Bergen Belsen, April 1945, By Tracey Vale

The frivolity of the Ice Cream Parlour front room was in direct contrast to the broadcast we were hearing from the radio we were huddled around. Barely daring to breathe, we felt the intensity and despair in Richard Dimbleby's words and voice as he revealed to us the detritus of what he had just seen and the realisation of the true scope of Hitler's evil. We felt his horror. We felt his pain. We were awash with disbelief and sorrow. I remember it clearly, to this day, the unmistakeable meaning in the faltering of his voice.

I didn’t know anything about the concentration camps or the plight of the Jews until the Allies entered Germany on their march to Berlin. The radio, which was on all the time, began it’s BBC broadcast and we were drawn towards it and listened to the report in its entirety. We had never heard anything like this before.

As children, we were used to the news that war brought forth. We were used to hearing how many soldiers had been killed or how many sailors lost at sea—and always in the thousands. We would hear such announcements often, and life would go on. It was not like it is today, when we hear of the death of a soldier, know them by name and see their coffin return to their homeland. Not so, in World War Two. It was generalised: “Five thousand British soldiers lost their lives today while defending the…”

But this—this was quite different. Dimbleby’s voice unmistakeably faltered several times, so confronting was his experience. My father was swearing as we listened and was stating his concern that I was hearing this nightmare.

It was April 15, 1945. British Troops had just liberated Bergen Belsen concentration camp, the first to be freed by the British. Although the Red Army had liberated concentration camps in Poland--including the largest, Auschwitz, liberated in January—little was known of the extent, conditions and inhumanity of the atrocities. Bergen Belsen was a work camp, a slave labour camp, where the imprisoned worked in the grounds or in the bullet factory from dawn to dusk. The camp, without running water, became over-run with disease, primarily typhus, tuberculosis and typhoid and it was mainly for this reason that Germany surrendered it to the British.

The camp was severely overcrowded and filthy, with piles of rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving people, including children. Dimbleby had spent two hours in the compound and returned to immediately compile his report.

"Here, over an acre of ground, lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which, except, perhaps, by a convulsive movement, or the last quiver of a sigh from a living skeleton, too weak to move.

"The living lay with their heads against the corpses and, around them, moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people with nothing to do and no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them.

"There was no privacy, nor did men or women ask it any longer. Women stood or squatted stark naked in the dust, trying to wash themselves and to catch the lice on their bodies.

"Babies had been born here—tiny, wizened things that could not live.

"A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child and thrust the tiny mite into his arms and ran off, crying terribly.

"He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.

"This day at Belsen was the most horrible day of my life."

Harrowing as this excerpt is, it is nothing to the full description we heard. It was far beyond my comprehension and, I suspect, that of most people’s, to understand and believe that man could be so inhumane to man. The broadcast left us stunned, sickened, wide-eyed and desolate. We felt helpless in our inability to alleviate the suffering of these people, that it was much too late for so many—the numbers of which we still did not know—and that the few survivors had to live with their losses and with their nightmare of inherent horror, terror and forever-etched, painful imagery.

I couldn’t believe what I had heard. Mum held me for a long time afterward.

Soon after, Dad brought home pictures revealing the awful reality of Jewish persecution. I don’t know how it was that he came by them but I could see they disturbed him. I asked to see them but he wouldn’t allow it, despite my claims of being ready for it.

“But I’m old enough, Dad,” I coerced. I’m not sure if it was the reality of the photographs that I needed or if I subconsciously hoped they would reveal some level of falsehood. That it couldn’t possibly be true that such evil existed in the world I knew.

“Not to see these,” was my father’s quiet but firm reply, as he gathered the pictures together to remove them to a safe place.

Later, the world would embrace the writings of a girl, not much older than myself, who so eloquently put a much-needed human face to the suffering, grief and loss of so many who lost their lives or their families in Nazi concentration camps. That girl was Anne Frank. Her diary, published by her father in Dutch in 1947 and English in 1952, went on to become one of the most read books in the world—second only to the Bible. 

After two years of hiding, Anne and her family were sent in cattle trucks to Auschwitz. Anne was only just 15 which meant she escaped immediate gassing in the gas chambers, the fate of all children on arrival if under this age. Upon arrival, they were branded with a tattoo, shaved, stripped and disinfected. Within months, Anne and her sister were sent to Bergen Belsen where they rapidly became among the emaciated and diseased, both dying of Typhus in March 1945—tragically, just weeks before the camp was liberated.

Much later, I was to visit those haunted halls of Bergen Belsen and witness first-hand the intensive German record-keeping during that time, for there remained, despite the considerable passing of time, rooms full of reams of recorded details from that camp. As well as items of what can only be described as barbaric gore.