‘BELSEN LIBERATION ANNIVERSARY MARKED BY CEREMONIES’
Extract from UNRRA European Regional Office, 4 May 1946
The anniversary of the liberation of Belsen was recently marked by special ceremonies at the barracks where today 18 000 displaced persons are living under the care of UNRRA. April 15 1945 saw British mobile columns roll up to the walls of the notorious concentration camp, and set free the living remains of once healthy human beings. Today the old camp is levelled to the ground and completely ploughed under; the old buildings have been replaced by mass graves and the site is now usually deserted. The comfortable barracks which today house the displaced persons are some distance away. This assembly centre was first organised by British Army authorities shortly after the liberation of the concentration camp; the UNRRA assumed responsibility for the centre’s administration late in February.
The Poles in their new camp, who number almost 9000, many of whom are awaiting repatriation, observed the occasion with a quiet church service followed by festivities. But for the 9000 members of the Jewish camp, the event, falling as it did on the eve of the traditional Passover festival, was a much more sombre one. In a special ceremony attended by visiting British Army and Military Government officers and personnel from UNRAA, and some half dozen cooperating volunteers and agencies, the Jewish DPs unveiled a monument commemorating the 30 000 Jews who had been slaughtered at Belsen. Standing on the site of the old camp, the granite and marble stone base [of the monument bore an] inscription, chiselled in English and Hebrew, [which read] ‘Israel and the world shall remember 30 000 Jews exterminated in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, at the hand of the murderous Nazis. Earth conceal not the blood shed on the first anniversary of liberation April 15.’ Speaking in English after the unveiling, one of the camp leaders said they stood on the spot that was a stigma for all Germany. Declaring that many of his people could have been saved had the statesmen of the world proved more human and less compromising during the pre-war years, he added, ‘Every concession resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Now we stand here and bow our heads in memory of six million dead.’
Earlier a parade stretching several miles in length had taken the thousands of Jews from their own camps to the scene of the ceremony. Almost all of them between the ages of fifteen and thirty—five, they marched now as a healthy-looking group, holding aloft their banners and flags.
Arriving at the site of the memorial, the parade disbanded and the gathering unveiled the monument, with traditional Jewish commemoration services. The stone itself was used as a pulpit and the assembled Jewish displaced persons prayed fervently.
On all sides of the thousands who witnessed yesterday’s ceremony lay the massed graves, marked and levelled out like innocuous garden plots. Pieces of charred clothing could still be found, as could some human bones, and the chimney of the incinerator still stood ominously in the distant corner of the field.
Present were Colonel Agnew of the British Red Cross Society, Brigadier Stawell, UNRRA Deputy Chief of Operations in Germany, and Major-General Fanshawe, Deputy Director of UNRRA in the British Zone.
Several hundred of the 18 000 displaced persons at the nearby UNRRA assembly centre had been original inmates of the same concentration camp. The majority, however, had come from the entire countryside, and in many cases been in other concentration camps in Germany. The 9000 Jews contributed almost the entire number of Jewish DPs in the British Zone of Germany.
Doherty Collection, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, Israel, 0—70/36, volume 3, pp. 365-6.