Bergen Belsen
-
Anne Frank is one of the most well-known figures of the Holocaust, primarily due to the posthumous publication of her diary, “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, Anne and her family were forced to flee to the Netherlands in 1933 following the rise of Adolf Hitler and…
-
On 3 September 1944, Anne Frank and her family were put on a transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz. It would be the last train to leave Westerbork. The train arrived three days later at Auschwitz. The women selected from this transport, including Anne, Edith, and Margot, were marked with numbers between A-25060–A-25271. Anne Frank’s final…
-
Herta Bothe was a German concentration camp guard during World War II. She was imprisoned for war crimes after the defeat of Nazi Germany and was subsequently released from prison early on 22 December 1951 as an act of leniency by the British government. She was 6ft 3in, which must have been quite intimidating for…
-
The boy who walked through shadowscarried no bitterness in his hands. He had seen the gates of Bergen-Belsen,seen hunger wear a human face,seen silence settle over namesthat should have lived for generations. Yet from those ashes of memory,he chose not vengeance,but witness. He crossed years and countries,telling the story again and again,so that forgetting would…
-
One sign, 2 languages, 5000 bodies. A sign that explains that a number of 5000 bodies are buried there. No individual graves with head stones. No individual places where family members leave small artifacts or flowers. No place to gather around a single grave to say a prayer. Some of those 5000 may have been…
-
This broke my heart. On September 14, 1945, an obituary appeared in the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad, a Dutch Jewish weekly newspaper. It was an obituary for several generations of one family: George Sandelowsky (father and father-in-law), who had died on February 25 as a result of the awful conditions in Bergen Belsen concentration camp. aged…
-
On April 15, 1945, British forces, including units of the British Second Army and the 11th Armoured Division, entered Bergen-Belsen and liberated the remaining prisoners. The sight that greeted the liberators was horrifying. They found tens of thousands of emaciated and diseased prisoners, along with thousands of unburied corpses strewn throughout the camp. The liberation…
-
Tonight, the 98th Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, will take place. Unfortunately, many award shows have increasingly become platforms for politics rather than celebrations of the arts, and I fear the Oscars may be no exception. Yet I want to take a moment to look back at the life of a man who…
-
In the solemn and haunting grounds of Bergen-Belsen, where the echoes of a dark past resonate, exists an unexpected symbol of hope amidst the memories of suffering and loss: a single rose. This rose, though seemingly insignificant in the vastness of the camp’s history, carries within its delicate petals a story of resilience and defiance…
-
Liberation for Bergen-Belsen arrived on 15 April 1945. Major Dick Williams, one of the first British soldiers to enter and liberate the camp said, “It was an evil, filthy place; a hell on Earth.” The British comedian Michael Bentine, who took part in the liberation of the camp, wrote this on his encounter with Bergen-Belsen:“Millions…
History of Sorts 