My Friend Anne Frank by Hannah Pick-Goslar & Dina Kraft

Author:Hannah Pick-Goslar & Dina Kraft [Pick-Goslar, Hannah and Kraft, Dina & Kraft, Dina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

My loved ones, we are together… on our first journey in a long time…

Don’t be sorrowful for us, we have good hopes and it would only hurt us if you were sad. We want to see each other again…

My Barbel child, take care. Your last parcels still delicious. We’ve got porridge with us. Also Dad’s bathrobe, the wool and everything you sent to Granny.

Friendly people here. All still without certificates. We’re going. Bye Darlings.

All the love, all the best. Bye.

I entered the barracks of the orphanage, now silent and emptied of its children. In the distance, I heard the shrill cry of the train whistle. I collapsed onto my bunk. Apart from the day we lost Mama, this was the saddest day of my life. I felt more alone than ever. My heart ached. My whole body ached as I rocked myself back and forth in the crushing silence. It had never been a quiet place. Even at night, someone was always stirring, shifting in their bunk, coughing or whimpering in their sleep for the mothers and fathers they missed. I felt the absence of wide-eyed, sweet Sarah Eva and the other children. How could absence feel so present? I felt the loss of Sanne and her family and imagined them trying to find a place to sit on the train without being trodden on. I was confounded by the power of a name on a typed list that could determine who stayed on Dutch soil and who was forced to undertake that dreaded journey.

If the Ledermanns were on that train, so might my family and I have been – we could have been among those hoisted onto one of those airless cattle cars, hurtling into the unknown. We were all so different but to the Germans we were all the same, no matter whether we were Orthodox, secular, baptised, Zionist, socialist, Dutch, stateless former German citizens, potato sellers, diamond merchants, doctors, teachers, soccer players, architects, shopkeepers, elderly, children, toddlers, newborns. To Hitler and his supporters, we were the enemy. The Jewish enemy. I could not understand why this was happening – what had we Jews done? Why were we being punished? As far as I could tell, our only sin was being Jewish.

No one could say what exactly happened at these work camps but we knew it was nothing good. When I tried to imagine what kind of ‘work’ people might do there in that bleak, faraway place, my only reference point was what I saw at Westerbork, where people were assigned to work details doing everything from operating machinery and sewing to making brooms, toiling in the kitchen and harvesting potatoes. Perhaps, I thought and hoped, it was just more of the same there. But to what end? I knew Hitler railed against the Jews, called us vermin and had declared ‘war’ on us, but what was the point of all this misery? How would sending whole families to labour camps accomplish anything?

It was becoming bitterly cold here, and with winter approaching I could only imagine how frigid it might be in Poland.

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