When the group arrived at Westerbork, they were made to stand in a long row in the mustering square while one of the clerks entered their names on a list. The conditions were bad, but not unbearable. Westerbork, after all, was merely a reception camp, and although there was overcrowding, deprivation, and undernourishment, there were no gas chambers or crematoriums, as there were at the concentration camps.
An eyewitness who was at Westerbork says, “I saw Anne Frank and Peter Van Daan every day in Westerbork. They were always together, and I often said to my husband: ‘Look at those two beautiful young people.’ . . . In Westerbork, Anne was lovely, so radiant that her beauty flowed over into Peter. She was very pallid at first, but there was something so intensely attractive about her frailty and her expressive face.”
Seemingly, Anne was happy at Westerbork, despite everything. She could see new people and talk to them, after having been cooped up with the same seven people for over two years. The thought that occupied her mind most of all was whether they would be sent to Poland and whether or not they could live through the trying days ahead. Anne’s father would visit her in the women’s barracks sometimes in the evenings, standing by her bed and telling her stories. Similarly, when a twelve-year-old boy who lived in the women’s barracks fell ill, Anne stood by his bed and talked to him in the same way.
On September 2, Anne, together with the other members of the group in hiding, was gathered into a group of one thousand persons and sent to Germany. They traveled in sealed railway cattle cars, seventy-five people crowded in each car, with only one, small, barred window, high up. The journey took several days, and on the third night, the train suddenly came to a stop. The doors of the car were jerked open, and blazing searchlights, SS men with dogs, and the bustling Kapos (prisoner guards) constituted the prisoners’ first glimpse of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the passengers streamed out of the train, the men were ordered to go right, and the women were ordered to go to the left. Children and sick people were told to enter trucks painted with big red crosses to spare them the hour’s march to the camp, but the trucks never arrived. The children and sick people who entered them were never seen again.
Anne, her mother, Margot, and Mrs. Van Daan all marched with the rest of the women to the camp, hustled along at a brutal pace by the SS guards and the Kapos. On arrival at the camp, everyone’s head was shaved; yet a woman who was with Anne at that time said of Anne; “You could see that her beauty was wholly in her eyes. . . . Her gaiety had vanished, but she was still lively and sweet, and with her charm she sometimes secured things that the rest of us had long since given up hoping for.
“For example, we had no clothing aside from a gray sack, and under that we were naked. But when the weather turned cold, Anne came into the barracks one day wearing a suit of men’s long under-wear. She had begged it somewhere. She looked screamingly funny with those long white legs, but somehow still charming.
“We were divided into groups of five for roll call, work, and distribution of food. You see, we had only one cup to each group of five. Anne was the youngest in her group, but nevertheless she was the leader of it. She also distributed the bread in the barracks, and she did it so well and fairly that there was none of the usual grumbling.”
With the sensitivity which she reveals in her diary, Anne must have suffered greatly, having to witness the daily acts of cruelty and suffering in the concentration camp. Many prisoners became immune to the torment of those around them, but Anne retained her sense of compassion, and she could still shed tears of pity and perform acts of kindness for others.
On October 30, 1944, there was a “selection,” and all the women had to wait naked on the mustering ground for a long time, then march in single file into the barracks, where each one had to step into the bright beam cast by a cold searchlight. The infamous Dr. Mengele ordered those prisoners who were not too sick or too old to step to one side, and it was obvious to everyone that the others would be gassed. Anne and Margot passed the exam; they were deemed fit enough to be sent to the Belsen concentration camp; their mother was not.
Once again, the prisoners were crowded into sealed cattle cars and sent on a long journey which lasted for several days. The train stopped and started, sometimes waiting for an hour at a time. Many passengers died of hunger or disease along the way.
When the train arrived in Belsen, SS guards were waiting on the platform with fixed bayonets. The prisoners were told to leave the dead lying in the cars and to line up in marching order. In the words of someone who was there at the same time as Anne, Belsen was different from Auschitz. “There was no regular work, as there had been at Auschwitz, although the prisoners were given the task of removing the dead, dragging them over the ground to the cremation area. There were no roll calls, nothing but people as fluttery from starvation as a flock of chickens, and there was neither food nor water nor hope, for it no longer meant anything to us that the Allies had reached the Rhine. We had typhus in the camp, and it was said that before the Allies came, the SS would blow us all up.”
