One day as I was browsing through Netflix, I decided to watch the Anne Frank story. We've become interested in learning more about WWII since moving here because so many of the things we see had been destroyed and then rebuilt after the war. We have also been able to visit many important sites from the war. I knew we would be going to see the Secret Annex hideout in Amsterdam when my parents come in May. I have been there before when I came to Europe for study abroad ten years ago (wow, has it really been that long?) Anyway, I watched it and cried, but I noticed that at the end it mentioned that she died at the Bergen-Belson Concentration camp. I was curious where that was. So I Googled it, and discovered it was in our state Lower Saxony and only about an hour away from where we live. I called Tom at work to tell him and we decided to drive up to see it.
Bergen-Belson Camp is just north of the town of Celle, in Lower Saxony. It began as a POW camp in 1940 for soldiers from Belgium and France . But in 1941, it ended up holding mostly Soviet Prisoners. About 20,000 soviets were sent there after "Operation Barbarossa." There conditions were absolutely horrible. We saw in the memorial that there were no buildings for them and so the soldiers had to live in open, sod huts they dug in the ground themselves. Within a year, about 18,000 men died of exposure, hunger, and typhus fever. In the memorial, I remember reading that they were so hungry they dug up bugs and the roots of all the plants in the area that soon it was a barren wasteland. They stripped all the bark off the trees, and every needle of the trees. It made me sick to think about how horrible they were treated. Eventually they did build barracks, but they were pretty basic.
In 1943, the part of the camp was turned into a hospital for POWs. The remainder of the camp was separated and taken over by the SS to house political prisoners and Jews, most of them Dutch, intended for shipment to camps overseas in exchange for German civilians who were being held outside of Germany. These prisoners were usually treated better than at other camps since they were being used hostages for exchange for German civilians. But in late 1943, the POW camp was closed and the entire facility become the Bergen-Belson Concentration camp.
That is is when the camp conditions deteriorated and prisoners really began to suffer. There was overcrowding and lack of food. I learned in the memorial that in 1944, there were so many women in the camp that there was no room for them. This would have been about the time that Anne and Margot Frank were living at the Bergen-Belson camp. (They were sent to the camp in August of 1944 and died in April 1945.) The women had to sleep in tents and in November there was a terrible snowstorm that collapsed and killed many women.
There were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, since most of the mass executions took place in the camps further east. But in addition to the 50,000 Russian and other POWs who died at the camp early in the war, it is estimated that 50,000 Jews, Czechs, Poles, anti-Nazi and gypsies died in the camp from disease or starvation. The average life expectancy of an inmate was only nine months. Sadly, both Margot and Anne Frank died of typhus in March 1945 only a few weeks before the camp was liberated.
There was a crematorium at the camp, but most of the bodies were buried in mass graves. As we walked around the grounds, there are no barracks or buildings left. There are only mounds and a stone memorial indicating it as a mass grave. It was hard to comprehend how many people had died there until we saw all of the mass graves. It was so sad to see how many there were. Each was labeled with how many bodies were buried there anywhere from 1,000 bodies to 5,000 in one grave. Family members of specific people ,who died at the camp, have put up individual grave markers in a field to honor them. We found the grave stone in memory of Anne and Margot Frank. It was covered with pebbles to show respect and remembrance.
The camp was liberated by British and Canadian soldiers on April 15, 1945. After the war, the camp was used as a "Displaced Person" camp until 1950. There is still a British Army base right next to the Bergen-Belson grounds.
This was a very humbling and sad place. We left there wondering how such a horrible place could have existed...and that it was only one camp of many during the war. It made us wonder how could humanity treat one another so badly? It will definitely be a place we always remember.
Luckily Ainsley had no idea what was going on. In the memorial, we shielded her from most of it through distraction. She was bored and so wouldn't look at the pictures which was good, because they were really graphic. But they had tv screens throughout the memorial where you could listen to audio headphones of real prisoners telling their accounts of the camp. It was mostly in foreign languages, with subtitles, so we would have her put on the headphones and listen to them. They also had glass cases in the floor of artifacts and objects excavated from the remains of the camp. She would walk from each one and peer down in them. This shielded her from most of it. When we got outside, she was happy to run around. It was raining, but that didn't slow her down. She kept running back and forth and playing joyfully. I admit I felt guilty and embarrassed inside that I had such a happy child in such a somber place. But she is just a child, she doesn't need to know what really went on in there and we never told her. There weren't many visitors that day, so we didn't have to worry about her offending anyone.
There are no buildings left at the camp, so this is a model of what the camp looked like. The buildings on the top left were where the main entrance was. It was the administration buildings, soldiers barracks, hosipital, and prisoners barracks who were being used for as hostage exchanges. On the bottom left is where the POW camp was as well as the trail from the railroad ramp where they were unloaded from trains from all over Europe. All the buildings on the right side were used as the concentration camp barracks.
This was the crematorium
Ainsley sitting in the memorial looking out at the grounds of the camp
Each of the dark mounds are mass graves. The stone on the outside indicated how many people were buried there.
This particular grave held 1,000 people. But we saw them as large as 5,000
Here is Margot and Anne Frank's headstone. They do not know where they were really buried. In the background you can see the obelisk memorial to all those who died at Bergen-Belson.
After we went to Bergen-Belson, we drove up to Bremen. Once we got to our hotel, we walked over to the Marktplatz. We passed a huge windmill on the way. The Marktplatz was a beautiful main square with several gabled houses. The Rathaus, or Town Hall was gorgeous. It has a Renaissance facade that was built in 1405. In front of the Rathaus is a statue of Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne and the town's protector. It was built in 1404 and symbolizes the town's independence. There is a large church next to the Rathaus that was built in the 11th century. We happened to be there right when the carillon of bells started playing. It was beautiful. But the most popular feature of the Marktplatz was the small statue of the "Bremen Town Musicians" from Grimm's Fairy tales. It is a statue of a donkey, dog, cat, and rooster all standing on top of each other like they did to defeat the robbers in the fairytale. Supposedly if you make a wish as you rub the statue it will come true.
