I saw Bergen-Belsen through the eyes of a 94-year-old survivor returning for the first time
Twenty-five years ago, as I left Auschwitz, I was certain I would never set foot in a concentration camp again. As the granddaughter of a survivor, I felt a duty to witness and to honour – but I knew that what I saw during those few days in Poland would remain etched in my memory forever. And I was right. I remember so clearly stepping into those cramped barracks, seeing the blue residue of Zyklon B on the gas chamber walls, walking the railway tracks that had carried thousands of Jews on a catastrophic one-way journey. Certain memories time cannot erode.
Yet fast forward a few decades, and I find myself visiting a concentration camp again – Bergen-Belsen. This time, my motivation is not to see, but to hear – from survivors themselves. The opportunity to visit the camps alongside those who lived through those dark chapters of history is becoming ever more rare. But to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation by British troops – and ahead of VE Day – survivors (as well as dignitaries including Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis) have gathered at the former concentration camp.
Among them are Bergen-Belsen survivors Mala Tribich and Susan Pollack, both gravely ill with malnutrition and typhus when they were liberated in April 1945. Susan, 14 at the time, has never returned to Bergen-Belsen – until today.
She still remembers that moment of liberation in painful detail. 'I was starving, and I wasn't able to walk any more,' she tells me, her eyes watery with age and memory.
'So I crawled out [of the barracks]. I crawled out to die. There were so many rotting bodies to be seen everywhere.' Her tone softens: 'Then a pair of gentle hands lifted me up. And who was that? A British soldier.' Does she remember what went through her mind at that moment? 'It was a miracle,' she says.
At 94, she is still a walking miracle. When I first meet her, it is 6am and she is striding through Stansted Airport clutching a stick that seems to be struggling to keep up with her. She's resplendent, even at such an ungodly hour, in a pretty pink pullover and matching lipstick. We are flying to Hanover and then driving the hour-long journey to Bergen-Belsen as part of the UK delegation organised by Ajex (the Jewish Military Association).
Eighty years ago, when the British freed the people from that hell on earth, they didn't just bring skeletons back from the brink of death; they restored humanity and dignity. As a British Jew, it's a piece of history that fills me with both pride and gratitude. The first troops to enter the camp were from the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, under the command of Lt Col Richard Taylor, accompanied by a loudspeaker truck from the Intelligence Corps.
Amongst them was Sgt Norman Turgel, a Jewish officer in the British army. His son, sitting alongside me at the ceremony today, tells the story of how Norman came across a young woman in the camp, who, despite her own unbearable grief and frailty, was helping to nurse other survivors.
'That woman was my mother,' he says. 'They formed a bond that turned into love, something almost unimaginable in a place built for death.' Six weeks later they were married – his mother, Gina, wearing a wedding dress sewed from British military silks, gifted from Norman's comrades.
Meanwhile, British veteran Stanley Fisher from the West Midlands, who was unable to make the journey (he's 100 years old), recalls his experience in a message. 'I fought through France and all the way to northern Germany, eventually stationed very close to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where I witnessed horrors that have stayed with me all my life.'
By the time Bergen-Belsen was liberated, around 70,000 people had already died there, mainly due to disease or starvation. Albrecht Weinberg, a 100-year-old survivor from Germany, remembers the moment British soldiers arrived. He had been deported to Bergen-Belsen on a wagon.
'Our bodies were tipped out,' he says. 'Two days later, a tank drove in. I thought, 'Now I'll finally be freed by death', but it was British soldiers coming to liberate us.' He was a 20-year-old man at the time, but weighed only 4st 7lb.
Over afternoon refreshments, Susan explains what perhaps needs no explanation – why she has never returned. 'Bergen-Belsen, for me, was a place of death,' she tells me, leaning in, her voice low, her words hesitant. 'Of suffering.'
Today, very little of the camp remains. The site is barren, save for a memorial obelisk, but grass mounds now mark the locations of mass graves, with thousands buried beneath each.
Susan shares a memory from her arrival here in 1944. Among the 'walking skeletons,' she recognised an old friend and neighbour from her hometown of Felsőgöd in Hungary. Susan's father had been taken by the Nazis early in the war, and she had been separated from her mother and brother while at Auschwitz. So the familiar face must have been a comfort to that teenage girl, and the memory still swirls in her mind more than 80 years later.
'She recognised me and asked, 'Do you think I'm going to survive?' The following day, I went back to see her, but she had lice all over her.' In the camp, lice spread typhus. A look tells me what I need not ask. 'Very few survived in Bergen-Belsen,' she says simply.
Susan (then Zsuzsanna Blau) was one of those who did – just – but she was alone. More than 50 members of her family had been murdered. She later discovered her mother had been gassed at Auschwitz. Her brother survived but never mentally recovered. He had been made to work as a Sonderkommando (work units made up of death camp prisoners), shovelling dead bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens.
Recalling those early years after liberation, Susan says: 'They were very difficult times. Here I am, a youngster. I don't speak English. I have no support and no financial help because I had no relatives.'
She was sent to Sweden to recover and was then taken to Canada, where she met fellow survivor Abraham Pollack. 'He liked me. Then we became friends. And we shared many similar experiences, so we understood each other.' Susan was 18 when they got married but says they didn't know many people; her husband had to pay two people at work to be their witnesses. 'I'm here now because of my husband. He used to work two shifts every day,' she says.
Her philosophy has always been to look forward. She had three children and in 1963 the family moved to London, where she worked as a librarian and eventually got a degree in history, aged 60. It was only later in life she started to work with organisations like the Holocaust Educational Trust to share her experiences and educate.
I know little of my own family's experiences, one generation always wanting to protect the next from their horrific memories, except that my grandfather Brian, originally from Pabianice in Poland, was in Buchenwald when he was liberated. He passed away when my father was 14, so I never had the chance to meet him. My grandmother, also from Pabianice, moved to London before the war, but her mother and sister survived Auschwitz, passing off as sisters.
One of the only details of their experience that I know is that they lived in relentless fear – not only day-to-day, but second-to-second. They knew any moment could be their last. My grandmother's other sister, Yadja, was gassed in a lorry, and most of the large extended family perished. But her cousin, Helen Aronson, was one of the few survivors of the Łódź Ghetto – she celebrated her 98th birthday last week. She survived by hiding underground when the Nazis came to 'liquidate' the ghetto.
Like Susan, every life to emerge from those camps was miraculous. Being part of that legacy means I will always feel gratitude for being here, but it also feels like it comes with responsibility – to ensure memories are kept alive and lessons are never forgotten.
As we file off the plane in London, I take a moment to sit with Susan, still perky at the end of an 18-hour day. With a warm smile and an invitation to pop over to her house for tea, she tells me she's happy she made the decision to go. I am too – and I hope to help keep the memories she's shared with me alive. Like that visit to Auschwitz 25 years ago, Susan's story of survival will always be with me.
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