Bergen Belsen Quotes

The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians.

How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Stories from concentration camps bring nightmares to adults as if they were helpless little children.

There is a picture of me from that day. I saw it once on a PBS documentary about April 15, 1945, when the first British tanks approached Bergen-Belsen.

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.

Se ora penso agli anni di allora, mi colpisce quanto poco ci fosse in realtà da vedere, quante poche immagini illustrassero la vita e la morte nei Lager. Conoscevamo di Auschwitz il portale con la sua scritta, i pancacci di legno a più piani, i mucchi di capelli, occhiali e valigie; di Birkenau l'entrata con la torre, i corpi laterali e il passaggio per i treni; e da Bergen-Belsen ci venivano le montagne di cadaveri trovate e fotografate dagli alleati al momento della liberazione. Conoscevamo alcune testimonianze di detenuti, ma molti libri apparvero subito dopo la guerra e vennero ristampati solo negli anni Ottanta, visto che nel frattempo non rientrarono nei programmi delle case editrici. Ora ci sono così tanti libri e film che il mondo dei Lager è ormai parte dell'immaginario collettivo che completa il mondo reale. La fantasia lo conosce ormai bene, e a partire dalla serie televisiva Olocausto e da film come La scelta di Sophie e soprattutto Schindler's list si muove anche in quel mondo. E non ne prende solo atto, ma integra e abbellisce. Allora la fantasia stentava a muoversi; riteneva che allo sgomento di cui era debitrice al mondo dei Lager non si confacessero le movenze della fantasia. Quelle poche immagini che doveva alle foto degli alleati e alle testimonianze dei detenuti, le ha poi guardate riguardate, fino a farne dei cliché.

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.

And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats—Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling—the whole Germanic sphere—without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.

The Blood player could acquire a Rose item, but only by handing over an atrocity, thus leaving himself with less ammunition and the Rose player with more. If he was a skilful player he could attack the Rose side by means of the atrocities in his possession, loot the human achievement, and transfer it to his side of the board. The player who managed to retain the most human achievements by Time’s Up was the winner. With points off, naturally, for achievements destroyed through his own error and folly and cretinous play. The exchange rates – one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids – were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers – the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.

Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet… Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English,

In 1945 Himmler ordered the camps to be evacuated and charged the commanders with ensuring that not one of the prisoners would fall into Allied hands. On January 17, some 60,000 detainees from Auschwitz were evacuated on foot and sent on a death march to the city of Wodzislaw. Those who could not continue or who fell behind were shot by the SS guards. Some 15,000 died during the march and the survivors were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany where they were liberated by British forces in April 1945.

On these pages, you will read about events that will forever live in my memory, like a movie playing in a loop―events that still haunt my dreams to this day. I could never remain silent after all that happened, after all I have lived to tell. The price of freedom is everlasting vigilance

SS, or Schutzstaffel,

To this day, I still cannot understand how Hitler got away with it.

the Holocaust is still a very current topic that must be remembered forever.

maybe a cowardly

but the world still suffers with so many wars.

believe it happened.

Segregation had

Hitler had

was antisemitism,

during his time in prison,

Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, "There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation-well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister's death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.

Jewish people were the main victims of the Nazi hate

Haas went to the battlefront and would not survive the war,

Everyone who went to other camps

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It seemed to us the devil smiled, then, and seemed to say, 'I am stronger, more personal and more fearful than you thought possible in your little sheltered lives and bourgeois homes. You thought Apollyon was a myth, a faery tale of misty, ancient days when men had superstitious minds and didn't know about modern science, progress and motor-cars. Well, I hope I've shown you otherwise. Now go home and deny me if you can, forget Belsen, hate for a time, take a little bloody revenge and then go back and gradually feel it wasn't true. You'll soon believe that even what you saw was propaganda, when you're not believed at home. Then when again the world is lulled with its own petty round, I'll give you another taste of what I can do when men give me their souls.

Shortly after the war's end, posters went up all over the British and American zones [in Berlin]. Under a photograph of corpses at Bergen-Belsen was printed the sentence THIS IS YOUR FAULT.

the Nazis

war is only good for one thing: to bring about destruction.

The event had shaken the family up, a true disaster, and was forbidden to speak of. It hovered like a bird around the family tree that could not linger on any of its branches.

Anne Frank disappeared one day, too. She and her family went into hiding in early July 1942 and started to live in a secret annex located at her father’s company Opekta Werke, which made ingredients for fruit jam. The word out in the street was that they had run away, but nobody knew for sure.

To this day, I still cannot understand how Hitler got away with it. He transformed men and women into brutal animals without any sense of humanity. That is only one of the many things I still wonder about.

The camp had a main path with barracks on both sides. I looked around and saw some guards and watchtowers. It was the somber, solitary backdrop of a prison. Who was paying for all that? Literally, we were, because camp maintenance and expansion were being financed with properties confiscated from the Jewish people.

Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp but its conditions did not allow for survival either. What do we need to survive? Proper food and good hygiene. Neither was available in Bergen-Belsen or any other concentration camp. Their intention was to wear out people little by little, so they would not have any strength left to live.

Hitler would not have done it all by himself: for this horror to take root, it took millions of blind people who were indoctrinated by the Führer’s ideas—and sometimes these ideas resonated with their own.

What shocked us the most was that the Nazis kept a clear conscience while resorting to brutality, because they truly believed they were doing a good deed in the name of Germany. Society should be alarmed when ideology becomes so deep seated that it supports barbarians with such an abominable purpose.

You must make the most out of good, happy times! We never know what will happen next, and never could we have imagined what was about to happen to us.

