The train stood still for a long time—so long they grew impatient and wished they would finally get some clarity, that they would finally see what Auschwitz was. The clarity came.

At the first sign of dawn, the train started moving for the last time, only to stop again a few minutes later at an embankment in the middle of flat countryside. Standing beside the embankment were groups of ten to twelve men. They were dressed in blue-and-white-striped clothes with matching hats. A great number of SS men were walking back and forth in an incomprehensible flurry of activity.

The moment the train was at a standstill, the costumed men stormed up to the wagons and pulled the doors open. “Throw out the baggage. In front of the wagon. All of it.” They were terribly shocked because they realized they had now lost everything. Quickly they tried to slip the most essential items under their clothes, but the men had already leapt into the wagons and begun tossing out baggage and people. All at once they were outside, where they hesitated for a moment. But that hesitation didn’t last long. SS men came at them from all sides, pushing them toward a road that ran parallel to the railway track, and kicking anyone who didn’t move fast enough or hitting them with their sticks, so that everyone hurried as quickly as they possibly could to join the long lines that were forming.

Only then did Hans know for certain that the two of them were going to be split up, that men and women were being separated. He hurried to kiss Friedel—“Till we meet again”—and then it was over. An officer with a stick was standing at the front of the lines as they slowly marched toward him. He cast a fleeting glance at each person and pointed with his stick: “Left. Right.” Old men, invalids, and boys up to about eighteen went left. The young and sturdy went right.

Hans reached the officer, but wasn’t paying attention. He only had eyes for Friedel, who was standing in her line a few yards away and waiting until it was the women’s turn. She smiled at him as if to say, Be patient, it will be all right. That was why he didn’t hear the officer—who was a doctor—ask him how old he was. Annoyed at not being answered, the doctor gave Hans a blow with his stick that immediately sent him flying to the left.

He was standing among the weak and infirm: old men, a blind man next to him, and a youth on the other side who looked like an imbecile. Hans bit his lip with fear. He realized that only the strong stood any chance of staying alive and he didn’t want to share the fate of the children and the elderly. But it wasn’t possible to cross over to the other line, as there were SS men everywhere, guns at the ready.

Friedel was directed to the young women. Older women and all women with children were put in a separate line. In this way four lines formed: approximately 150 young women and just as many young men; the other seven hundred were standing in their own lines on the side of the road.

Then the medical officer returned and called out to the elderly men, asking if there were any doctors among them. Four men leapt forward. The officer turned to Van der Kous, an elderly Amsterdam GP: “What kind of diseases were there in the camp in Holland?”

Van der Kous hesitated and then told him something about eye diseases. Annoyed, the officer turned away.

Hans saw his opportunity: “You probably mean contagious diseases. There were sporadic instances of scarlet fever, which followed a relatively benign course.”

“Any typhus?”

“No, not a single case.”

“Good. Back in line, all of you.” And then, turning to his adjutant: “We’ll take him.”

The adjutant beckoned Hans and took him to the end of the line of young men. He felt that he had escaped a great danger. And, sure enough, trucks had arrived in the meantime and the old men and women were being loaded onto them.

He saw now for the first time what it was really like under the SS, who began shoving, kicking, and beating people. Many found it difficult to climb up onto the beds of the high trucks. But the Sturmmann’s sticks guaranteed that all of them did their very best.

An elderly woman was bleeding badly from a blow to the head. A few people were left behind; they couldn’t possibly get up onto the trucks and those who tried to come to their aid were chased away with a kick or a snarl.

The last truck drove up and two SS men took an unfortunate old man by the arms and legs and threw him into the back. After that the women’s line began to move. He had lost sight of Friedel, but knew she was there somewhere. When the women were a couple hundred yards away, the men started walking too.

The columns were heavily guarded. Soldiers were marching on both sides, guns at the ready. There was one guard for approximately every ten prisoners. Hans was fairly close to the end of the line. He saw the guards to his left and right signal each other. They looked around for a second, then the one on his left came up to Hans and asked him for his watch. It was beautiful and had a stopwatch. His mother had given it to him for his doctor’s exam.

“I need it for my profession. I’m a doctor.”

A grin passed over the guard’s face. “Scheisse, Arzt… A dog, that’s what you are! Give me that watch!” The man grabbed him by the arm to pull it off. For an instant Hans tried to resist.

“Escape attempt, huh?” the man said, bringing up his rifle.

