Drawing on documentary and oral sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Dutch and French, this book challenges many sterotypes about Belsen, and reinstates the groups hitherto marginalized or ignored in accounts of the camp and its liberation.

This volume presents the most authoritative recent scholarship on Belsen by British, American, German, French and Israeli historians.

“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.

Drawing on documentary and oral sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Dutch and French, this book challenges many sterotypes about Belsen, and reinstates the groups hitherto marginalized or ignored in accounts of the camp and its liberation.

Between 1941 and 1945 as many as 70,000 inmates died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwestern Germany. The exact number will never be known. A large number of these deaths were caused by malnutrition and disease, mainly typhus, shortly before and after liberation.It was at this time, in April of 1945, that Michael Hargrave answered a notice at the Westminster Hospital Medical School for ‘volunteers’. On the day of his departure the 21-year-old learned that he was being sent to Bergen-Belsen, liberated only two weeks before.This firsthand account, a diary written for his mother, details Michael's month-long experience at the camp. He compassionately relates the horrendous living conditions suffered by the prisoners, describing the sickness and disease he encountered and his desperate, often fruitless, struggle to save as many lives as possible. Amidst immeasurable horrors, his descriptions of the banalities of everyday life and diagrams of the camp's layout take on a new poignancy, while anatomic line drawings detail the medical conditions and his efforts to treat them. Original newspaper cuttings and photographs of the camp, many previously unpublished, add a further layer of texture to the endeavors of an inexperienced medical student faced with extreme human suffering.

This ePaper, History and Memory: lessons from the Holocaust, presents the original text of the Leçon inaugurale delivered by Professor Saul Friedländer on 23 September 2014 at the Maison de la Paix, which marked the opening of the academic year of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. The lecture highlights an original analysis of the evolution of German memory since the end of World War II and its consequences on the writing of history. Generations of historians have been particularly marked in a differentiated manner, depending on their personal proximity to the war, but also on collective representations conveyed by film and television in a globalised world. Saul Friedländer is Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988.

A monument to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.In these compelling, award-winning, Holocaust memoirs, Nanette Blitz Konig relates her amazing story of survival during the Second World War when she, together with her family and millions of other Jews were imprisoned by the Nazi's with a minimum chance of survival.Nanette (b. 1929), was a class mate of Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum of Amsterdam. They met again in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne died. During these emotional encounters, Anne Frank revealed how the Frank family hid in the annex, their subsequent deportation, her experience in Auschwitz and her plans for her diary after the war.This honest WW2 story describes the hourly battle for survival under the brutal conditions in the camp imposed by the Nazi regime. It continues with her struggle to recover from the effects of starvation and tuberculosis after the war, and how she was gradually able to restart her life, marry and build a family.Nanette Blitz Konig, mother of three, grandmother of six and great grand mother of four, lives in São Paulo, Brazil. Her Holocaust memoirs were written to speak in the name of those millions who were silenced forever.In these compelling, award-winning, Holocaust memoirs, Nanette Blitz Konig (b. Amsterdam 1929) relates her amazing story of survival during the Second World War when she was imprisoned by the Nazi's in Bergen-Belsen with a minimum chance of survival. It was here that she last saw her classmate Anne Frank.