“Since that day, Iʼve felt like a newborn”

In this sense 22-year-old Irmgard was lucky:

“Now I’m doing well again. I’ve not been left with any damage to my health and I’ve already gained back over 10 kg. Dear Father makes a great effort to find food and take good care of me.

Sadly I don’t have any hope of seeing our dear Bruno again, after what I personally saw of what they did with people.”

Indeed, Irmgard and Walter’s brother Bruno was murdered by the Nazis in Sobibor in 1943. The fact that many didn’t survive even after liberation is also a reason why many survivors of 1945 called themselves “the surviving remnant.” While many of them were stranded in Germany and wanted desperately to leave the country as soon as possible, Irmgard Brill wrote her letter from France. On the contrary, she regretted that she couldn’t move back to the German city of her birth:

“Unfortunately after the liberation I couldn’t return to Herzebrock or Rheda, because the French consider me a Frenchwoman. Since we took the train from Münster, I got to see the cemetery where our dear mother [is buried] as well as our house.

Dear Father inquired whether he could return to Germany. As Germans, there’s nothing yet to be done. For the time being, we have to stay here, or I’ll have to look into it myself because my previous bosses have invited me to Paris to recover there, and maybe from there I can do something for dear Father.”

Because the JMB does not have any other documents about Irmgard Brill in its collection to help us interpret this statement, we can only assume that she had good contacts in France and felt more comfortable there than in postwar Germany. Indeed, she died in Paris in 2008. Before she discusses her current situation in France, however, Irmgard first gives a thorough but economical description of her experiences from her detention in February 1944 to her liberation:

“They detained me on Sunday morning, the 6th of Feb. 44 at 8:30 a.m. when I was with my boss. From there they took me in a car to Father's apartment to take him too, but thank God he had a second apartment, and so I could lead them to the one he wasn’t in. From there they brought me to Grenoble where I joined 100 or 120 other detainees.

After we were there for a day, they brought us to the Drancy internment camp. I was there for a month, & from there I was brought with a transport of 1,500 people (a transport like this went about every 8–14 days) to Auschwitz in Upper Silesia, between Katowice & Krakow.

My fate was basically decided upon arrival. To live or die, because when you get out of the cattle car you’re selected & it all depends on luck: out of all of us 1,500 men, women + children, 37 young women + 60 young men were sent into the camp, all of the others into the gas chamber & then the crematorium.”

In fact, Irmgard Brill had arrived in Auschwitz on 10 March 1944 with transport number 69. According to the existing body of research, there were 1501 people on this train, 812 men and 689 women. After the “selection,” 110 men and around 80 women were admitted into the camp – including Irmgard Brill. The other deportees were murdered shortly after their arrival. When Irmgard Brill lists numbers in her letter, we need to keep in mind that these are rough estimates from memory – in addition to the possibility of errors introduced in the transcript. Unlike us today, in May 1945 she was unable to consult other sources and the scholarly literature that would allow her to reconcile her memories with documented statistics. At any rate, her intention here is to describe in general terms the scope of what happened and, most of all, explain how the death camp’s machinery functioned.

It was part of the strategy of annihilation to systematically deceive the victims about their fate, dragging them into the machinery of murder. But for the letter writer, the gas chamber seemed even worse for those who knew what awaited them. She continues:

“They were lucky, they didn’t know where they were going, whereas the weak + sick ones who are picked out from the camp know about everything & stay another 3 days in another barracks after being picked out. That is the worst.”

Next she mainly describes the many coincidences, physical advantages, useful knowledge, personal actions, and meetings with helpful people (including among the perpetrators) that made it possible for her to survive, though she didn’t believe in it until the moment of her liberation:

“In this sense, I personally can’t complain because I didn’t take too many blows, since dear Father told me in advance how you have to behave. Always just keep your eyes open.

Second I didn’t suffer too much from the cold because, thank God, none of my limbs got frostbite Third the fieldwork didn’t make much of a difference to me because I’d often helped father to cultivate the land.

The first month, the month of March until April 10 44 we were in quarantine against typhus. I laid together with several people sick with typhus (that is, we were six to a pallet) and thank God I didn’t catch it. Most people had horrible diarrhea & imagine that we could only use a bucket 2 or 3 times per day, and during that month we could only shower 2x instead of bathing. A shower means quickly undress, under the shower head, quickly dress. No soap, no towel, just 2 minutes of lukewarm water.

After the quarantine I went to the potato bunker. This was one of the best work crews for the initial time because you could get hold of potatoes. Then for 2 months I cut turnips and later until early July I dug + stored potatoes. Then I stopped working because I got sick. For 24 hrs. I had a very high fever & spent Saturday to Tuesday in the sick bay.

Do you recall Walter Heller from Rheda? He was my Oberschaarführer [SS squad leader]. Whenever he had a moment when he could say 2 words to me unnoticed, he’d say to me you still look good, or you look a lot like your mother. He asked what Father + you all were doing + said to me a few days before they evacuated us that he’d like to go home with me + apologized that he could give + do good. Now and again he took great pains to give me 3 slices of bread. Then the day before we were liberated, between Dellbrück and Kaunitz he gave me a big bowl of pea soup + then I didn’t see him again.”

When the work camp in Lippstadt had to be evacuated due to approaching American troops, Irmgard was marched on foot with the remaining workers toward the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. As she writes at the beginning of the letter, the group was liberated by the Americans on 1 April 1945 near Kaunitz, Germany.

Arriving at the present in her letter, she adds:

“I didn’t tell you that my head was shaved + I’m tattooed. I have the number 75911 + a triangle underneath it that means Jew on my arm now.”

The male prisoners who were deported to Auschwitz together with Irmgard Brill were assigned the numbers 174,904 to 175,013 upon their registration. The numbers the women were assigned are unknown to researches. At Auschwitz, the numbers were tattooed onto the prisoner’s forearms, sometimes along with a triangle symbol. However, unlike the triangles sewn onto uniforms at other concentration camps, these tattoos were not color-coded. In other words, there was no yellow triangle in the tattoo to designate a person as Jewish.