![]() Every day for three weeks, 11 dead were removed and 11 nearly dead filled the empty beds.Įven when I had the crazy idea that my mother and Anne Frank knew each other, I was aware that they were very different girls from very different backgrounds. ![]() On April 23 or 24 she was washed, disinfected and placed in a makeshift hospital room with 12 beds. It took four weeks for the liberators to stem the tide of death. More than 13,000 died after the liberation. Those who were there longer had less of a chance. If not too far gone, they were able to withstand the final five days under Nazi rule, when no food or water was distributed. The dead lay in huge piles, or among the living in the huts.īy the time units of the British Second Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, half of the camp’s 60,000 inmates were recent arrivals. More than 17,000 prisoners died that month. No one knows the exact date, but it was likely within one or two weeks of my mother’s arrival in mid-March. Death was practically inescapable.Īfter witnessing the demise of Margot, Anne, emaciated and ill, also succumbed. A February transport brought typhus to the camp. Now they landed in a place without sanitation, clean water or habitable housing. Without adequate shoes and clothing, with hardly anything to eat, they had suffered terribly on death marches and in overcrowded rail cars. Bergen-Belsen, deep in northwest Germany, received the largest number of war-ravaged survivors. With the advance of the Red Army in the winter of 1945, the Nazis hurried to evacuate concentration camps in the east. It would be another four-and-a-half months before my mother encountered that hell. On November 1, 1944, Anne, her sister, Margot, and Augusta Van Pels were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. Had Anne been at my mother’s party, she would have had a slice of the cake decorated with a scene from Hansel and Gretel, made by women who worked in the SS officers’ kitchen, created at the risk of punishment for stealing scarce ingredients. Meanwhile, in Christianstadt, my mother received gifts: slippers and a hat made of straw pulled from mattresses flowers made of somehow-procured crepe paper. A celebration of any sort would have been unthinkable. (She deliberately made the holes shallow, rendering the weapons useless.)īy October 8, the date of my mother’s birthday, Anne - having been deported with her family on the last train to leave Westerbork - had known the terror and depredations of Auschwitz-Birkenau for more than a month. In its neighboring munitions factory, she gouged holes in grenades, preparing them for pins. Finally, providentially, she and her sister Elisabeth were sent to Christianstadt, a labor camp in Lower Silesia. For more than two months, she had struggled to survive in the shadows of the gas chambers and crematoria. And the trauma of being separated from her parents and siblings on the ramp at Birkenau. They hauled the group to a detention center, a stop before Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp.īy this time, my mother had endured the harrowing journey from Sighet to Auschwitz. Searching behind the office’s bookcase, they found Anne and the seven others (Otto, Edith and Margot Frank Herman, Augusta and Peter Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer) who had been hiding there for more than two years. On August 4, 1944, SS-Oberscharfuehrer (Nazi squad leader) Karl Josef Silberbauer and Dutch police officers raided Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank ran his business. Here is why Anne and my mother were never at the same place at the same time: Hopeful.Įventually, after multiple conversations and into my college years, I learned the truth. She recalled and elaborated on her birthday party in a labor camp. She worried that her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen would give me nightmares. When I was a young teenager (about 13, the age my mother was during the war), my mother was restrained in what she shared with me. Though Anne knew that terrible things were happening, “The Diary of a Young Girl” does not touch the horrors of the Holocaust. I could appreciate her humor, wisdom and powers of observation. How did I arrive at such a fantastic conflation?įor one, who hadn’t heard about the gifted diarist? Expressing normal adolescent interests and concerns, Anne’s letters to imaginary friends helped her cope with the oppressive situation in “the Secret Annex.” I could picture the hiding place she described. After all, they were the same age and they were both in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. ![]() When I was a teenager, I imagined that Anne Frank was at my mother’s 15th birthday party.
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