The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (28 page)

Conditions deteriorated by the day. In time, administration of the camp was turned over to the
Kapos
, who were often harder on the prisoners than the SS guards. Many carried rubber hoses, and
Irene witnessed people beaten for not walking fast enough to work or for no reason at all. The bodies of the people in camp told their stories: loose teeth, shaky hands, missing eyes, arms, and legs.

A
Kapo
entered the barrack on January 20 and told the Hasenbergs about the exchange. To leave camp, the transports—those people on the list—had to be screened by a
Stabsarzt
, a medical officer. If a prisoner could walk into the hospital, the medical officer would give clearance for transport. Irene and her brother, Werner, who was two years older, coaxed Gertrude from her bed and explained to her that to leave camp she had to appear before the Nazi doctor. Gertrude was confused but agreed to see the doctor. Her children helped her walk, but once outside the barrack, she collapsed. Irene and Werner carried her back to the barrack, then the two of them went to see the doctor. He looked them over and absentmindedly checked them off the list.

Hours later, John returned home to the barrack from his slave work of digging trenches. “He was in very bad condition by then—terribly emaciated and undernourished,” Irene recalled. That day John had been severely beaten by a
Kapo
. His body was bruised and he was delirious, and neither Irene nor Werner could understand what their father tried to tell them. For so long, John had lived with the firm belief that he and his family would survive, that a reprieve was on its way. The work was hard on him, but he did not talk about it. The only task he concentrated on, day by day, was keeping himself and his family alive. He knew the Nazis’ goal: extermination. The only dignity he had left was in his ability to resist.

On this day, salvation was at hand. Werner explained that John had to get clearance from the medical officer. John agreed to go, and while Werner stayed with Gertrude, Irene accompanied her father, steadying him as he slowly made his way to the office.

“What’s your name?” asked the officer.

John stared at him in silence.

The officer looked at the list, ran his index finger down the page. “Are you John Hasenberg?”

John nodded yes.

“Well,
your children have been here already.” The officer looked at Irene and mistook her for Gertrude. Mother and daughter weighed about the same and were the same height. Irene’s bony face and hollowed blue eyes—all symptoms of starvation—disguised her youth. By sheer luck, her mother was now on the list as well.

“Be ready tomorrow morning,” said the officer.

John and Irene walked back to the barrack and told Gertrude that they had all made the list. Gertrude was barely responsive. They grappled with the next problem: If Gertrude couldn’t walk to the doctor, how could she get to the train? John told his wife that the time was now. If they were going to get out of Bergen-Belsen, she had to summon the energy to leave. She looked at her children’s faces and nodded, telling her husband she would do what she had to do to save Irene and Werner.

The next morning, with the help of her family, Gertrude hobbled to the bathhouse. A female SS guard ordered Irene and her mother to remove their clothes, and they took showers to supposedly rid their bodies of lice. These miserable little things crawled all over their bodies—were in every nook and cranny. She showered, but Irene knew there was no real way to get rid of the lice.

While they were seated naked on a bench, the guard pointed to Gertrude, who was half-conscious. “This woman looks as if she’s dying. I don’t think you are fit to go.”

“Oh,” said Gertrude. “It’s just my stomach. I think . . . um . . . I must have eaten something that disagreed with me.”

Irene hurried to help her mother get dressed. When Irene put on her clothes, the incubated lice eggs hatched. When they left the bathhouse, she and her mother had more lice on them than when they arrived. For a small moment, Irene savored the defeat of the infamous Nazi efficiency: it was no match for the tenacity of lice.

Before Irene left Bergen-Belsen, Hanneli Goslar, one of her friends, asked Irene to walk with her to the Dutch section of camp. They took some clothes and threw them over the fence to a bald girl
with sunken, dark eyes and a dark stubble of hair on her head—Anne Frank.

Both Hanneli and Irene knew the Frank family from the neighborhood they previously shared in Amsterdam. Hanneli was a closer friend of Anne’s than Irene. Anne, eighteen months older than Irene, was two grades ahead of her, and Irene remembered Anne as the smart, popular girl in school, the one with charisma and style.

