This is the first study to place Jewish refugee movements from Nazism into a wider framework of global forced migration from the late nineteenth through to the twenty first century.

When British troops arrived at Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 they found 40,000 desperately ill men, women and children and 10,000 unburied dead bodies. In a final act of cruelty the Germans had withheld food and water from the inmates for a week. Typhus was raging and conditions were chaotic. Muriel Knox Doherty arrived soon after as Chief Nurse with the task of creating a hospital, scrounging supplies and saving as many of the camp survivors as possible. In letters written to her mother and friends in Australia, Doherty describes her experiences at Belsen in moving detail. She tells of the plight of Jewish survivors unable to return home, and the challenge of rebuilding their health and their self-respect. She is inundated with appeals from desperate families trying to find their loved ones among the camp survivors and the many displaced people at Belsen. For one particularly memorable day she attends the Luneberg Trials as Belsen survivors gave evidence against war criminals. One of the few accounts of a concentration camp written by a non-Jew, this remarkable collection of letters is illustrated with drawings by one of the Belsen survivors and period photographs. It is a compassionate tale of the effects of war and the effort made to heal Europe after World War II.

“I find it hard even now to get into focus all these horrors, my mind is really quite incapable of taking in everything I saw because it was all so completely foreign to everything I had previously believed or thought possible.” British Major Ben Barnett’s words echoed the sentiments shared by medical students, Allied soldiers, members of the clergy, ambulance drivers, and relief workers who found themselves utterly unprepared to comprehend, much less tend to, the indescribable trauma of those who survived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British in April 1945 was a defining point in history: the moment the world finally became inescapably aware of the Holocaust. But what happened after Belsen was liberated is still a matter of dispute. Was it an epic of medical heroism or the culmination of thirteen years of indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews? This startling investigation by acclaimed documentary filmmaker and historian Ben Shephard draws on an extraordinary range of materials–contemporary diaries, military documents, and survivors’ testimonies–to reconstruct six weeks at Belsen beginning on April 15, 1945, and reveals what actually caused the post-liberation deaths of nearly 14,000 concentration camp inmates who might otherwise have lived. Why did it take almost two weeks to organize a proper medical response? Why were the medical teams sent to Belsen so poorly equipped? Why, when specialists did arrive, did they get so much of the medicine plain wrong? For the first time, Shephard explores the humanitarian and medical issues surrounding the liberation of the camp and provides a detailed, illuminating account that is far more complex than had been previously revealed. This gripping book confronts the terrifying aftermath of war with questions that still haunt us today.

This true-life novel was written in the aftermath of the Second World War and the author’s terrible experiences in a Nazi death camp. Only now has it been published for the first time. Edith Hofmann is a survivor of the Holocaust, born in Prague in 1927 as Edith Birkin. In 1941, along with her parents, she was deported to the Lodz Ghetto, where within a year both her parents had died. At 15 she was left to fend for herself. The Lodz Ghetto was the second-largest ghetto to Warsaw, and was established for Jews and Gypsies in German-occupied Poland. Situated in the town of Lodz in Poland and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the German Army. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population, including Edith, was transported to Auschwitz and Chelmno extermination camp in cattle trucks. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated due to the advancing Russian army. Edith was only 17, and one of the lucky ones. For the majority, it was their final journey. A small group of them were selected for work. With her hair shaved off and deprived of all her possessions, she travelled to Kristianstadt, a labour camp in Silesia, to work in an underground munitions factory.