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Authors: Francine Prose
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metal caps with a screwdriver, and they went into a third basket. In addition to getting terribly dirty from the work, we all began to cough because it gave off a certain kind of dust.
Another Westerbork prisoner remembered that Anne and Peter were always together, and that Anne, frail and extremely pale at first, came to seem radiant, even happy. Edith Frank appeared stunned and mute; Margot rarely spoke.
Ronnie Goldstein-van Cleef rode with the Frank family on the train from Westerbork to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, the last transport that would take that route. The Franks agreed that, if they survived, they would try to find each other through Otto’s mother in Basel.
More than a thousand people were on the train. The list of passengers included the Franks, the Van Pelses, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, all packed into boxcars. They traveled for three days and two nights before reaching Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, as was customary, they were “selected” according to their age and their level of health and fitness. Over five hundred of the new arrivals went straight to the gas chambers. None of the former residents of the secret annex was among them.
According to camp protocol, men and women were separated, stripped, and sent to be “disinfected.” The hair that Anne was so proud of—and which, according to her girlhood friend, had kept her so busy—was shaved off. Numbers were tattooed on the prisoners’ forearms. Anne, Margot, and their mother remained together in Women’s Block 29.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper recalls female Kapos in angora sweaters following the prisoners around with whips. Recently donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial, a photo album that had once belonged to an adjutant to the Auschwitz commandant shows the guards eating blueberries, lighting a Christmas tree, relaxing in lounge chairs. Meanwhile, the prisoners worked in weaving mills and prepared plastic to be used in airplanes, or labored at more useless and punitive tasks, digging up stones and patches of sod.
Badly infected with scabies, covered with sores, Anne was sent to a particularly dreadful compound, the so-called scabies block, the barracks for prisoners with contagious skin diseases. Margot went along voluntarily, so as to remain with her sister. At Auschwitz, the debilitating anxieties that had plagued Edith in the secret annex vanished, as did the muteness and near paralysis from which she had suffered at Westerbork. Seized by the determination to help her daughters survive, Edith tunneled under the wall of the scabies block, digging a hole through which she was able to pass them a piece of bread.
In October 1944, as the Russian army approached Auschwitz, eight thousand women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, inside Germany and farther from the encroaching enemy. Edith Frank was left in Auschwitz, where the gas chambers and crematoriums were blown up to destroy the most damning evidence of what had transpired there. Edith Frank died of disease and exhaustion a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the Russians at the end of January 1945.
The Frank sisters remained together in Bergen-Belsen. The most recent paperback edition of the diary, the one students read, concludes, as do previous editions, with an afterword adapted from Ernst Schnabel’s 1958 Anne Frank, A Portrait in Courage. Schnabel describes Anne’s deportation, her imprisonment in Auschwitz, “a fantastically well-organized, spick-and-span hell,” and her transport to the filthy, chaotic Bergen-Belsen:
“Anne, who was already sick at the time,” recalled a survivor, ‘was not informed of her sister’s death, but after a few days she sensed it, and soon afterwards she died, peacefully, feeling that nothing bad was happening to her.’ She was not yet sixteen.”
In subsequent years, other reports have painted a more harrowing picture of Anne’s final days.
Originally one of
Another Westerbork prisoner remembered that Anne and Peter were always together, and that Anne, frail and extremely pale at first, came to seem radiant, even happy. Edith Frank appeared stunned and mute; Margot rarely spoke.
Ronnie Goldstein-van Cleef rode with the Frank family on the train from Westerbork to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944, the last transport that would take that route. The Franks agreed that, if they survived, they would try to find each other through Otto’s mother in Basel.
More than a thousand people were on the train. The list of passengers included the Franks, the Van Pelses, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, all packed into boxcars. They traveled for three days and two nights before reaching Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, as was customary, they were “selected” according to their age and their level of health and fitness. Over five hundred of the new arrivals went straight to the gas chambers. None of the former residents of the secret annex was among them.
According to camp protocol, men and women were separated, stripped, and sent to be “disinfected.” The hair that Anne was so proud of—and which, according to her girlhood friend, had kept her so busy—was shaved off. Numbers were tattooed on the prisoners’ forearms. Anne, Margot, and their mother remained together in Women’s Block 29.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper recalls female Kapos in angora sweaters following the prisoners around with whips. Recently donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial, a photo album that had once belonged to an adjutant to the Auschwitz commandant shows the guards eating blueberries, lighting a Christmas tree, relaxing in lounge chairs. Meanwhile, the prisoners worked in weaving mills and prepared plastic to be used in airplanes, or labored at more useless and punitive tasks, digging up stones and patches of sod.
Badly infected with scabies, covered with sores, Anne was sent to a particularly dreadful compound, the so-called scabies block, the barracks for prisoners with contagious skin diseases. Margot went along voluntarily, so as to remain with her sister. At Auschwitz, the debilitating anxieties that had plagued Edith in the secret annex vanished, as did the muteness and near paralysis from which she had suffered at Westerbork. Seized by the determination to help her daughters survive, Edith tunneled under the wall of the scabies block, digging a hole through which she was able to pass them a piece of bread.
In October 1944, as the Russian army approached Auschwitz, eight thousand women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, inside Germany and farther from the encroaching enemy. Edith Frank was left in Auschwitz, where the gas chambers and crematoriums were blown up to destroy the most damning evidence of what had transpired there. Edith Frank died of disease and exhaustion a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the Russians at the end of January 1945.
The Frank sisters remained together in Bergen-Belsen. The most recent paperback edition of the diary, the one students read, concludes, as do previous editions, with an afterword adapted from Ernst Schnabel’s 1958 Anne Frank, A Portrait in Courage. Schnabel describes Anne’s deportation, her imprisonment in Auschwitz, “a fantastically well-organized, spick-and-span hell,” and her transport to the filthy, chaotic Bergen-Belsen:
“Anne, who was already sick at the time,” recalled a survivor, ‘was not informed of her sister’s death, but after a few days she sensed it, and soon afterwards she died, peacefully, feeling that nothing bad was happening to her.’ She was not yet sixteen.”
In subsequent years, other reports have painted a more harrowing picture of Anne’s final days.
Originally one of
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