Four of our Ambassadors, Hadia, Mark, Ben and Abbie, reflect on their experiences of our Belsen 75 project and their visit to Bergen-Belsen for the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
Hadia
I am immensely grateful for the educational experience I gained from visiting Bergen-Belsen. It offered a human perspective of this debasing tragedy. My prior focal understanding of the holocaust has been of mass barbarism and neglect. In the shroud of gruelling statistics, individual human lives were lost; friends, siblings, parents, and loved ones. I remember the bleakness of walking toward the gate entrance amidst the freezing weather. I longed to bask in the warmth of the coach. I realised that I had the opportunity, the ability to act upon that desire; this liberty deprived from the victims.
I created a video for my project, inspired by Richard Dimbleby’s BBC report on the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. I took excerpts from his report and introduced the voices of the survivors who lived the experience, humanising the facts. Solely remembering the atrocities of the Nazis propel their ideology of dehumanisation. By acknowledging the victims’ lives, we pay respect to those stripped of it.
"I remember the bleakness of walking toward the gate entrance amidst the freezing weather. I longed to bask in the warmth of the coach. I realised that I had the opportunity, the ability to act upon that desire; this liberty deprived from the victims."
Mark
Every year, for the last seventy-six years, people across the world remember their experience at the concentration camp Bergen Belsen. And every year, that number of people gets smaller. As people grow old, and survivors of the camp pass on, we lose the most important connection to the past: a human one.
For that reason, I want to reflect on how we, as a society, can best remember the camp, the holocaust, and commemorate the ending and liberation of such a foul place moving forward. In February of 2020, I joined the Holocaust Educational Trust on a visit to the site, wishing to learn more about the people who suffered there. Two things struck me: the small number of gravestones – as if only a handful of individuals had died in Belsen, whilst the rest were forgotten in mass graves, marked only by a mound and a number. The other thing, surprisingly, was the list of untried perpetrators inside the museum. Those who worked at the camp, oversaw its creation and running, and were never punished for it.
British journalist Richard Dimbleby, who visited the camp shortly after it was liberated, described the horror of Belsen as “the gradual breakdown of civilisation that happens when human beings are herded like animals behind barbed wire.”, but I think this fails to acknowledge the truth. The most horrifying part of Belsen, and the Holocaust as a whole, is not that it is the breakdown of civilization, but that it is civilization left unchecked. What people do when no-one else stops them.
It would be easy, too easy, I think, to pause for a minute every year, on the 15th of April, and think “Thank God we liberated the camp from the monsters of the Nazi regime”, but that would miss the vital lesson of all: that we are the monsters. The most horrible part of Belsen comes when you realise, when you truly understand, that both the victims inside, and those outside, were people. The guards, the villagers next to Belsen who turned a blind eye, the average citizen who did nothing, were all normal people.
It is human nature to want to be the hero. To say, “I would’ve stopped that robbery” or “I would’ve spoken up”, but the sad truth is, this unlikely. It is too easy to miss the brutal lesson of all when commemorating Belsen, and remembering the Holocaust: that it is difficult to be the one that stood up.
So, how do I try to commemorate the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. I find that the day itself is best reserved for remembering the victims – for reflecting on those that suffered. Those that survived, and those that didn’t. But beyond that, whenever there is some current political issue – whether it be the Uighur genocide in China, the American border crisis, or the disturbing new banning of the Hijab in France, I try to remember Bergen-Belsen.
That once, it was just a banning of Jewish businesses, the wearing of stars, the rise of a small, mostly unliked extremist party. And then, a few years down the line, after no-one said anything, it was the most horrifying humanitarian crisis the world had ever seen.
"It is too easy to miss the brutal lesson of all when commemorating Belsen, and remembering the Holocaust: that it is difficult to be the one that stood up."
Ben
I’m Ben, I’m from West Sussex and I’ve been an H.E.T Ambassador since I took part in Belsen75 in 2020. It was an amazing honour to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial with many other young people and teachers from different colleges. Before the visit, I took the opportunity to speak family members and researched my own German-Jewish history. Listening to Holocaust survivor Renee Salt BEM and travelling to Bergen-Belsen helped to put everything I have learnt in history lessons into context. Hearing survivor testimony and asking questions, as well as visiting sites of genocide, are important but hugely challenging things to do. The Trust provided amazing support throughout, always aiming to educate rather than shock or impose ideas on people.
