Amsterdam
LIBERATED NETHERLANDS
Sitting on her bed in the light of her lamp, the notebook in her lap, she writes about a day in Birkenau during the last weeks Mummy was with them. There was a woman in their barracks, a Dutch woman, who for a ration of bread might organize something warmer to wear. The woman liked Margot because she was the same age as her daughter, or something like that. Anyway, Mummy traded a bite of their camp bread for a woolen pullover and gave it to Margot. Anne remembers it because she was just so insanely jealous. Wasn’t she the sickly one? Growing up, wasn’t it Anne who caught everything there was to catch?
The sweater was ugly and ragged along the bottom hem, and Anne had always despised the color brown, but how she wanted it. Wanted it because Mummy had given it to Margot and not to her. It made her feel very ashamed to be so overlooked. Margot got a pullover, and what did Anne get? Scabies.
Soon after her mother’s trade for the sweater, there was a selection in their section of the Frauenlager, but not for the gas chamber. No, the rumor was it was for a work camp in Liebenau, far away from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and what luck! Margot and Anne and their mother were all three picked for the transport, but that’s when the SS-Lagerarzt saw that Anne had the Itch. It was hard to miss, really; greasy red and black sores had spread over her arms and hands and neck. So instead of the sanctuary of an Arbeitslager, Anne was sent to the Scabies Block. After that her mother and Margot stayed, too. They didn’t have to. They could have gone to Liebenau. There were no smoking chimneys there, just factory work. They could have survived. But because Anne had the Itch, they stayed.
Sometimes Anne can still feel the cold ground under her. Margot came with her to the Scabies Block just so Anne wouldn’t be alone, which meant it wasn’t long before both sisters were infected. They sat beside each other in the dirt, tucked under a blanket in the murky shadows of the block, not talking. Anne glared into nothing, listening to the groans of the sick and the squeak and patter of the rats. When a small scoop of light crumbled out from the ground beneath the wall, she didn’t understand what was happening. Not at first. And then she heard Mummy’s voice. “Is it working?” Mummy begged to know, and another woman answered, “Yes. It’s working.” Mummy and a lady from their barracks had managed to dig a hole from the outside. Anne heard Mummy calling their names and tried to call back, but she barely had a voice at that point, so she managed to rouse Margot, and they crawled over to the hole, where Mummy stuffed through a piece of bread. Margot tore it in two and gave her sister half. Anne can still taste the bitter roughness of that bread and remembers how desperately she swallowed it down. But even so at that moment, when she should have loved Mummy utterly, she felt a pinch of anger.