Real and Imagined Places in the Diary of Gabriella Trebits ^†

Abstract

Gabriella Trebits was a prisoner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp between November 1944 and April 1945. The spaces present in her diary include both the places of the camp and her typhoid hallucinations. Gabriella described venues through their sensuous dimensions. Since the sensory experiences of everyday life mingled with her visions, her diary became a “textual journey” between real and imagined places. Her narratives helped her to express the difficulties caused by her physical environment and the confusion caused by her hallucinations. As a result, the references to changes in her sensory impressions created a discursive space for the diarist to express her feelings. Since her narrative depicts a suffering and painful condition, we use Joanna Bourke’s concept of pain talk in our analysis. Moreover, the diary demonstrates that it was possible for typhoid patients to connect with their environment despite their isolated situation. Even on the periphery of the camp space, social life persisted. This exploration will not only uncover the narrative strategy of one diarist but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which tens of thousands died of starvation and diseases―without mass executions or gas chambers―in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the spring of 1945.

1. Introduction

Our study aims to present Nazi concentration camp life through the narrative of a Holocaust diary written by Gabriella Trebits. Gabriella was a Hungarian Jewish prisoner in the infamous German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Her diary documents the last weeks and the most serious stage of typhus from a victim’s perspective. In this research, we focus on the narrative and meaning of places in the diary. Gabriella Trebits’s account offers a unique insight into her efforts to record her illness with typhoid fever and her general observations on living in a “horror camp” (Rahe 2008, p. 210), and it preserves the feelings and sensations she associates with real and imaginary places.

Examining the ego-documents of Holocaust victims, and most specifically those contemporary ones that were written during the persecution, offers great possibilities for getting close to the everyday life of the camp inmates—much closer than any other historical sources allow. Using her diary entries, the paper not only examines Gabriella Trebits’s interpretation of her own physical deterioration and mental changes but also analyzes her surrounding spatial conditions. The “spatial turn” in Holocaust historiography has been productive for the last decade in terms of mapping and understanding the geography of genocide, forced mobilization, displacement, and space/place distinction. To examine the Holocaust from a geographical approach requires the application of a variety of scales, “from the macro scale of the European continent; through the national, regional, and local scales of individual countries, areas, and cities; and down to the micro-scale of the individual body” (Kelly-Knowles et al. 2014, p. 3).

Our case study aims to contribute to the spatial study of the Holocaust by presenting how a young, deported woman depicted its environmental impacts in her diary. Her accounts include impressions of the physical and natural environment as well as physical and psychological processes.1 Therefore, the diary provides a complex picture of the relationship between the individual and the environment of the concentration camp. The overcrowding, filth, diseases, and typhus were all the result of the conditions which the SS created or allowed to develop in the camp while doing nothing to prevent them. Gabriella’s diary also demonstrates that a better understanding of camp life requires a combined analysis of the physical, natural environment, and of bodily/emotional effects. Nikolaus Wachsmann also draws attention to this fact when he suggests, “look at Auschwitz through the lenses of space, sense, and emotion”. Wachsmann examines spatiality in as complex a way as possible: through the natural and built environment; real and imagined places; positive and negative feelings; and the different sensory dimensions (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) because “all of them essential components of individual experience” (Wachsmann 2021, p. 30). In Gabriella’s diary, her spatiality is complemented by the description of hallucinations, which illuminates the role of spaces in the unique context of typhoid fantasies, adding an unusual perspective to her narrative of camp life and personal experience.

This young woman wrote her account in a very painful and inhumane situation. In her seminal work The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry shed light on the limits of articulating both one’s own pain and others’ pain. According to her, pain is a private, interior process that cannot be communicated because it destroys language (Scarry 1985). In recent years, a cohort of scholars who revisited Scarry’s work have disagreed with her statement. They argue that we must approach pain in a broader context: in a body and mind relationship; in social dimensions (gender, age, etc.); and in cultural context (norms, taboos, expectations, practices, etc.). All of these determine what pain means and how it is narrated in different eras (Dawney 2019, pp. 3–21). In our study, we use the broadest definition of pain. Pain can be physical but also emotional, and it has psychological consequences. On the other hand, the feeling of any kind of pain in the camps was rooted in the violence inflicted upon the prisoners, whether it was physical, emotional or structural (Buggeln 2014, pp. 5–6). Violence was also a complex social practice based on the interplay of actors, and always based on humiliation, degradation, and the overwhelming dominance of the SS over the prisoners (Mailander-Koslov 2010, pp. 34–36). Violence against the body can take many forms, from physical aggression through verbal abuse to providing unhuman and dangerous environmental conditions. We use Joanna Bourke’s concept of pain talk (Bourke 2014) as a tool and framework for interpreting these diary entries.

From December 1944 onwards, Bergen-Belsen, a North-Western German concentration camp, became one of the terminal points of the “death marches,” by which is meant the destination of the evacuation transports from Auschwitz and other Eastern concentration camps and killing sites. In mid-January 1945, a typhus epidemic had broken out in Belsen; the inmates of the camp contracted typhus fever in large numbers. Since the British liberators were able to bring the disease under control only several weeks after the liberation, the period of epidemics gives a frame to this diary. Gabriella Trebits was one of the ten thousand who caught typhus in the spring of 1945. Her notes depict the stages of not only the drastic changes in the camp conditions and the prisoners’ life in general, but also the mental and physical degradation that continued to suffer even after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British military forces in April 1945. However, we only possess the transcript of the text, which was created in the British hospital in the spring of 1945. We are unsure of what and how much the author may have changed in the transcription of the original notes, which she probably destroyed before her death in the 1980s.2

