As chance would have it, the voice which answered her belonged to Mrs. Van Daan, whom both Lies and the Franks, of course, knew, and it was she who went and called Anne. Both Anne and Lies were very weak and emaciated by then and simply cried upon seeing one another across the barbed wire fence. They told one another what had happened to their families, but Anne did not know where her father was, only that her mother had stayed behind in Auschwitz. She also told Lies that Margot was still with her, but that she was very ill.
Lies tried to get a little extra food and clothing across the fence to Anne, and she succeeded, in part. But this, it seems, was not enough to save Anne from the typhus that was raging in the camp, and from which Margot died a few days before Anne herself perished.
Lies was told that Anne had died of typhus, and she believes this because she never saw her after the February night when she attempted to throw a package across the wire fence to her. Lies was sent out of Belsen in a shipment destined for Theresienstadt, but their train traveled right into the middle of a Russian offensive, and the Russians liberated the prisoners.
A woman who was in the camps at that time has said: "In Auschwitz we had had visible enemies: the gas chambers, the SS, and the brutality. But in Belsen we were left to ourselves. There we had not even hatred to buoy us up. We had only ourselves and our filthy bodies; we had only thirst, hunger, and the dead, the corpses lying all around, who showed us what a little thing life is. There it took a superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation — well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister's death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp."