After my visit to Bergen-Belsen, I completed my Legacy Project. The opportunity for ambassadors to spread the knowledge, experiences and testimony that they have gained to a wider audience is what makes H.E.T’s programmes so impactful. For my project, I created an educational video for my A-level history class, applying my new knowledge of Bergen-Belsen to our history coursework on the Holocaust. This helped me to see how important first-hand survivor testimony can be for learning about the wider Holocaust. Every anniversary we get further away from the atrocities committed against the Jews, so organising and engaging with education and memorials is a vital way to ensure the experiences of survivors, who number less each year, are not forgotten. I also recently took part in H.E.T’s Understanding Antisemitism course, which demonstrated just how prevalent anti-Jewish hate still is in modern society. When we commemorate the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, we not only remember the thousands of Jews who died at the camp and the 60,000 who were liberated on the 15th April 1945, we also join together against Antisemitism past and present.
"Every anniversary we get further away from the atrocities committed against the Jews, so organising and engaging with education and memorials is a vital way to ensure the experiences of survivors, who number less each year, are not forgotten."
Abbie
Unlike other camps such as Auschwitz, little remains of Bergen-Belsen. In some ways, it was the lack of physical structures that made Belsen all the more harrowing when I visited; with only a few pictures of what had once stood on the site, so much is left to the imagination.
Having visited Auschwitz a few years before, I found Belsen a very different experience. In particular, the exhibition was striking. While it’s records of life in the camp were hard-hitting, there was the lighter tone, life in Belsen post-liberation. Liberation at Belsen was not the immediate blaze of freedom and life that we may like to think it was but looking at the displays I found a sense of hope. Artefacts like a hand-sewn dress and pictures of people smiling in the DP camp made me think just how remarkable, ordinary, and above all human, the victims and survivors of Belsen were, making the conditions and neglect they were subject to more unbelievable and difficult to understand.
However, the hardest point of the trip for me, was seeing the mass graves. While they were created by the British after liberation, the reality of the conditions and neglect at Belsen really hit me. The most heart-breaking thing of all was the fact that no-one knows who lies in each grave. Even though there are plaques and headstones on the site, they are merely symbolic and only represent a handful of the people who died at Bergen Belsen. All of the victims with no surviving family or friends, to me is the even greater tragedy, as they lose their individuality again, becoming just another number carved into the stone. Faced with the reality of Belsen, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so ineffectual.
These were the main things I took away from the trip, and something I and my partner on the trip tried to emphasise in our Legacy Project. Because of the pandemic we adapted our original plans into an article that was featured in our school magazine and published again on the school website as part of our schools Holocaust Memorial Day efforts. In the article we briefly explained the unique history of Belsen and outlined our experience, but what we mainly focused on, was re-humanisation.
At one point on the trip we saw a grave marked with 800, roughly the same number of people in our school at the time. Nobody can comprehend 6 million people, but everyone at our school can picture 800. If they can picture 800 staff and students who all have their own families, friends and lives, we could get them to remember that the number carved in stone wasn’t just that; it was 800 innocent people, who all had their own stories to tell, some of which we will never know.
In 2019 we were lucky enough to have survivor Mala Tribich, tell her story to our school, and I was privileged enough to hear her talk again as part of the Belsen 75 Project. It is one that will always stick with me. As part of our article, we retold Mala’s story. It’s hard to empathise with large numbers and figures, but by telling one person’s story, we can remind people that victims of the Holocaust were ordinary individuals, simply persecuted for being who they were. Those who were lucky enough to survive after the liberation of Belsen were able to regain the individualism, identities and humanity they were stripped of, but many didn’t live to see liberation. And, out of those who did, approximately 13,000 still lost their lives.
While from a British perspective remembering the liberation of Belsen is significant, for me, its commemoration is part of a much wider message that we should take from the Holocaust. Respect everyone and their basic human rights, whether we can understand people or not, because acceptance is key. This can never happen again.
"All of the victims with no surviving family or friends, to me is the even greater tragedy, as they lose their individuality again, becoming just another number carved into the stone."