Although Gabriella’s diary is just one of the more than 30 diaries written in Belsen, this is probably the only one in which the diarist’s entries are based on not only real observations and experiences, but typhoid hallucinations as well. We attempt to reveal and analyze the narrative and meaning of places in the diary. In other words, we uncover how Gabriella perceived the spaces around her, and whether these were real or imagined. In her account, we also concentrate on how she describes her illness with typhoid fever to show the feelings and sensations she associates with places. We find that she considered the imagined places to be just as important to include in her narrative as the real spaces of the camp—a kind of dual narrative that makes this Holocaust diary truly unique. Using testimonies written by other Hungarian prisoners, the paper contextualizes Gabriella’s observations. The first section of our paper is divided into two parts; the first gives a general overview of the history of the Hungarian “Häftling” groups of Belsen, based mostly on secondary sources. The second part reflects on Gabriella’s diary among the camp diaries. This second section is a comprehensive analysis of the sensation of the real and imagined places in the diary, and the diarist’s mainly confused feelings rooted in fear, isolation, desperation, and physical degradation. Despite these conditions, our paper demonstrates that even in a traumatic situation―such as living in a “horror camp”―social life among the inmates could persist. In a wider context, we would like to contribute to scholarship that emphasizes the significance of revealing, unfolding, and examining diaries in Holocaust research.

2. Historical Context: Bergen-Belsen and the Hungarian Jews

Bergen-Belsen was one of the most significant and biggest concentration camps in history and played a special role from the perspective of the Holocaust in Hungary. Ten thousand Hungarian Jewish citizens were deported to this camp, which was situated in the Luneburg Heath (Lüneburger Heide) and was run by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt), in 1944 and 1945. The concentration camp was divided into two parts. In a broader, more global, sense of the term, one major part of this camp consisted of two sectors: the Women’s Camp (Frauenlager) and the Men’s Camp (Männerlager), where inmates mostly had to perform hard labor. The other major part of the concentration camp maintained a unique function since its setup in 1943. This was the Exchange Camp (Austauschlager or Aufenthaltslager) for the so-called “exchange Jews”, who had been brought there from several European countries (Rahe 2008, pp. 205–10). The prisoners were living there as “hostages” according to the Nazi jargon, but in slightly better circumstances than in the Woman’s and Men’s Camps—a phenomenon that the historian, Nikolaus Wachsmann, refers to as an “anomaly” (Wachsmann 2015, p. 337). The so-called “exchange Jews” from Hungary were detained in the so-called “Hungarian Camp” (Ungarnlager), a special sector of the Exchange Camp. Here, families were neither separated nor forced to work, and due to their special status, the SS let them live in bearable conditions behind barbed wire fences, according to the Häftlings of the other sectors of the camp (Billib 2014, 2020).

In the last phase of the war, Belsen was again reorganized by the camp commandant due to the general state of the German military–political decline on the Eastern front. The huge extermination camps and other killing centers of the East were being liquidated and some of these―such as Auschwitz―were slowly evacuated from the last months of 1944 into several centrally located and strategically important concentration camps in Germany. These processes lasted until the first three months of the following year (Hördler 2015; Blatman 2011, pp. 57–298). Heinrich Himmler ordered Bergen-Belsen (along with Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau) to become one of the destinations of the evacuations coming from the East. The resulting flood of inmates into the camp resulted in overcrowding and a lack of sufficient food and water. These conditions led the camps to became hotbeds of several kinds of diseases, such as typhus and malaria, among the inmates. In the meantime (on 1 December), Josef Kramer, the former commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, replaced Commander Adolf Haas SS-Hauptsturmführer. Kramer brought with him the most notorious SS officers and guards from Auschwitz. His leadership soon resulted in drastic changes in living conditions. Kramer’s rule was so harsh in the concentration camp sectors that he became known as the “Beast of Belsen”. After Kramer had taken office, he strove to eliminate the privileged Exchange Camp; however, despite his request the commander failed to obtain permission from Himmler to do so.

Not long before the liberation of Belsen (15 April 1945), the SS evacuated the Exchange Camp according to Heinrich Himmler’s order. Due to the lack of administrative records, only ego-documents report about the evacuation transports that left or reached Belsen. Gabriella Trebits was deported to Belsen from Allach (KZ Außenlager Dachau-Allach), a huge subcamp of Dachau that provided slave labor for nearby BMW factories. She was among the 500 women who were evacuated to the Women’s Camp of Belsen at the end of November. With overcrowding growing by the day, the Belsen epidemic caused a very high death rate among camp inmates. By the end of January 1945, the camp suffered the breakout of a massive typhus epidemic that could only be stopped by the British liberators in May. The rest of the inmates, including the Hungarian Jews in the prisoners’ sectors, stayed in Belsen, which by then had become a “death camp.” (Lavsky 2002, pp. 37–41; Lattek 1997, pp. 37–71).

In the meantime, the British 11th Armored Division approached the area. The British forces finally entered the camp on 15 April 1945, according to the terms of a truce agreement with the retreating Germans to surrender the camp peacefully and not long after the SS had fled the area. The liberators experienced such circumstances which they were not at all prepared for (Stone 2021, pp. 120–42). They found more than 50,000 inmates, most of who were acutely sick and starving. Among them were thousands of Hungarian Jews. More than 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition lay littered around the camp. The prisoners had been without food and water for days before the arrival of the Allied forces. About 500 people were dying per day, primarily from typhus (Shephard 2005, p. 56). Typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis were all present in the camp.