Hans realized how powerless he was and handed over the watch. He had no desire to be shot “attempting to escape” on his first day in Auschwitz.

When they were crossing the railway track, he saw Friedel in the bend of the road. She waved and he sighed with relief. After the railway line they passed a barrier with sentry posts that seemed to mark the grounds of the camp proper. There were storage depots for building materials, sheds, and enormous stacks of bricks and timber. There were small trains moved by manpower. Wagons, dragged by men. Here and there along the road were larger buildings, factories with the hum of machinery coming from the inside. And then more timber, bricks, and sheds. A crane, lifting up cement buckets. There was building going on everywhere, and everywhere was alive. But more than cranes and small trains, one saw the men in their thieves’ costumes. There was no motorization here; this was the work of thousands, of tens of thousands of hands.

Steam is practical; electricity is efficient, able to be put to work hundreds of miles away; gasoline is fast and powerful. But people are cheap. That was clear from the hungry eyes. It was clear from the bare chests with ribs standing out like cords holding their bodies together. One saw it from the long lines of men carrying bricks, shuffling along in wooden clogs or, often enough, in bare feet. They trudged on without looking up or around. Their faces remained expressionless. No reaction to the new arrivals. Now and then a tractor pulling wagons full of bricks. The engine thumped slowly: oil engines. Hans couldn’t help but think of the evenings he’d spent on the water, lying back on his boat and listening to the freighters chug by. What life had been like back then, the things it had promised him! He steeled himself. He felt that he couldn’t start brooding now. He had to fight. Maybe he could make that old life come back one day.

Then they were standing in front of the gate and seeing the camp for the first time. It was made up of large, brick barracks. There were about twenty-five of them. They were two stories high with pitched roofs and small attic windows. The streets between the buildings were well kept. There were pavements with tidy paving stones and small strips of lawn. Everything was clean, well painted, and shining in the bright autumn sun.

It could have been a model village: a camp for thousands of laborers working on a great and useful project. Above the gate, in cast iron, the concentration camp slogan. Suggestive but dangerous: “ARBEIT MACHT FREI.” A suggestion that was intended to calm the unending multitudes who entered here. Here and through many similar gates in other parts of Germany. But it was only an illusion, because this gate was a gate to hell and instead of “Work sets you free,” it should have said “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Because the camp was surrounded by electric fences. Two rows of concrete posts, neatly whitewashed, three yards high. Barbed wire on the insulators. The wire looked strong, hard to get through. But what was even worse was invisible: 3,000 volts! With nothing but little red lamps glowing here and there to show that the electricity was on. And every ten yards a sign mounted on the fence with a skull and crossbones and the word “stop” in German and Polish: Halt, Stój. Still, no barrier is sufficient unless every part of it can be kept under fire. That was why small watchtowers had been built every hundred yards, manned by SS guards with machine guns.

No, there was no way out of this place, unless by a miracle. The people they encountered in the camp said the same thing, because now that they were inside the wire, they were much less strictly guarded; the SS men had mostly handed over the task to prisoners. Prisoners, to be sure, who looked very different from the thousands at work outside the camp. These ones were wearing striped linen uniforms that were cleaner and well-fitting. Often they were dressed almost elegantly, with black hats and tall boots. On their left arms they wore red bands with numbers on them.

These were the Blockälteste, the heads of the various buildings, who organized everything in their block, running their own administration with the help of a clerk and distributing the food. They themselves did not go without; you could tell from their moon-shaped faces. They were all Poles and Reich Germans.¹

But there were also a few Dutch prisoners around. The SS and the Blockälteste kept them at a distance because the newcomers still had all kinds of valuables on them. Nonetheless a few managed to come forward. They asked for watches and cigarettes: “You’re going to lose it all anyway.” But most of the new arrivals still didn’t believe it and kept everything in their pockets. Hans gave a Dutchman a packet of cigarettes, but an SS man was watching and hit him. The Dutchman had already run off; he’d seen it coming in time.

A man appeared, small but with a herculean build. He was apparently held in great respect.

“So, lads, when did you leave Westerbork?”

“Three days ago.”

“Any news?”

“Do you already know about the landing in Italy?”

“Of course, we read the paper. How are things in Holland?”

What could they say to that? They were more interested in hearing how things were here in Auschwitz, what their future would be.

“Who are you?” asked one of the newcomers.

