Ap(photo credit: Renee Ghert-Zand/Times of Israel) The displaced persons camp Grave of an’unknown deceased’ at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp cemetery. It is striking that even among those who received a proper burial, so few were remembered with a permanent marker.

For them, the Holocaust did not end with the arrival of the Allies. A number of them state nothing more than “Here lies an unknown deceased,” in German.Īlmost 14,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen in the first few months after liberation. Four and a half thousand people - Jews and Christians - are buried here, but there are relatively few gravestones. There is another cemetery nearby, one that was established after liberation. (In more recent years a documentation center and museum have been added by the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, which manages the site.) (photo credit: Courtesy of Jean Bloch Rosensaft)īergen-Belsen is in effect the largest Jewish cemetery in Western Europe, but there are no grave markers or monuments save for a small number of symbolic ones, placed in recent years by family members or memorial foundations to supplement a number of official monuments erected on the site in the late 1940s and early ’50s. The concentration camp - the only one the Nazis built exclusively for Jews - was designed to hold no more than 7,000 inmates, but by liberation it imprisoned 50,000, thousands of whom were provided no shelter, food or water in the final months. In 1943 it also became an “exchange camp” for Jewish prisoners who could be held as hostages to be traded for German prisoners overseas. That was when the Soviets advanced across Poland, and the Germans marched and transported prisoners from death camps in the east to concentration and prison camps in territory still under their control.īergen-Belsen was originally a prisoner of war camp. That’s why there is nothing left of this place, where more than 70,000 people perished between 19, other than vast open fields and the surrounding forest - and, of course, the huge mounds covering those who died of disease or starvation as the camp’s population ballooned tremendously beyond capacity. The barracks are gone because the British immediately burned down every single structure in the typhus- and typhoid-infested camp in an effort to prevent the further spread of disease.

I suspect, however, that I may be listening more to the ghostly sounds that someone with me here and who has visited this site many times, says she hears, as the wind blows through the 70-year-old trees that stand exactly where the camp’s barracks used to be. Yet, before I will have had time to fully process it, I will walk by those mass graves again on Sunday, as I make my way to the official ceremony marking the 70 th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.ĭignitaries like German President Joachim Gauck, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, and British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis will speak. It was a disturbing feeling, a surreal experience I have not yet fully grasped. Instead, there are grassy berms, covering the massive pits into which more than 10,000 emaciated corpses were packed, with bulldozers, after British forces liberated the concentration camp on April 15, 1945.įrom a young age, I have seen film footage of those bulldozed bodies, but the other day I actually walked among those berms. BERGEN-BELSEN, Germany - There are no gas chambers or crematoria to see at Bergen-Belsen.

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