In the first two weeks after the liberation, 15,000 former inmates also died from the consequences of epidemics, long illnesses, starvation, and inadequate treatment by the British. Saving the lives of the liberated prisoners was also shockingly hard to arrange. The British not only had to restrain and end the epidemic diseases, but also set up a hospital together with a steady supply of food and water for the survivors. The major problem was nourishing the inmates, since at least a quarter of them were unable to digest what was given to them and so were placed on a strict diet provided to them by the British, who also had to solve the medical treatment and sanitation problems for about 21,000 people. The British set up a hospital in the former Wehrmacht hospital of Belsen, and it was here that Gabriella spent almost half a year until her recovery. By 19 May, all the ill survivors were being cared for. However, the British were unable to properly handle the problems of the mentally and physically ill people who mostly needed specialized, long-term treatment. The British allied forces established the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Person’s (DP) camp partly in the area of the former military camp adjoining the concentration camp in order to gather the North-Western surviving Jewish inmates. This camp existed until 1950 (Lavsky 2002; Seybold 2014, pp. 186–88).

3. Diary Writing in Nazi Concentration Camps and the Diary of Gabriella Trebits

Plenty of photos of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen depict the conditions inside the camp from the liberators’ perspectives (Haggith 2006, pp. 89–122; Celinscak 2015, pp. 117–59). However, only a few camp inmates were able to create notes and save them, mainly during these final weeks; keeping diaries in Nazi concentration camps was therefore not a widespread activity. These sorts of ego documents remain the only historical sources, besides correspondences and letters, that are both personal accounts and contemporary narratives.

In the historian Thomas Rahe’s opinion, Belsen was the most over-represented concentration camp among those in the Nazi camp-system of the SS in terms of the keeping of diaries among its inmates. Based on his research, we can estimate that the number of diaries written in the various sectors of this enormous camp complex was more than 30 (Rahe 2021, p. 51).3 This fundamental peculiarity arises from the previously described special function of Belsen. Due to their privileged status, the inmates had opportunities to keep their belongings. Not surprisingly, the first diary ever written in Belsen is from 1943, written by a member of the first “privileged” groups of the Exchange Camp (Kushner 1997, p. 183). They often had a pen or pencil, as well as paper, which provided the means for some people to register their daily activities. Many diaries of Belsen were written in Hungarian, primarily by the “hostages” of the Hungarian Camp sector.

Despite the considerable number of diaries kept in Belsen, writing them was strictly forbidden in the concentration camp sectors, even in the Exchange Camp. Prisoners who kept diaries were taking risks with this sort of hidden activity that could easily have proven dangerous for them. Consequently, the diarists―with the presumable exceptions of those during the last phase of Belsen’s history―were writing their daily narratives secretly and did not want to be seen showing everyone else their work. One of these diarists was Gabriella Trebits, who wrote notes in the Women’s Camp between November 1944 and November 1945.

Gabriella Trebits (1912–1989) was born in Debrecen, a large city in northeastern Hungary. According to her daughter, Gabriella grew up in a warm and loving family. Her parents, together with their three daughters and two sons, moved to Budapest in 1933 because of the economic world crisis and in the hope of a better livelihood. The family was not religious. The diarist worked as a civil servant before the war in Budapest. Her brother and her future husband both went to university in Brno, Czechoslovakia because in Hungary the numerus clausus law severely limited the number of students who could be admitted to a university. The two men became friends and were involved in the left-wing student movement. In Budapest, they joined the illegal communist party (Party of Communists in Hungary) together with Gabriella. It was also here that the family acquaintance turned into a marriage. The young woman was an activist for Red Aid, an organization officially intended to support the relatives of convicted or executed communists. In the 1960s, the Hungarian communist party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt) certified her party membership from 1933.4

The political police arrested Gabriella in early November 1944 and put her in the jail of the Defensive Department in Szilárd Rökk Street. She arrived in Dachau on 14 November with a large group of political captives; from here they were first taken to Allach and then, with part of the group, to Bergen-Belsen at the end of the month. Gabriella spoke German fluently, which made her life easier during the deportation. However, her tobacco addiction caused her much suffering. Between April and October 1945, the diarist received treatment in the British hospital in the DP camp near Bergen-Belsen camp. She left for home in early September, but because of a lack of transportation, did not arrive in Budapest until early November. After the war, she divorced her husband, remarried in 1949, and had a daughter. Gabriella deliberately destroyed her original diary before her death so as not to burden her family, leaving only the transcript she had made in the hospital. However, she omitted certain life-threatening and brutal episodes from the latter (for instance, when a German guard caught her smoking and almost shot her), according to her daughter who had secretly read the original notes. Her descendants donated this transcribed version of the diary to the Bergen-Belsen archive in 2014.5

Writing diaries had been a common activity since the mid-19th century in Hungary, both in bourgeoisie families and in middle-class settings. In the Hungarian camp, the proportion of prisoners with a bourgeois background was very high (Billib 2020, pp. 12–18). Since many of the detainees belonged to the Jewish intelligentsia back in their homeland, it is quite likely that some of them tried to insist on some sense of “normality” by keeping diaries in their “abnormal” circumstances. Another reason could have been to give meaning to the time they spent behind the barbed wire. This behavior might be interpreted and understood as another, intellectual form of the so-called “food talk” (Goldenberg 2003, pp. 161–79), or as the keeping and preserving of “luxury items” of camp life, a behavior that was very common within the Nazi concentration camps in general (Karwowska 2015, pp. 64–76). Gabriella does not give any indication of what motivated her to write, but we can assume that in her case, her communist party missions and tasks played a role in her decision to write a diary.

4. Typhus and Senses of Places

The concentration camps provided ideal conditions for life-threatening epidemics. The SS had not taken any serious steps to alleviate starvation and diseases, and these created unbearable living conditions in Bergen-Belsen. On 1 March, Josef Kramer warned his superiors that the reception of further “consignments” was impossible given the lack of accommodation and food, and he added that there was now typhus to consider when assessing the increasing death rate (Shephard 2005, p. 79).

