Berlin schoolchildren on the former main street of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (c) Mikhail KaluzhskyEarly last Tuesday morning I travelled to Bergen-Belsen with a group of Berlin schoolchildren, to visit the memorial centre on the site of the former concentration camp. We were there to meet Jovan Reisz, a Jew from northern Serbia who spent several months in the “Hungarian camp” [the camp was split into a number of sections for different national groups – ed.] between autumn 1944 and April 1945, when the camp was liberated by British forces. He was 11 years old, and most of his family had perished in Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps.
Bergen-Belson was not an extermination camp. Initially it held French and Belgian, and later Soviet and Italian prisoners of war, and later Jews from the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland and citizens of neutral countries. But its death rate, especially towards the end of the war, was horrendous, mostly a result of starvation or a typhoid epidemic: Anne Frank was a typhoid victim. When the British troops liberated the camp, they demolished it to avoid any further spread of the epidemic. The memorial centre consists of clearings in the forest where foundations of the camp barracks have been preserved, with information panels on its history.
It was raining, and Jovan Reisz, standing on a muddy track, showed us the birches and oaks that have grown on the site of the barracks where he spent several months, 70 years ago: “This is where we lived. And the kitchen was over there. When we were liberated, the streets in the camp were strewn with bodies”.
