Word traveled through Westerbork whenever a new transport arrived, bringing both hope and despair: hope that it might not be family or relatives who’d been betrayed and whose presence would double one’s pain; despair that the transports were still leaving Amsterdam regularly and that, despite the Allied advances, the war had not yet ended.
A woman named Mrs. Rosa “Rootje” de Winter was watching the new arrivals with her fifteen-year-old daughter. Suddenly she shouted, “Judy, see!” Eight people were standing in the long line waiting for the clerks to register their names. Mrs. de Winter noted their pale skin: “You could tell at once that they had been hiding and had not been in the open air for years.”8 One of them was Anne Frank. Her daughter and Anne would become friends in that desolate place.
Arrival was scripted: first the quarantine barracks, where an employee of the Lippmann-Rosenthal bank confiscated any remaining valuables, then assignment to Barrack 67, the punishment barrack for criminals, since hiding was a criminal offense. Three hundred people were living in each barrack. The new arrivals were handed blue uniforms with a red bib and wooden clogs. The men’s heads were shaved; the women’s hair was cut painfully short.
In her diary, Anne shared that her only vanity was her beautiful hair. But the Germans required hair for power belting and pipe joint packing in U-boats.9 It was the universe gone mad: the hair of the people whose existence the Nazis were annihilating was used in the manufacture of weapons of war.
Westerbork was located in an area of peat bogs that lent dampness to everything. The camp was not large, about five hundred square meters. It was run in part by German Jewish prisoners called the Order Service （Ordedienst; OD）， who served as a kind of police force. They were refugees whom the Dutch had confined in the camp in 1939, when the Netherlands was still neutral. Later, Dutch Jews had joined their numbers. The Germans assured the members of the OD that if they enforced authority within the camp, they themselves would not be transported to “the east.” They varied in number between forty and sixty men and reported directly to the camp commanders.10
For Anne, ironically, Westerbork provided a kind of freedom after the incarceration in the Annex. Mrs. de Winter recalled, “Anne was happy; it was as if she were liberated, for now she could see new people and talk to them, and could laugh.” She could breathe and feel the sun on her face. “Although we weren’t in safety nor at the end of our misery,” Mrs. de Winter added.11
On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated. On September 3, Brussels fell, and on the fourth, Antwerp. The Americans were halfway up the Italian peninsula. The war was almost over. But still 1,019 people were transported to Auschwitz beginning Sunday, September 3: three days, two nights, 60 to 75 people per cattle car: 498 women, 442 men, and 79 children, among whom were the Frank family, the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer.12 It was the last transport to leave Camp Westerbork for the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Otto had hoped that luck would be on their side. It wasn’t.
14
The Return
Of the eight people who had been hiding in the Annex, only Otto Frank survived. The fact that he was in the camp hospital when the Nazi command evacuated Auschwitz meant that instead of going on a forced march to his death, he was liberated by the Russians. It was January 27, 1945. Two days before, he had been in a lineup awaiting execution when Russian soldiers had approached, sending the SS firing squad running for cover. Otto once said that he retained an image of the Russians in their “snow-white coats” coming over the white landscape; it was his image of freedom.1
On February 22, almost a month later, as the former inmates regained their strength, the area near the camp came under siege. Throughout the night, Otto and the others could hear the sound of artillery. The Germans had returned, and the Russians seemed to be losing ground. After surviving so much suffering, it was unthinkable that all could be lost now. But finally, on February 23, several Russian officers collected survivors in the main camp square and a dozen trucks arrived to transport them behind the lines to the safe zone.
They reached Katowice, the capital of Upper Silesia in Poland, where they were housed first in a public building and then in a school in the city center. Otto asked all those he met if they had encountered his wife and daughters among their fellow inmates. He wrote to his mother on March 18 that he wasn’t yet ready to tell her what he’d been through, but at least he was alive. He said he was tormented not to have found Edith and the children, but he remained hopeful. He worried constantly about Kugler and Kleiman and whether they had survived the concentration camps. That same day, he wrote to his cousin Milly: he said he felt like a homeless person now; he’d lost everything. He didn’t even have a letter or a photo of his children.2