The British response to typhus during the genocide stemmed from a broader hygienic paradigm. Quarantine was an existing practice dating from the 17th century to control the spread of epidemics. Those considered to be infected, or carriers of infected lice, were subjected to a brutal procedure of disinfection, decontamination, and quarantine (Weindling 2000, pp. 3–18). In Bergen-Belsen, some prisoner doctors, independent of the camp authorities, made efforts to separate patients, but their attempts had no effect. According to testimonies, healthy people were also admitted to barracks designated as quarantined, and in several places, typhus patients were simply accommodated alongside those who had not yet become infected (Lattek 1997, pp. 55–59). Himmler was informed of the outbreak of typhus on 5 March and finally agreed to ignore Hitler’s orders and vaccinate the inmates. Gabriella Trebits notes on 15 February that she got her shot: “Do they vaccinate us against typhus or with typhus, who knows?”6 After the liberation, British doctors tried to apply injections in the hospital of the DP camp, but this was impossible for these patients, who were terrified because the Germans had been injecting petrol into the dying Belsen prisoners to make them burn better in the crematorium (Shephard 2005, p. 100). The diarist’s ironic comment may refer to the rumors about this practice as well as Nazi medical experimentation.

No medical records were kept in Bergen-Belsen, but some of the prisoner doctors’ and patients’ personal notes give an insight into the conditions. Dr. Sándor Zinner worked as a prisoner doctor there from late February. According to his diary, there were 200 typhus deaths in the camp within 24 h, a statistic that is consistent with Kramer’s report. Recovery without medicine and proper care was hopeless. Despite his vaccination, Zinner also caught the disease, but his diary does not detail his condition.7 Károly Székely, placed in the Ungarnlager, secretly corresponded with his daughter Magda, who was in the Women’s Camp. Although the young woman was not ill, she was isolated due to the outbreak of typhus. Her last letter, written on 5 March from the quarantine barracks, was full of desperation and fear: “I do not know what will happen. There is an epidemic too. My feet are swollen, and I can barely walk. We cannot drink any water here, but we are always thirsty” (Huhák and Szécsényi 2014, pp. 95–96). Given the small size of the pieces of paper upon which these letters were written, it was not possible to give a detailed picture of the situation. Further, because Magda died in Bergen-Belsen, she could not report the effects of typhus later. The Yugoslav communist Hanna Levy-Haas describes the starvation and agony of the last months in her diary. By the spring of 1945, her records had become increasingly sparse after she contracted typhoid fever and could not move for two weeks (Levy-Hass 2015, pp. 117–18). These typhoid diarists were unable to write because of their condition, and most of them did not mention the course of the disease in their later notes because of their traumatic memories. However, we have more detailed documentation from the immediate post-war period. In February 1946, 627 patients returning from deportation were treated for typhus at the Szent László Hospital in Budapest. The initial stages of the disease were investigated using medical staff who had become infected with typhoid (Kalocsay 1946, pp. 177–84).

In the first entry of this diary, Gabriella reveals where she is and what she sees: “Opposite is the grey house with the skull and crossbones, I can tell you, glorious architect, ugly ornamentation. Inside, 250 women and men sit on the floor, no talking allowed! At noon and in the evening, they bring dilute scrambled soup in a canteen cup, with black, buttered bread. The canteen cup tastes of iron and stinks.”8 Gabriella writes from the position of an outsider observer, but she paints what she sees and experiences in an emotionally rich way. Gabriella begins writing at the site of her arrest, at the Defensive Department of the political police in Budapest on 2 November 1944. Beyond her visual impression of the “ugly ornamentation”, she mentions another perceptual dimension: the bad taste of the canteen cup. Such combinations of different sensory dimensions characterize several entries in the diary. This scene is followed by episodes of the train journeys to Dachau, Allach, and Bergen-Belsen. The diary offers a very wide range of analytical possibilities. In this paper, we focus on the passage the diarist wrote about her illness with typhoid fever in March and April 1945.

Gabriella was placed in the Revier barrack with pneumonia and pleurisy, about which she reports in an entry on 12 March.9 She does not indicate who made this diagnosis. One week later, she writes that her new bunkmate had typhoid fever; she was subsequently diagnosed infected with the disease on 7 April. Her diary offers a personal narrative of the diagnosis of the repatriated deportees in Hungary, i.e., their physical and psychological symptoms: fever, headache, typhoid deafness, hallucinations, loss of consciousness and memory, “introverted state of mind” and the feeling of “alienated personality” (Halász and Raáb 1946, pp. 1128–30). Relative to the other contemporary notes, Gabriella provides a detailed account not only of her physical condition but also of her typhoid hallucinations. Conveying her typhoid fever in her diary created a narrative in which the conscious activity of writing and the will to write struggled against the weakness and day-by-day weakening of her body and mind possessed by typhus.

From the detailed description of the hallucinations, we can infer that she was documenting a very recent experience. According to the entry of 15 April, she wrote lying down for days because she could not sit up: “I am suffocating and dizzy, I write a few lines and rest for hours.”10 Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that in her most desperate condition, and with frequent blackouts, she could still write. We assume she noted her last entries, mainly of 13 April on her hallucinations in the British hospital, immediately after the liberation. However, what matters is not exactly when Gabriella wrote about her experiences, but the fact that she felt she had to record them in her diary.

