Arrival at Bergen-Belsen

After a train journey of three days and two nights in cattle wagons, Anne, Margot, Auguste van Pels and about a thousand other women from Auchwitz arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. For Anne and Margot, this was the first time without their mother.

The women were counted on arrival at the camp and, as in Auschwitz, registered and given a new prisoner number. Registration records from Bergen-Belsen have not survived, but through reconstructions by the Dutch Red Cross we know that the numbers of the 3 November 1944 transport were between 7270 and 7360. It is thought that Auguste van Pels was given the number 7306.^[1]

Once in the camp, the women were first housed in tents set up on a flat piece of ground in the south-western part of the camp, next to the Wehrmacht shooting ranges. The women were given a horse blanket and a mess tin or pan, and then had to wait for hours. It was here that Janny Brilleslijper saw Anne and Margot again for the first time since Westerbork and remembered how the two sisters were waiting with the blankets around them.^[2]

When it got dark, the women were given some kind of soup and then sent into the tents in groups of four to five hundred women. The tents were leaky and had no beds so everyone lay mixed up on dirty straw. The next day, the women had to be at roll call at six o'clock.^[3]

On the fourth night in the tents, a violent storm raged, causing some of the tents to collapse. There were deaths and injuries and the women had to wait in the rain for some time, after which they were confined to a few storage huts for several days.^[4] Eventually, the women were moved to different huts in the camp. In this, Anne and Margot ended up in the Kleine Frauenlager.^[5]