Bergen Belsen Survivor Quotes

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

SS, or Schutzstaffel,

maybe a cowardly

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

Everyone who went to other camps

Jewish people were the main victims of the Nazi hate

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

Segregation had

Hitler had

but the world still suffers with so many wars.

believe it happened.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

was antisemitism,

during his time in prison,

the Nazis

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.

Society should be alarmed when ideology becomes so deep seated that it supports barbarians with such an abominable purpose.

The Nazi State came to power with a radical discourse and attitude from the very beginning. It was clearly built to put an end to diversity and control people through a dangerous ideology. Those acts of horror that the Nazis were implementing had been largely accepted and supported by the vast majority of the German population, all for the sake of economic growth.