Gabriella writes about their fight against the unbearable dirt and stink of the huts: “Women are ragged, uncombed, and dirty. There is an epidemic of diarrhea, and human excrement everywhere on the road, in the blocks. It is disgusting. What happens when the snow melts? Cholera!”11 She adds strong emotional commentary to her descriptive account of the environment. Additionally, she reports on her tactile impressions relating to camp life. She writes that her wounded, purulent body and her “parchment-like thin skin” was more sensitive and vulnerable to the rough materials: “I am cold, my back hurts. My dear mother, I think only of you. My bunk is hard, I have no blanket, I am covered with a ragged coat, Mother, and I long for your hand.”12 The attack on human bodies and human senses in concentration camps had many dimensions: the uncivilized living conditions, the starvation, the illness, and the filth were all sensory assaults against the camp inmates.13

In some entries, Gabriella changed her perspective from the inside of the huts to the landscape of the camp. In the last weeks before the liberation, scattered corpses were lying throughout the camp area: “The naked bodies of men were drenched by the rain and heaped as pyramids on the open camp street. And I feel neither compassion nor fear. There is no room left in my heart for sympathy, only for indignation and hatred!”14 In this case, the neutral description of a horrific sight is accompanied by her unusual emotional reactions, i.e., the lack of compassion and fear. In the single month of March 1945, 18,000 prisoners died in Bergen-Belsen without systematic execution in gas chambers: “merely” because of the lack of supplies and months of mistreatment (Shephard 2005, pp. 15, 37). The SS, fearing an epidemic, barely entered the camp, and the weak prisoners could not collect the dead as quickly as the people died. As a result, the barrack yards and then the barracks were littered with bodies. By the last days, the corpses were as integral a part of the Bergen-Belsen landscape as the barracks or the barbed wire fence and became the visual imprint of mass destruction. “The corpses were like objects, not people,” a survivor recalled decades later.15

Dead bodies made not only a visual but also a tactile impression on the diarist. Gabriella had to share her bunk bed with two dying, later dead women. The constant physical contact caused by the crowding blurred the boundary between the living and the dead. Éva Weitzenfeld describes that she woke up every morning to find a corpse on her leg, another on her shoulder, and a third next to her.16 Hanna Levy-Haas also sensed those who lay around her in the quarantine barracks dying. As she wrote, she spent her “remaining semi-existence in the company of other ghosts, living and dead” (Levy-Hass 2015, p. 118).

According to historian Amos Goldberg, the narrative of camp life points to a seemingly unbridgeable gap between knowledge and experience. Their knowledge meant that the prisoners lived in an extreme world in which ordinary rules no longer apply and so that everything in the camp—including the bodies accumulating in the camp streets—seemed to be normal and banal (Goldberg 2017, pp. 15–16). Gabriella knew that she should greet the sight of dead bodies with compassion and horror, but instead she looked at it like any other ordinary scene. Overall, in her diary she does not give an exact explanation for her insistence on continuous documentation. At one point, however, she notes that by the time her notebook is full, she will return home. “My notebook fills up quickly even with shorthand. When it fills up, I turn it over and write between the lines, and when it is full, too I will be home.”17 In effect, Gabriella is writing herself out of the camp space, having in the meantime attempted to maintain her sanity, which she found increasingly difficult during the typhus.

5. “Confused” Spaces

Pre-war family and cultural life have a strong presence in the diary. However, Gabriella’s account did not arouse nostalgia but rather a feeling of detachment from the past. On 4 December, her 33rd birthday, she writes that her old life comes back to her “like a distant and beautiful dream”.18 More than four months later, on 13 April, she writes again that she is detached from the past, from objects, and from persons. She believes that the only way to survive the camp is not to relive her pre-war life. On 1 March, she adds that she must change her feelings and thoughts “to not want to perish”.19

Along with her former life, she also saw the defining elements of her personality disappear: “There are no cities, no life, only camps, barbed wire, brutality, disease, Germans, and death. Have they never been? No love, no life, no concerts, no poems, no childhood, no brothers and sisters, no parents, no family?!”20 The tone of the narrative in these entries, the rigorous listing of losses, only confirms the diarist’s intention to distance herself rather than to indulge in nostalgia. These and similar passages in the diary show how the traumas of the camps broke the continuity between the three dimensions of time: past, present, and future. Witnesses reported a sense of time standing still, a static, massive present, and the disappearance of the past and future (Goldberg 2017, pp. 33–43). The present also made the past fade for Gabriella, because this past no longer served as a point of reference that could give meaning and sense to her experiences.

Alongside old places (her former family and cultural milieu), her own body was becoming alien to her. On 7 April, she writes that she still combs her hair every day, but no longer looks at herself in the small mirror she had exchanged for bread while working in the camp kitchen: “Waxy yellow, bald little kid. That is not me. A child’s blue eyes grown huge, a tiny face, no clue for my breasts or hips.”21 The diarist again took the position of an outside observer, as in the first entry of her diary, when she described the internment camp. This time, however, she documents the transformation of her body in a completely emotionless and resigned way. Furthermore, 7 April was one of the bleakest points of the diarist for several reasons. One was the typhus: “I have typhoid fever. Lice, fever, my legs are swollen and pus-fever. My back aches with every breath, and the inflammation of my lungs and pleura has not taken place for want of medicine. I have no desire for anything. I just want to eat.”22 She is also lying in bed with two dead people, and she no longer believes in survival. In her fantasy, she is going to die, and her body is being dragged into the snow. She is longing to do nothing but die in bed, “in the pink upholstered room”.23

Additionally, this day was the anniversary of her wedding. She had no peace from the lice for a single moment and was faced with not only the physical symptoms but also the mental effects of the disease: “So it is my wedding anniversary and I do not remember your face either, Pali. I feel and know that we can be dead or alive, we will never meet again.”24 After her decline in health, the next stage was her mental decline. She felt she had been deprived not only of her earlier life but had even lost her memories because of typhus. To keep a distance from the past was no longer her own decision, but a consequence of the typhus, a process over which she had no influence.

Recalling and communicating the sensations of bodily torment has barriers. As Joanna Bourke claims, “the body-in-pain often seeks solitude and silence, instead of stories”. Communicating pain can also be painful. However, Gabriella tried to describe her painful experiences and emotions during typhus. In her work on the history of pain, Bourke argues that because it is one of the recurring and conscious events that we experience and witness regularly, it is part of the individual’s life history. She points out that people who claim their suffering to be “unspeakable” may then go on to give a detailed description of their pain. As a result, pain can be communicable and pain talk can be productive in creating their narratives (Bourke 2014, pp. 1–26). What is unique about Gabriella’s diary is that she also describes how the effects of typhoid fever on her nervous system caused hallucinations (in addition to physical pain). In her long note dated 13 April, the diary becomes a “textual journey” between real and imagined places that are recalled by different memories and thoughts. Instead of listing them chronologically and in detail, we focus on what kinds of patterns are featured in the narrative.

