Torture, Starvation, and Death Become A Way Of Life
The higher-ups in Auschwitz could see that Irma Grese wasn’t just some dainty woman destined to make coffee. She showed a lot of promise, and would eventually be called nickname like “the beautiful beast” and “the hyena”. Despite her young age, she was assigned to become the new warden of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. As one might imagine, Bergen-Belsen was an all-female camp, so it would only make sense to have a tough woman in charge of the prisoners.
The camp was called a “residence camp”, and they claimed it simply provided housing to these prisoners of war. The camp held tens of thousands of prisoners who were Jewish, Roma, disabled, and lesbians. They were very short on water, food, and supplies. Even though these women were not doing a lot of hard manual labor like in many of the work camps, they would die quickly from a lack of resources. There were very few bathrooms, and disease was spreading rapidly. Thousands of women died every month, so mass graves were scattered around the camp for everyone to witness.
Once Irma Grese became the warden, she gained a reputation for being absolutely brutal and unforgiving to those who stepped out of line. Prisoners who survived living in Bergen-Belsen claimed that she would kick the prisoners as hard as she could with her steel-tipped leather boots, and let her guard dog loose to attack the women. She also used a whip and any other club or weapon she happened to have on-hand to beat the female prisoners whenever she felt it was necessary. Women were made to hold large boulders above their heads for extended periods of time as a form of torture. They say that when the train arrived with new prisoners, she would find the most beautiful female prisoners and choose them to die first, likely out of jealousy.
One of the camp survivors, Alice Lok Cahana, said, “Bergen-Belsen was Hell on Earth. Nothing in literature could ever compare to what it was.” She described people screaming for water, and the poorly constructed houses prisoners were expected to live in. Floorboards will give way, and people would break their legs. Straw mattresses were rotting, and the beds were falling apart. At the end of all long day, women would try to get some sleep, and the wood ended up snapping and collapsing on the floor.
When the Allies liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp, everyone in the administrative offices began burning their files to destroy the records of their crimes. There were so many mass graves of dead women, they had no choice but to get giant bulldozers to clean up the remains of all of these people. The most famous prisoner who died in Bergen-Belsen was a young woman named Anne Frank. Her body was most likely scooped up among all of these other nameless bodies, but not all of them were so lucky as to leave a diary of their lives behind.