Irene no longer recognized Anne. The bright girl in Amsterdam with the shiny black hair and beaming grin was gone. This Anne wore no clothes except a blanket wrapped around her shivering body, which bore all the signs of starvation: the bony frame, the muscle atrophy, the feet swollen with edema. Anne spoke calmly but told them her sister, Margot, had typhus and was too ill to leave her bed; Anne, too, had the fever. She thanked them for the clothes.

Later, through the barbed wire, Anne told Hanneli that she believed her father, Otto, and her mother, Edith, were both dead. She said that she didn’t have the strength to live anymore. Another of Frank’s friends, Lise Kostler, visited her later and in the 1995 documentary
Anne Frank Remembered
said, “After her sister died, she was just without hope. But she didn’t know [that her father was alive] and so she really had nothing to live for.”

Irene’s hands and face felt cold that day at the fence. Clouds blotted the sun, and the sight of Anne, a frail shadow of her former self, brought the past into sharp relief. They both were born in Germany (Anne in Frankfurt and Irene in Berlin), and before the war, Irene’s father was a partner in a business that her grandfather had founded in Berlin. The Hasenbergs, enjoying a comfortable, protected life, ate meals together as a family, walked in the parks, and went to concerts. By 1936, with the Nazi persecution in full force, Jews could not attend public schools, go to the movies, or live in certain sections of Berlin. Synagogues were destroyed and Jewish businesses seized.

Irene’s father looked for ways to get out of Germany. He was offered a job with the American Express Company in Amsterdam
and took it. The Hasenberg family became one of three hundred thousand Jewish families that left Germany between 1933 and 1939. In the beginning, the move was difficult for Irene. She did not speak Dutch on arrival, but soon became fluent and settled in at school. The family went to temple on Saturdays, and Werner was bar mitzvahed in Amsterdam.

When the Germans occupied Amsterdam after the invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, the flow of mail between Amsterdam and Berlin stopped. John lost his job at American Express because the Nazis would no longer allow the company to employ Jews. It was a particularly sad day for Irene when she had to turn in her bicycle. Oddly, she never minded wearing the yellow star on her coat. In the beginning, Irene found her Dutch friends supportive. She felt proud to be a Jew, and the star was a symbol of her Jewishness. Initially, the practical difficulty was the Nazi requirement that she have it on at all times. In the winter, she pinned it to her coat, but when she took it off, she was starless. Finally she solved that problem by wearing the star stitched onto a vest over her clothes, but the risk was constant. She witnessed Jews stopped on the streets who had their stars ripped off their clothes by police and were then punished for not wearing them.

Irene’s father weighed the risks of going into hiding, along with Anne Frank’s family and the other twenty-five thousand Jewish families in Amsterdam. But John and Gertrude were ambivalent. It was hard to find people willing to hide Jewish families, and no amount of money could secure trust. Once families went into hiding, they could not buy food with coupons, but had to depend on the expensive and unreliable black market. Irene remembers her parents debating the issue. Aside from the fear of betrayal and the lack of food, both of her parents knew the penalty for defying the Nazis. If they were caught, as one-third of those families in hiding were, they would be shot on the spot or deported and killed in Germany. In the end, John and Gertrude decided to wait out the situation.

One day John met a businessman, a friend of his, on the street
in Amsterdam. He told John that he’d recently secured false South American passports for his family from a broker in Sweden. He gave John his contact and explained how to go about the secret transaction. No money was involved; the man wanted to help save the Hasenberg family. John immediately had passport photographs taken of himself and the rest of his family and sent a letter to the broker as if the two were old family friends, saying, “We haven’t been able to write you for a long time. You probably wonder what the kids look like. I’m enclosing the pictures.” Months passed and the passports did not arrive.

After February 22, 1941, when Germans arrested hundreds of Jews in Amsterdam and deported them to concentration camps, the Hasenbergs, like every other Jewish family, lived in constant anxiety. One day Irene was in class when she heard the principal call out her name. She left the classroom and discovered her father had been arrested because he’d applied for a tram permit. Her mother had also been arrested. Irene and Werner were taken to a Jewish theater in the center of Amsterdam, from which all the seats had been removed. Hundreds of Jews were seated on the floor, which was covered with red carpet, and moans filled the stale air. Irene and Werner saw their parents and rushed to their side. The family stayed in the theater for three days, expecting to be deported at any time, but then they were released.