The price of freedom is everlasting vigilance. As the Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana once said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Since there was not a calendar we could not tell what day of the month or the week it was. Even though we knew the exact date of our birth, we could not really celebrate it. How could we celebrate someone’s birthday when there were more chances of death instead of life? People passed away and we did not even have time to mourn; we had to move on and try to survive to see another day.

Sometimes we, human beings, tend to believe we have no strength left to endure certain events that are imposed on us. When that happens, there is nothing else we can do but move forward.

Intending to proceed to the subject of human cruelty and the homicidal tendency of the species, Cosima ordered documentaries on Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, the Soviet gulags, the Khmer Rouge, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others.

This nightmare was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a special Hell on Earth created by Nazi Germany.

Stories from concentration camps bring nightmares to adults as if they were helpless little children. And if adults have trouble processing it all, imagine what it is like for little kids.

Unfortunately, there is no delete button for the mind.

Auschwitz was attacked and recovered by the Russian forces on January 27th, 1945. A very short time before that date Buchenwald had been reconquered. Buchenwald was the first concentration camp to be opened and exposed to the public eye.

They were accused in the first place of having committed individually murders and other offences against the camp inmates, and in the second place of having all knowingly participated in a common plan to operate a system of ill-treatment and murder in these camps.

The accused were: Joseph Kramer, Dr. Fritz Klein, Peter Weingartner, Georg Kraft, Franz Hoessler, Juana Borman, Elizabeth Volkenrath, Herta Ehlert, Irma Grese, Ilse Lothe, Hilde Lobauer, Josef Klippel, Oscar Schmitz, Karl Francioh, Fritz Mathes, Otto Calesson, Medislaw Burgraf, Karl Egersdorf, Anchor Pichen, Walter Otto, Franz Stofel, Heinrich Schreirer, Wilhelm Dorr, Eric Barsch, Erich Zoddel, Ignatz Schlomowicz, Vladislav Ostrowski, Antoni Aurdzieg, Ilse Forster, Ida Forster, Klara Opitz, Charlotte Klein, Herta Bothe, Frieda Waiter, Irene Haschke, Gertrud Fiest, Gertrud Sauer, Hilda Lisiewitz, Johanne Roth, Anna Hempel, Hildegard Hahnel, Helena Kopper, Antoni Polanski, Stanislawa Starotska and Ladislaw Gura.

I began to tell myself that if I’d survived Bergen-Belsen, I could survive anything,” said Irene. “I tried to focus not on what I’d lost, but what I had to gain. It was a struggle.” In

Ana murió en el campo de Bergen-Belsen en marzo de 1945. Su Diario nunca morirá.

My mother always told me that she gave birth to me but that Luba gave me life.

As soon as the Rabbi of Bluzhov had finished the ceremony of kindling the lights, Zamietchkowski elbowed his way to the rabbi and said, “Spira, you are a clever and honest person. I can understand your need to light Hanukkah candles in these wretched times. I can even understand the historical note of the second blessing, ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.’ But the fact that you recited the third blessing is beyond me. How could you thank God and say ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season’? How could you say it when hundreds of dead Jewish bodies are literally lying within the shadows of the Hanukkah lights, when thousands of living Jewish skeletons are walking around in camp, and millions more are being massacred? For this you are thankful to God? For this you praise the Lord? This you call ‘keeping us alive’?” “Zamietchkowski, you are a hundred percent right,” answered the rabbi. “When I reached the third blessing, I also hesitated and asked myself, what should I do with this blessing? I turned my head in order to ask the Rabbi of Zaner and other distinguished rabbis who were standing near me, if indeed I might recite the blessing. But just as I was turning my head, I noticed that behind me a throng was standing, a large crowd of living Jews, their faces expressing faith, devotion, and concentration as they were listening to the rite of the kindling of the Hanukkah lights. I said to myself, if God, blessed be He, has such a nation that at times like these, when during the lighting of the Hanukkah lights they see in front of them the heaps of bodies of their beloved fathers, brothers, and sons, and death is looking from every corner, if despite all that, they stand in throngs and with devotion listening to the Hanukkah blessing ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season’; if, indeed, I was blessed to see such a people with so much faith and fervor, then I am under a special obligation to recite the third blessing.”2 Some years after liberation, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, now residing in Brooklyn, New York, received regards from Mr. Zamietchkowski. Zamietchkowski asked the son of the Skabiner Rabbi to tell Israel Spira, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, that the answer he gave him that dark Hanukkah night in Bergen Belsen had stayed with him ever since, and was a constant source of inspiration during hard and troubled times. Based

Even as the war began to go badly and others sought ways to put a better face on their activities, Eichmann adamantly opposed the deals with outsiders, supported by some of his more pragmatic colleagues, in which Jewish lives were to be bartered for desperately needed trucks or clothing. It thus came as a considerable surprise to his colleagues when in late 1944 he finally relented, agreeing to the departure of seventeen hundred Hungarian Jews for Spain. But, hardly for the first time, others had underestimated the man. At the last minute the train was diverted to Bergen-Belsen.

Many thousands of the survivors did not leave the Allied camps; some not for months, some not for years, some not at all. Thousands died from disease and malnourishment even after Hitler’s defeat. At Dachau, at Bergen-Belsen, and at dozens of DP camps like them, they remained jailed inside the walls that Hitler had erected. With the survivors surrounded by the stench of death and squalor, the liberating Allied forces, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would not allow them to leave. The world didn’t know what to do with them.

Since deportation was the most devastating scenario, we lived in constant fear that each one of us and our close relatives would be taken away. You would wake up one day and your cousins were gone; the next day, your grandmother had been deported and disappeared as if she had never existed. Those were traumatic times.