes.
There was no time to mourn or even acknowledge that a human being had died. In her hurry to get down from the cattle car, Rachel stumbled across the woman, who was nothing but another number, a scratch mark on a list of corpses to be removed. One less person to toil in slavery for the Aryan master race. The platform seemed strangely familiar, but her barely functioning brain needed a full minute to recognize it was the train ramp of Bergen-Belsen. A glimmer of hope that Mindel might still be somewhere in the camp warmed her heart, although that warmth dwindled to almost nothing as she remembered the one-hour march to the camp she first had to endure.
The guard in front of her swung his whip over his head, seemingly boasting to his comrades about his versatility painting figures in the air. He stumbled and all but fell, catching himself at the last moment.
Rachel flinched back and was about to move on when she saw a glitter in the mud, where he’d been seconds ago. She dropped to her knees, risking being lashed, while her hand grabbed whatever glittery thing he’d lost. It turned out to be a ring, undoubtedly stolen from one of the women, since it seemed much too small for his pudgy fingers.
She hurriedly slipped it inside her shoe and managed to get up before one of the guards could hit her with his truncheon. For the next minute she held her breath, hoping nobody had noticed what she’d done. The ring in her shoe added to her discomfort, seemingly getting bigger and scratchier with every step she took toward the camp.
The march was an endless ordeal, forcing a body that had been depleted to the maximum to keep on walking. Many women straggled and whenever they couldn’t catch up, inevitably a shot rang out as that one was put to her final rest. The first several times, Rachel flinched, but when the shots became more frequent, she stopped batting as a much as an eyelid, since every movement drained valuable energy from her body.
She gasped in horror, the very moment she marched through the gate with the odious words “Arbeit macht Frei”: The camp was bursting at the seams. Everywhere she looked there were women standing, sitting, lying, squatting. Since her departure a few months ago, the camp population must have tripled at the least.
The stench of death was ubiquitous and for a brief moment, Rachel considered begging to be returned to the salt mines. As opposed to her former arrivals at Bergen-Belsen, this time she wasn’t processed or registered. No, the newcomers were simply dumped inside, left to fend for themselves.
With chaos raging and apparently no SS guards even bothering to maintain a semblance of order, Rachel took the initiative and made her way to the barracks where she had been living last, hoping to find Anne or Margot. The hut was incredibly overcrowded with five to six women sharing a bunk and despite having been exposed previously to the most awful stenches human misery could produce, she gagged as she ventured deeper inside the darkness of the barracks.
Neither of the girls was there and none of the women she asked knew anything about them. Back at the door she glanced one last time into the hut, deciding it was preferable to sleep rough than to try and find a space in this hell on earth.
Outside, dozens of women had secured themselves protected spots under the small awning of the hut. They were leaning against the wall, soaking up the warming sunshine of early spring, looking more dead than alive.
Rachel recognized a former barracks mate and approached her. “Hey, aren’t you Wanda?”
“Hm.” Wanda gave a barely perceptible nod. In her early thirties, she looked like an octogenarian.
“I’m looking for Anne and Margot Frank.”
“Both got sick.”
“Where are they?”
“No idea. Caught typhus and one day disappeared. I reckon they died and their corpses were put in front of the barracks to be discarded.”
Rachel flopped down at the empty spot beside the woman, the lost hope draining all her energy to stay afoot, since the Frank sisters had been her only link to Mindel.
Wanda moved aside to make room for Rachel to lean against the wall and murmured, “It’ll all be over soon. If I were you I wouldn’t set foot into the barracks. There’s nothing but typhus and dysentery in there.”
Rachel nodded. Sitting out here was as good as anywhere else, and since the SS apparently had abandoned the camp – except for the men guarding the fence – she decided to stay in this very spot until she either died or the Allies