Typhoid fever causes individuals to lose perception of the outside world and to turn inwards. Infectious deportees treated in Budapest were diagnosed with visual and hearing disturbances. The patients became apathetic and withdrawn from their surroundings, answering questions with sluggishness and apparent effort, as if waking up from a difficult dream (Kalocsay 1946, pp. 177–84). In his memoirs, Imre Kőműves mentions visions that occurred to him in his sleep, which were confusing and frightening. He felt himself falling into unconsciousness and always awoke from it as if he had been thrown “from a cold abyss by a cold mist”. Several times a night he heard bells ringing. Every night he “died a little” and every morning he wondered what could have given him the strength to wake up and make his way to the cold and damp bathroom (Kőműves 1967, pp. 97–98, 125).

Gabriella’s attention turned from the corpse-strewn spaces of the camp to natural phenomena. Her state of mind reinforced the surreal, unearthly nature of the camp: “[…] nature is also haunting, which was never alien at home. It was serene, accessible, a part of me. Here, through the cracks in the black window frame, I can see the moon, a big red ball, the stars glowing cold, the sky an improbable blue, a deep blue, all dark. All around are pine trees, not sucking the life from the ground. They act as a stage set. Between them are dirty wooden shacks, on top of them loose snow. I tell you, this landscape is quite alien, it is no longer nature, it is a German sky, it is hollow, stiff, joyless, like the eyes of the German people.”25 This description is rich in figurative speech: simile (“they act as a stage set”), metaphor (“red ball”) and synesthesia (“coldly luminous”). While the corpses evoked a sense of indifference, the natural environment evoked a sense of alienation in Gabriella. While the ordinariness of the corpses had become part of the landscape, the unusualness of the natural environment influenced her feelings about places. To express this alienation, she invoked the use of figurative speech, which is a basic means of describing experiences that are difficult to communicate, such as fear and pain (Bourke 2014, pp. 53–58).

The suffering caused by typhoid fever opened up new dimensions of perception for her, which also changed her narrative of places. Gabriella mentions her “confused”, “frightening, and uncontrollable” state in her diary. The young woman describes her hallucinations as the arrival of an “undefined someone”: “[…] behold the unknown, the unknowable, the never seen ‘other’ person flies into me. It flies into me!!! It is the only way I can express it because it is not beside me but within me. I shrink, I give them space […]”26 Later, she writes that this “other man” is a “part of her being”, even if he is a “stranger”. Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen felt something similar; she felt as if her head had been cut in two and that she was fighting non-stop with someone who wanted to take her food.27 These descriptions reveal a common typhoid hallucination in which patients experienced the doubling of their personalities. Paul Weindling’s book on epidemics cites similar cases from World War I and the Russian Civil War of 1917. Some patients felt as if they were experiencing two situations at the same time; for instance, they were in both their barracks and an imaginary place, simultaneously perceiving the details and spaces of both. Others spoke of their bodies splitting in two. Some experienced their body parts living a life of their own; some patients asked for their chin to be removed for shaving, or their legs to be hung up like clothing in a wardrobe (Weindling 2000, p. 5).

In one of Gabriella’s visions, her mother “arrived”, relieving her physical suffering and healing her. According to her narrative, her mother lifted her from the dirty bunk and took her to a clean room that she recalled by bodily sensations: “There people do not die at night, there are no lice, I lay in bed, alone, covered by a real quilt. I feel the pillow behind my head, and the mattress under my aching, sore body, and they give me water, tea, and fleshy, juicy fruit. These are wonderful things. The softness of the pillow, the water, the unlimited possibility of liquids, my mouth, my swollen, sore tongue, and my parched cavities filled with life, and moisture. My mother caresses me; her velvety palm touches my sad forehead.”28 Despite their confused state of consciousness, typhoid patients have also reported hallucinations that sometimes recall pleasant experiences, in which they have seen people—for instance, family members dear to them, as Gabriella’s lines demonstrate (Weindling 2000, pp. 4–5).

The recording of this condition is of interest to us not just from a medical point of view, but from a narrative one. Gabriella documented the hallucination as she would have the Bergen-Belsen baths, the barracks, or the Revier. Behind the entry is the gap between knowledge and experience—as quoted above, the perception of unreality as reality—but as she writes, “it was the only way she could express”. her perceptions. This time, however, the drama did not take place in the space of the camp but rather in the depths of her consciousness. The documentation of the psyche became equivalent to the representation of the deepest inner world, as the author was suffering from the effects of, but also inhabiting an alternative version of, the location itself.

In these notes, we can recognize an alternation between perception of the outside world and detachment from it. From these visions, the hunger, thirst, and physical pain returned her to reality: “I wake to the stench, to solitude, deaf with typhus, feverish, aching, unable to move my pus-covered, blood-encrusted, skeletal body, and I feel an indescribable longing for a liter of water.”29 The diary writer was overwhelmed by sensations that were painful and untreatable. As Gabriella’s mental state continued to deteriorate, her sense of disconnection from normality was counterbalanced by strong sensations of connection—paradoxically and primarily pain—with the physical world.

According to Bourke, people interpret their pain not as contained, isolated, individual bodies, but in interaction with other bodies and social environments. Pain is not just neurological activity in the brain or a physiological process in the body, and it does not push the person who suffers the pain into complete isolation. Despite the pain taking place within the individual, “pain is practiced within relational, environmental contexts” (Bourke 2014, p. 8). As a result, the individual’s perception of what she signifies (and narrates) as a pain event can also be profoundly affected by environmental interactions (Bourke 2014, pp. 12–16).

