PICTURES TO BE ADDED
We’re on the autobahn cruising at 140km/hour and we’re in the slow lane! There are three lanes each way and the inside lane is for the fastest, slowest use the outside lanes. At 140k/h we are frequently overtaken at such speed that it rocks the car. You know that rocking effect when you pass an on-coming car at speed, except in this case we’re being overtaken and not passed. The speeds are terrifying!
Travelling the autobahn can be beautiful. In places you frequently travel through avenues of trees of many types, which at this time of the year are autumning in a wide variety of colours. And these colours are coordinated so beautifully as if an artist had been at work. It’s mesmerising for the passenger, hopefully not so for the driver!
We are on our way to experience the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. During WW2 Bergen-Belsen started as a POW (prisoner of war) camp or Starlag for Russian prisoners. The SS moved in converting half of the area to a concentration camp for Jews, opponents of the Nazi regime, homosexuals and law breakers. By the time the allied forces liberated this camp just prior to the end of the war, 50000 Russian prisoners had died from torture, disease, starvation and murder. Over 30000 Jews lost their lives here, many murdered. There weren’t any gas chambers here but those in charge still found ways to mass exterminate.
The whole area is now a memorial and at the heart of this memorial is an impressive building that is the information and exhibition centre. The design of this Centre is very fitting for here I think. It’s architecture is brutal and simple. It’s a long thin rectangular structure of cement and glass. It looks like a large above-ground bunker from the outside and within. There is no decoration, ornation or colour to distract from its primary function and that is to educate the visitor to the black past of this place. Within the open-plan exhibition room which takes up two thirds of the building, the details of this place’s history is displayed beautifully on large back-lit perspex wall-panels. Much of the information is personalised with actual photos and camp records of many inturns. Ilya Novikov was a handsome young man interned here to be later transferred to another camp and murdered. There are thousands of these stories. And the tragic treatment of women and children simply amplify the agony splattered all over the informational walls here.
I simply cannot imagine the horrors these people lived with to try and survive. They would have been constantly surrounded by fear and death. And the cruel mind games – a transfer to another camp would give hope but then to get there and be murdered anyway.
A film is on show. It was shot by the allied forces as they discover the place. The footage shows the mass disposing of emancipated corpses and is literally sickening. Neither of us can watch it. Andreas walks out before I do. Sadly liberation did not mean instant recovery for the prisoners. Many died, to sick and damaged to survive.
Outside of this centre it is possible to walk the grounds and get a sense of where everything lay. There is a moving cemetery for the Russian POWs buried here. Monuments mark the area and mass graves are identified and memorialised. It’s just impossible for us to get our heads around this history. Bergen-Belsen was one of Germany’s main concentration camps for a time. It then became a transfer station where interns were relocated to other camps, never to be heard of again.
The fact that this camp and others have their torturous dehumanising past so respectfully memorialised is such a good thing. It suggests to me the German people’s admit to their past and are doing everything in their power to ensure this doesn’t happen again. There are many people here today on this Monday and there are bus-loads of school children going through the facilities. This tragic era will never be forgotten or diluted for as long as these memorials survive.
angusmccoll 
angus,
sounds sickening and tormenting. when i visited S21 in Cambodia I have since been scared by the violence and torture that occurred in a school, that was turned into a prison. You can walk the cells and rooms where people were imprisoned and tortured. I couldnt and still cant come to any sense of how one human can inflict such barbarity on another…we are the lowlife of the animal world when it comes to how we treat our fellow humans.
my favourite quote
Only until all of mankind lives in harmony with nature can we truly decree ourselves to be an intelligent species
Yes it does make you wonder how far we have advanced. You would like to think that our potential for such cruelty on a mass scale was well in the past. Then Rwanda happened.