When they returned to their apartment, they had to break open the seals on their doors. Irene never knew why her family was released, but by then her father was working for the Joodse Raad, the Jewish Council, which had a small amount of influence. He worked with a team of people who went into the homes of arrested Jews, packed up their hastily left belongings, and shipped them to camps. Sometimes people were arrested on the street and went to camps with only the clothes on their backs.

The Hasenberg family knew the day would come when they, too, would be arrested. Night after night, the Wehrmacht, the Dutch equivalent of the Nazi SS, rolled into the Jewish section of Amsterdam
in large trucks to round up more Jews in
razzias
—military raids. From loudspeakers on the trucks Nazis barked orders for the Jews to stop on the street. Other Nazis broke down doors. Irene remembers the screams of families pulled from the streets or out of houses and loaded into the trucks. John told his family their arrest was only a matter of time.

Gertrude packed rucksacks with clothes for all four of them, and a Gentile family offered to keep their photographs. For about a year, the Hasenbergs lived with the certainty that at any moment they would be taken.

On Sunday morning, June 20, 1943, the Nazis blocked off the Hasenbergs’ neighborhood and began a house-to-house search. The day was hot, but all four of the Hasenbergs dressed in several layers of clothes. They grabbed their rucksacks and bags of food. They joined a crowd of hundreds of other Jews in the street and began the slow march to a large square, where they were loaded into trucks and taken to the train station. All Irene remembered of that walk is that it was hot and long. Her clothes were drenched with sweat.

About midday, they arrived at the station, and Irene and her family were loaded into a cattle car with sixty or so other people. Irene heard the snap of a lock being bolted. The cattle cars had no drinking water, and two buckets were for human waste. Everyone, even those old and sick, sat on luggage. Babies cried. The only light came from small slits. Then a whistle blew and the train jolted forward. With a mixture of shock and perverse relief, Irene thought that at long last what she had imagined as the worst had happened. In the crowded cattle car, she felt utterly terrified and humiliated.

After an eight-hour trip, the train stopped late at night at the Westerbork Transit Camp in the northeastern Netherlands. Everyone on the train was taken into a large room and told to take off all their clothes. They were inspected for lice, and anyone infested had all the hair shorn off his or her body. Irene gasped, as she had lived a sheltered life and had never seen anyone naked. She had seen only two movies:
Hansel and Gretel
and
Snow White
. Nothing had
prepared her for what she saw that night: hundreds of naked bodies, young and old, with Nazi inspectors probing them for lice.

For the most part, the Nazis turned over the day-to-day running of the camp in Westerbork to the Jewish security service. Irene’s mother was assigned to a sewing circle and her father did hard labor. The camp was built around a railroad track, and every Saturday long trains came into the center of Westerbork, and their arrival is one of Irene’s most vivid memories. The trains, spanning the length of the camp, sat empty through Monday. Everywhere Irene walked in the camp, she saw the long, hideous cattle cars and was filled with a sense of doom.

At midnight on Mondays, the barracks leaders in Westerbork came in to each barrack, turned on all the lights, and read off the names of people who were scheduled for transport. Those whose names were called would be sent to their deaths in the Auschwitz or Theresienstadt concentration camps. On those Mondays when Irene’s family was not called, she lived in despair because she always knew someone on the list who was going the next day. Anne Frank and her family arrived in Westerbork in August 1944, fourteen months after Irene arrived. In September, the Franks’ names were called.

The Nazis forced the Jews to decide which Jews would be sent to their deaths out of Westerbork and to live with the guilt. More than one hundred thousand Jews transported from Westerbork were killed in gas chambers in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.

While in Westerbork, Irene contracted hepatitis and was hospitalized for two weeks. The separation from her brother and parents was difficult. Many people around her in the hospital were dying. Some were demented—their angry, desperate screams frightened Irene.