During her illness, the outside world for Gabriella was limited to the Revier. Despite her physical decay her mental state was a crumbling, but not completely destroyed, disintegration through which she was still able to interact with her fellow prisoners. Amid these descriptions of her hallucinations Gabriella mentions another Hungarian woman lying pregnant next to her. She also writes of a fellow prisoner, named Lucsina (correct spelling probably Lucyna), who was deported from Warsaw in winter along with many other Christian women who “were not Jews and not Communists, but evacuees.”30 As a result, she was not in social isolation. Her German language skills and the network of political prisoners may have contributed to her getting the news. When a Slovakian pharmacist, Ada, arrived at the bunk next to her in mid-March, they discussed her news from outside: “The allies are close. Let us consider the events and the possibilities. Food is getting worse by the day. The air threat is almost constant. But typhus will kill us within days. Even those who have not starved to death. The Germans will have to finish off the rest. Such camps, such testimony, cannot survive until the Allies arrive.”31 On 12 April, shreds of news also reached her. She writes of the arrival of the British troops, but she is unsure whether her mind is clear enough to judge the veracity of this information: “I dare not speak. I cannot see things clearly; I cannot make myself clear. Are the British coming here? How? Are all typhus sufferers really going mad?”32 For Gabriella, the perception of reality sometimes seemed more incredible than the hallucinations caused by typhoid. She later found the conditions of the camp hospital more difficult to comprehend than the horrific conditions in the camp. While the hills of the dead became familiar, the more ordinary experiences of the white bed, the silence, the tea, and the smiling Red Cross nurse became extraordinary for her.33 In other words, the non-extraordinary things were extraordinary for her.

It was at this time that the high-command SS officers decided to send a committee to the British in hope of signing a truce agreement with them. However, the handover of the camp took days, further reducing the chances of survival for starving and ill Jews. In early April, the 11th British Armored Division moved steadily northeastwards through rivers and a huge area of woodland and heather in the Luneburg Heath. After the truce agreement with the Wehrmacht leaders, British commanders designated troops for the job of entering the camp. Since the German resistance in the surrounding area remained strong, the British soldiers fought their way to Bergen-Belsen only on the morning of Sunday 15 April (Shephard 2005, pp. 33–34). Meanwhile, conditions had deteriorated drastically in the camp, day by day and in all respects. When Kramer took over the camp, its population was 15,000; this figure rose to 42,000 in March and 60,000 in April. Within this incomprehensible mass of people, Gabriella’s diary gives an insight into the events in a single barrack.

According to her entry, dated 13 April, terrible scenes had played on the Revier. Gabriella watched as the newborn baby of her “bunk mate”—who “had neither strength nor time to cry”—was taken from her mother and wrapped in paper.34 In December 1944, the last transports arrived from Budapest, and the pregnant woman Gabriella mentioned was one of these deportees. As there was no gas chamber and selection in Bergen-Belsen, she gave birth to her child, who was immediately taken from her and killed. At the beginning of 1945, Bergen-Belsen had become a destination for sick concentration camp inmates and pregnant women who were not able to work. Because of the chaos and overcrowding, abandonment and helplessness awaited pregnant prisoners in the camp (Amesberger 2010, pp. 139–55). The gynecologist Gisella Perl was assigned to the “pregnant block”, where malnourished, typhoid-ridden pregnant women were lying extremely crowded. There was no water, no medicine, and nothing that could be done for these people (Perl 1948, pp. 170–75).

That was followed by a further terrible experience when a capo beat Gabriella’s fellow prisoner.35 Kramer introduced the capo system as part of the standard regimen of the concentration camp in December 1944. According to testimonies, the leaders of the barracks and work groups, appointed from among the captives, often resorted to physical violence. When Lucsina begged for water, the capo began to beat the dying woman. The darkness of the night protected Gabriella from the horrific sight and she covered her ears so as not to hear the shout and cry. Then silence fell, and she noticed that Lucsina was sitting on her bunk, asking her for water: “She is embracing me with her wounded, pus-filled right arm, and I feel a terrible disgust and fear. But I hear her voice, the soft, sweet, singing German words, and all my foolish feelings are lifted from me. No longer am I afraid of the bloody pus that clings to me, no longer do I smell the stench, only hear her voice, her Slavic soft pronunciation.”36 Gabriella describes this scene with strong sensations. As we can see, the deterioration of her neighbor’s body has also strained social relationships, at least in this case. However, her bodily disgust at the stench and the bloody pus was overcome by the pleasant sound experience of “the soft, lovely singing German words”. Moreover, this social connection also triggered the re-emergence of emotions in the narrative. Later, she had to watch Lucsina’s death: “They take Lucsina in a blanket, dump her on the ground, her beautiful blond hair clinging to her head, her eyes wide with deception and hurt.”37

The diary writer described her state after this scene as one of total hopelessness. After witnessing these brutalities, typhoid fever took her back to her childhood memories. Colorful, warm pictures evolved in her visions, and she imagined herself in a vineyard during harvest among “many-colored grapes, many-flavored wines, rich scents”.38 This entry is the only example of feelings of nostalgia, as she recalls her happiness in her pre-war life. This hallucination evoked pleasant memories in her, like those during her meeting with her mother. For Gabriella, her thirst, hunger, and pain transformed her desire for liquids and a clean and comfortable room into a vision. After the traumatic experience of Revier, the diarist fled into memories of the past, into this world of pleasant sights, smells, and tastes. In both cases, the pleasant sensations were a refuge for her.

