Survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and their families have gathered at the site in northern Germany to officially commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by British troops.
Representatives of victims’ associations and the military took part in the ceremony along with the British deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner.
During the second world war, Soviet prisoners of war and later Jewish prisoners were held at the camp under extremely hostile conditions.
According to the foundation responsible for the upkeep of the camp as a memorial site, about 20,000 prisoners of war and at least 52,000 concentration camp prisoners died there, including Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist, and her sister, Margot.
Debbie Morag, who was born in Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons’ camp in 1948, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, and now lives in Israel, told the participants: “My father had the number 126,715 on his arm, a symbol not only of brutality, but of perseverance.
“My mother carried her memories silently, yet they filled our home. I often say that I absorbed the Holocaust with my mother’s milk – that’s how deeply it is connected to me.”
Accompanying about 180 British Jews, including survivors and their relatives, the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, read a psalm.
Lola Hassid Angel, 88, from Greece, described the camp in an interview with the Guardian earlier this month as “an abomination that historians will one day refer to as a dark page but which we, as the last survivors, are duty-bound to describe”.
At the ceremony, another survivor, 100-year-old Albrecht Weinberg, from Germany, recalled being taken half-dead by train from Auschwitz to Belsen. “I found myself lying amid the dead and the living on a wagon in Bergen-Belsen. Our bodies were tipped out. Two days later, a tank drove in. I thought now I’ll finally be freed by death, but it was British soldiers coming to liberate us. They later told me I’d weighed 29kg [4st 8lb].”
At the time in April 1945, the Guardian reported how a senior medical officer with the British army had witnessed thousands of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases on entering the camp, calling it “the most horrible, frightful place” he had ever seen.
“There was a pile – 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide, and 4ft high – of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the kerbstones as back rests,” the correspondent David Woodward wrote.
Accounts from the camp by soldiers and journalists were spread around the world and proved more shocking in many ways than other discoveries of death camps to the east, such as Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, as they had either been demolished to hide evidence of the crimes committed there, or emptied of their inmates, who, like Weinberg, were sent on death marches.
At Belsen, the camp construction and the evidence of what had taken place there remained intact. Some of the Nazi soldiers involved in the death machine were still on site.
The sheer number of prisoners and the conditions at the camp led to mass outbreaks of dysentery, typhus and malnutrition, leading to about 500 deaths a day, most during the final weeks of the war. A documented 14,000 survivors died by the end of June 1945, many of whose digestive systems had been unable to cope with the food they were given after the liberation of the camp.
