To my best friend ever,
Dear Jack.
It has taken me two years to finally write this letter to you. I think you wonder about the same questions I do, the day the German soldiers took us as prisoner. Well, I’m now in Auschwitz, and I’ve been here for 725 days. It has been just like hell. The day we arrived, the soldiers cut off all the hair we had, and we got some other clothes. We got a “prison-suit”, which they called it. It’s a white and black striped suit. As soon as we passed trough the camp gates, we could sense an atmosphere we never had sensed before. You could feel the intense and the fear the people felt with just being inside this house.
The most awful time here, is when everyone are going to bed. We are 2-3 people in each bed. The children are crying, and the rooms are colder than a fridge box. I’m dreaming every night that I’m lying beside you in a comfortable bed!
People here are from all over Europe. But they are only Jews, gipsies, homophiles, and mentally retarded people. From 6 AM to 6 PM, we’re working as slaves. We usually have to clear away snow or carry sand. When we’re working, people are crying over pain and tiredness. It hurts so much to see this. It makes my homesickness even bigger.
We have 20 seconds every morning and evening to go to the toilet, and we only get clean clothes one time a month. So it’s pretty clear that epidemics break out. A three year old girl got louse, and she killed herself with a touch on the wired fence. Many people end their life in that way.
In the beginning, I really believed that we one day would be sent home again. Back to you and the normal life. Eating ice cream, visit friends, play football, and just having a good time. Knowing that we won’t be killed or have to work. But the hope gets smaller and smaller for every day. We never know what the future will bring to us in here. And that makes it even more senseless to believe in a new future.
Many people here try to live as normal as possible, with playing games and learn the children to read, and that sort of things. But I just can’t forget what we have been trough. I really can’t smile about anything. I miss you, my mother and sister so terrible. The German soldiers killed my father the day they took us as prisoner. Some of them told me that they would send my mother and sister to Sachsenhausen. I don’t know anything about them, but I pray to God that they still are alive.
The women are the people that suffer most in here. A couple of months ago, a pregnant woman came. When she had to give birth, the soldiers left her in a room, totally alone, without any doctors or someone who could help her. When she finally had given birth, she had to bite over the umbilical cord herself, and the soldiers took the baby, and laid it away, so it starved to death. I don’t understand that the soldiers can do these things to people. Don’t they have a heart some place themselves?!
I write this letter in despair. The insecurity makes me feel so miserable.
Will I ever breathe the fresh air again?
Will I ever live a normal life again?
I just want to sit on a bench, in your arms, looking at the sunset, just like old days. Is that to much to demand?
I don’ see an end on this captivity. I walk around every day with the uncertainly whether I will be killed by the German soldiers, or just starve to death. I don’t know whether there is any meaning with my life any more, or whether it would be better to kill myself on the wired fence.
But my hope to see you again will never end, and I hope that’s gonna happen one day.
I love you, and I’ll do that whatever life brings to us.
Hundreds of love, prisoner 4544
Anna!