Her fight with typhus was so tragic and disturbing for the young woman because it attacked not only her body but also her sanity and her consciousness, which she had striven to preserve. Since she consistently insisted on writing, she also “organized” her hallucinations into a narrative. Even in this situation, documentation was for her the link with herself. In this final phase of her life in the camp, this experience—fragmented and disintegrating as it was—was thus transformed into a story that could be told. Moreover, this event took place not only in Gabriella’s mind but also in the community of Revier prisoners integrating into this social context. The diary entries prove that even the weakened, immobilized, and quarantined sick prisoners were able to communicate with each other. As many were dying continuously at the Revier, they were always replaced by new people bringing news from the outside world—even if the outside world meant only the space inside the barbed wire. For typhoid patients, these contacts provided both social interaction in the solitude of typhoid fever and a connection to the world outside quarantine.

6. Conclusions

Gabriella probably spent 15 April 1945, the day of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, in a semi-conscious state. Her note dated that day said that all she could sense was a British soldier standing next to her. Further entries in the diary describe the time spent in the hospital and the return home. The most challenging part of her narrative for historical analysis was written during the time of the typhus outbreak, or more precisely, that portion documenting this period. Since there is no knowledge about the pre-war status and life of the diarist, it is difficult to analyze the places and actors appearing in Gabriella’s hallucinations.

Gabriella Trebits’s diary has spatial relevance in a variety of ways. Firstly, her diary entries point out both the role and nature of spaces of the camp, as well as an individual’s mind and body. That shows how different scales of spaces could be presented and merged within a single narrative. Secondly, the relation between real and imagined spaces demonstrates how their sensory dimensions shaped the narrative, and how the descriptions of the environment and the sensory and emotionally rich elements varied during the diarist’s textual journey. The environment and spaces are present in the narrative as a sensory assault against the diarist and as typhoid hallucinations. Because of the illness, the perspective of the diary writer was narrowed to her bunk bed in the typhus barrack. When she could no longer even move about, her body became the space of her narrative through her physical sensations. Meanwhile, her hallucinations caused by typhus led her to remote places related to her pre-war life. These visions were strongly related to emotionally rich and safe places; either she was in the places of her childhood, at home, or in a clean room with her mother.

Diary writing is not only a means of documentation or remembrance. For Gabriella, writing was a way to connect with herself. She portrays herself as someone who faced the physical and mental effects of the camp, not escaped them. In contrast, she has documented her impressions of camp life in detail. Due to maintaining her self-awareness and her sanity during the typhus, she carefully recorded her complex emotional and sensory life. The descriptions of her sensations helped her to express both the difficulties caused by her physical environment and the confusion caused by her hallucinations. The references to changes in sensory impressions (regardless of whether they were real or imagined) created a discursive space for the diarist to express her feelings. Narrating her experiences, even in her worst and most vulnerable condition, was her main coping strategy. Meanwhile, the young woman set her own boundaries through writing. She felt a disconnection from the past and a dissolution from her life in the camps. Writing her diary can be seen as an act of resistance, which could no longer connect her to the past or remove her from the present, but which, by connecting with herself, built an inner world that was created by relinquishing certain elements of her former identity and personality and by salvaging others. By examining her pain in a historical context, we are more concerned with the response to pain. Gabriella’s response to the suffering of camp life was to write a diary. Stories about pain contain many characters and settings. Accordingly, the diarist found the linguistic means to express—at least in part—her suffering. Her experiences in the camps were woven into a narrative story, and this narrative strategy helped her to endure the harsh circumstances.

While typhoid fever dominated Gabriella’s perception and her record shows an increasingly reduced state of consciousness, she was still aware of the events around her to a certain extent. The social life did not disappear during her illness. She mentioned her fellow prisoners (a woman from Budapest, a Slovakian pharmacist Ada, and a Polish deportee Lucsina). She was still able to connect to the information network, and the news reached her to some extent; Ada brought her news about the war, and she heard rumors of the British invasion on 12 April. Lying at the Revier, the news took her to the front lines, to the crossroads of war. She pondered which would be faster: the Allies’ movements on the map, or the typhus and famine encroaching inside the barbed wire fence. The diary of Gabriella Trebits demonstrates that it was possible for typhoid patients to connect with their environment despite their lonely and isolated situation. When almost the only contact with the outside world was physical sensations, it was still possible to ponder what was happening in the barracks and the news about the camp and the war. Even on the periphery of the camp space, where one would think everything revolved around death and all means to connect had been destroyed, social life was still going on.

The diaries shed light on the most detailed nuances of everyday life in the camp—details which did not seem important or were forgotten in accounts that were spoken or written decades later. In the monotony of everyday life, the prisoners were attentive to small things and the impulses and sensory impressions of the physical environment. In comparison with the memoirs, the texts of the diaries were not influenced by later canonical novels and films. Thus, the experiences are narrated much more from a personal perspective, and the diarists were left on their own in the interpretation and meaning-making process.

Gabriella’s diary also demonstrates that the victims’ narratives provide much deeper insights into camp life than the recounting of the inedible courses of the camp menu or the rags of the camp clothes. Wachsman says that “the smallest spaces can reveal a lot about Auschwitz” (Wachsmann 2021, p. 49). We argue that these smallest spaces (the Revier, the bunk bed, a woman’s body) in even a single narrative can reveal much about camp life. The diary is not only about the experiences of a deportee, but also about the attitudes of the perpetrators, the functioning of the camp, and the conditions of the place. As in the case of any other dictatorship, spaces were totally controlled only in the leaders’ imagination. The SS was not able to rule even the concentration camps in everyday life. It is in the context of these facts that we must examine the survivors’ agency and narrative practices. Approaches that focus on the spaces, the body, and the senses need to be applied to the texts of the camp diaries, not only because they are inseparable from personal experience, but also because they can tell us more about the history of the camps and how they actually functioned in comparison with the planned visions.