After the Annex by Bas von Benda-Beckmann

Author:Bas von Benda-Beckmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

In her diary, Ruth Wiener noted all sorts of things between 1943 and 1945. On 20 December, she noted: “Margot and Anne Frank are in the other camp.” (The diary was for 1943, but she also used it for entries in 1944 and 1945.)

Ruth Wiener (left) with her sisters, 1930s.

After the destructive storm, people were moved about in the camp. One group of women from the Sternlager was moved to new barracks, and the women from the tent camp were sent to the barracks of the former Sternlager.58 Anne and Margot ended up in the so-called Kleinefrauenlager (small women’s camp), which was on the site of the former Sternlager. As more transports arrived, the boundary of this women’s camp was expanded further and further, reducing the size of the Sternlager. On 20 December 1944, Ruth Wiener noted in her diary: “Anne and Margot Frank are in the other camp!”59 This is the only contemporary document that proves the presence of Anne and Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen. Ruth Wiener knew them from the liberal Jewish community and the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam. She didn’t speak to them in Bergen-Belsen, she just saw them. She said that a transport always led to rumors: “Who was on it? Any Dutch people?” Then she always went to have a look. It was forbidden to meet at the fence, but it regularly happened.60

Anne, Margot and Auguste van Pels found themselves in an overcrowded barracks inside the Kleinefrauenlager. Rachel Frankfoorder remembers that she saw Anne and Margot, who she’d met in Westerbork, in Bergen-Belsen, this time without their father and mother.

Their parents weren’t there. You didn’t ask about that, because you actually knew […] because of your own experience with parents, brothers, etc., well, you had a suspicion, no more. The Frank girls were almost unrecognizable because their hair had been cut off, they were much balder than we were, I don’t know why that was. And they were very cold, like we all were. It was winter and you had no clothes. So all the factors for becoming ill were there. They were in an especially bad state.61

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