“Leen Sanders, the boxer. I’ve been here a year.”

The newcomers were momentarily reassured. So it was possible to live here.

“Are there still a lot of people from your transport here?” asked Hans, who was already growing skeptical.

“Don’t ask too many questions. You’ll see,” the boxer answered. “Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.”

“But you look fine.”

Leen gave a wise smile. “That’s a boxer for you.”

“What will we have to do here?”

“You’ll be assigned to the Kommandos that work outside the camp.”

Again Hans saw the people outside before him, those work-machines, lines of them carrying bricks and cement, their expressionless faces, dead eyes, and emaciated bodies.

“What happens to the old people they took away in trucks?”

“Haven’t you ever listened to the BBC?” Leen asked.

“I have.”

“Well, then, you should know.”

Then Hans knew everything. He thought of Friedel, whose line he had lost sight of. He thought of his mother, his brother, of everyone he had seen leaving for Auschwitz. He thought of his studies, his practice, his ambitions. He thought once again of Friedel and their plans for the future. They were the thoughts of someone who was convinced he was going to die.

And yet, doubts were already appearing. Maybe he would be lucky, maybe. He was a doctor—no, he didn’t dare hope, but he had to. He couldn’t believe that he would die here, but he couldn’t believe in life anymore either.

A snarl brought him back to his senses. “Aufgehen!” They walked down Lagerstrasse between the big blocks. There were a lot of people out on the streets. Glass plates were mounted over the doors of some of the blocks:

Häftlingskrankenbau

Interne Abteilung

Eintritt verboten

Sitting in front of the hospital door were men in white suits with red stripes on the backs of their coats and along the seams of their trousers. They looked fit and healthy and must have been the doctors. These men hardly glanced at the new arrivals, but Hans saw that their lack of interest wasn’t the same as the indifference of the thousands outside. With all those work slaves it had been the exhaustion, the deep despondency, that had prevented any mental effort. With these handsome men it was a kind of arrogance. After all, they were privileged, the camp “prominents.” And what were they, the newcomers? Everyone was free to abuse and ridicule them.

They arrived at Block 26, the Effektenkammer. Leen explained what that meant. It was here that the prisoners’ personal effects, clothes and other valuables, were stored. Above the windows you could see long lines of paper bags, each containing the property of one man. If somebody was going to be released from the camp, he’d get it all back.

Their clothes would not be stored. Jews were never released. There weren’t any legal proceedings involving them. As they hadn’t been sentenced to any punishment, they couldn’t be freed.

Sure enough, between Blocks 26 and 27 they were ordered to undress. All of their clothes and everything they had on them was loaded onto a wagon. They were only allowed to keep a leather belt and a handkerchief. Hans tried to hold on to a few of his best instruments, but they were on to him in no time. A scrawny man with a band on his left arm—Lagerfriseur—was checking everyone. Those who had tried to keep something back had to surrender it after all and got a blow for good measure. Hans asked if he could keep his instruments. The man grinned and pocketed the lot.

There they stood. Now they had lost everything. The process had been slow, but now it was complete. Had not Schmidt, the Commissioner-General for Public Security in the Netherlands and Rauter’s² representative for Jewish affairs, once said, “The Jews will return to the land they came from, as naked as when they arrived here”?

Schmidt had not gone into detail about when those Jews had come, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that they hadn’t really arrived naked, but had often brought great treasures with them from the countries that had expelled them. Nor did he mention the historic rights of Dutch Jews, granted to them long ago by decree of William of Orange.

But how could he have spoken of the work of a Dutch hero who had fought for freedom? You couldn’t expect that from heroes of Nazi oppression, who would not die with a patriotic prayer on their lips, but take to their heels to try to save their own skin.

Hans consoled himself with that thought. There was no doubt that he was in a bad position, but still: his fate was dark; theirs was certain. They would definitely fall and then, of all their victories, only one would be left: their victory over the Jews. Slowly but surely the Dutch Jews had been pushed toward their ruin.

1940: All Jews sacked from public office

1941: Banned from practicing liberal professions, banned from using public transport, banned from shopkeeping, banned from theaters and parks, sport, and everything that makes life beautiful; permitted capital capped at 10,000 guilders, later 250 guilders

1942: Start of deportation, the ban on life itself.

Slowly, because the Dutch would not have tolerated “their” Jews being exterminated at a time when the terror in Holland still hadn’t taken hold.