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."
It was at Belsen that Anne and her school friend, Lies, met again, for Lies and her family had been sent there earlier and had been placed in a separate section for "neutral foreigners." In that "privileged position," Lies was still able to receive packages through the Red Cross Organization. When she heard that a group of people had arrived from Auschwitz, Lies managed to make contact with Anne, across the barbed wire fence that separated them, and Lies describes her thus: "She was in rags. I saw her emaciated, sunken face in the darkness. Her eyes were very large. We cried and cried."
Anne was freezing and starving, and Lies attempted to get some extra food across the fence to her friend. She packed up a woolen jacket, zwieback (rusks), sugar, a tin of sardines, and threw it all across the fence. All she heard, however, were screams, and Anne crying. When she shouted and asked what had happened, Anne called back, weeping: "A woman caught it and won't give it to me." Lies told Anne to come back again the following night, and that time, Anne caught the packet, but this time it contained only zwieback and a pair of stockings.
