Wasn’t sure whether to write this one and sorry if this is “oversharing”. But I decided to put my thoughts as far as I can order them after our visit yesterday. Was it only yesterday?
As expected, the visit to Bergen-Belsen Memorial was sobering, depressing but also in a strange way a sort of uplifting experience.
To bear witness to man’s inhumanity is something I believe we should all do. But it is also hard to understand how people can do such appalling things to other people.
Just the bare facts tell a grotesque story:
Between 1941 and 1943 20,000 Russian prisoners of war died in the camp, primarily due to starvation and disease as they were so badly provided for.
From 1943 to 1945 over 50,000 of those interned, in what had by then become a concentration camp, died. Also primarily from neglect, disease and malnutrition. Of these at least 30,000 were Jewish.
Almost unbelievably Bergen-Belsen was not designated by the Nazis as an “Extermination Camp”, so it did not have gas chambers and those that died there did so despite the fact they had either been captured as POWs or had been transferred there as “fit for work” (which of course meant forced slave labour).
Two of those who died there were Margot and Anne Frank, ironically transferred from an actual extermination camp at Auschwitz, having been captured as all know from hiding in Amsterdam for 2 years. The grave is a memorial as their actual place of burial, like virtually all those who died, is not known. Nor is the exact date.
I experienced anger, at the fact that that the majority of SS officers and guards walked away from this with no consequence. A few were prosecuted after the war but many received either lenient sentences or were never brought to trial and lived out their lives in freedom, in what was then West Germany.
But the uplifting bit is that the memorial itself is superbly done and is testament (I hope) to our determination to never let this event pass out of consciousness. Having also been to Auschwitz and found it an almost unbearably moving experience, I found this much the same. The bare facts in the excellent memorial exhibition tell the story but for me the real feeling is found sitting in what was the grounds of the original camp, now a cemetery mainly for mass graves of unknown people, shedding a tear and simply acknowledging the luck I have to be born where, to whom and when I was. We could all do with visiting a place like this to remind ourselves of what men (and it is nearly always men) are cruelly capable of. This is just one of the many mass graves.
I’ve quoted him before but I will do so again.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santayana
I know I have said this before but I travel to educate myself as well as to see the world. I will get back to the travelogue tomorrow or the next day but for now, without I hope sounding too pretentious, and for what little it achieves, I dedicate this to the thousands of souls who lost their lives in Bergen-Belsen.
May they rest in peace.
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