A Day (or a Lifetime) at Bergen Belsen (July 5)

Bergen Belsen is not a long ride from Celle, the picturesque German city where we stayed overnight.  The road goes through fairy tale like villages next to a a forest that is straight out of Red Riding Hood.  In fact, I was thinking of her, looking for her amongst the trees, when the bus suddenly turned into the entrance to the camp memorial.  From Red Riding Hood straight to the Big Bad Wolf.

I had to catch my breath as we pulled in.  There had been no warning.  I didn't feel prepared.

We went straight to a classroom, and we broken into two groups.  My group focused on Testimony.  Our group leader and guide for the day, Janine, gave us an in-depth chronology of Bergen Belsen, much more than we had in our pre-trip reading.  Much more than I had learned in my years of Holocaust learning and teaching. She is so incredibly knowledgable, and we were eager to learn everything.

Then, pairs of us were given the name of a survivor who had been in Bergen Belsen.  We went through the main exhibition area of the museum and saw pieces of video testimony given by our survivor.  My partner and I learned about the life of Steven Pearl.  We saw two clips with his thought on liberation and two clips about his life in Bergen Belson DP (Displaced Persons) camp.  Steven was 16 or 17 in 1945, and went from the DP camp to England with many other orphans.  He was so resiliant and so grateful.  We were inspired.

Following lunch (which in and of itself is an odd thing at Bergen  Belsen, as are the clean restrooms), we heard about some very special photographs taken by US soldiers who liberated a trainload of people.  The train was one of three that the Nazis were sending east from Bergen Belsen at the end of the war.  One of the members of our group was instrumental in bringing the photos to light, and he is writing a book about it.  (He even has a Rochester connection. He went to Geneseo!)

Then it was time to walk through the site.  Because there had been a terrible typhus epidemic in the camp when the British army arrived, the buildings were burned to the ground.  The memorial site is large (as the camp was large) with memorials and mass graves throughout.  These mass graves are filled with the remains of the many, many bodies found by the British army upon liberation.  The British film footage --horrific images that stay in your mind  - are the ultimate in Holocaust shock value.  I would never show them to my students, though they made it into newsreels worldwide.

The site is very powerful and quite overwhelming.  I left memorial rocks throughout the camp.  (Yes, I left a couple of rocks at Hadamar and at the Holocaust Memorial in Frankfurt.)  At the Wall of Silence, we lit Yartzheit (Memorial) candles, and I was given the honor of saying Kaddish.  I broke down and somehow made it through the prayer and the English translation, though my eyes were blurred with tears.  As I walked away, a chill wind passed over (through) me.  No one else felt it.