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Bergen-Belsen,
located on Lünenberg Heath 45 miles south of Hamburg, was the
first concentration camp to be liberated by British troops who were
not at all prepared for what they found there.
The
camp had been created in 1943 to house foreign prisoners but as
Allied troops progressed across Europe the Germans transported prisoners
from other camps threatened by the advance. By the time the British
soldiers arrived at Belsen in 1945 around 60,000 prisoners, mostly
Jews, were housed there. The camp authorities had given up on delivering
the basic requirements necessary to sustain life resulting in starvation,
and dehydration. The crowded conditions meant that typhus, dysentery
and tuberculosis were all at epidemic levels in the camp.
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| "Although
we had been fighting, fighting's different to a concentration
camp - terrible." |
Huddersfield
soldier Walter Stott, who served in the Royal Engineers, did not
have an easy war. Called up at the outbreak of the war in September
1939, he was sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force.
He worked on the beaches as a stretcher-bearer during the retreat
from Dunkirk, wading out to sea with wounded soldiers and putting
them on to the waiting boats. He returned to France in June 1944,
landing at Bayeux with the 11th Armoured Division just a few days
after D-Day.
Walter
Stott's testimony has been filmed and will be shown during the commemoration
event at Dewsbury Museum. In the film Mr Stott remembers some of
his reactions when he entered Belsen concentration camp: "I
was with the doctors, going round finding the people that we thought
would live. We couldn't get them all 'cos they were dying in front
of us...They had big mounds of potatoes and turnips - there were
even bodies around these as they were trying to pinch the turnips
and potatoes to eat. And you couldn't believe anyone could be like
that could you?
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| Walter
Stott in Royal Engineers uniform |
"Emma
Grise and Von Kramer, they were the bosses at Belsen. She made two
lampshades of human flesh - she were a right one - he got rid of
thousands did Hitler and his confederates...We made the SS dig trenches;
they piled all the skeletons up and we made them carry all the bodies
with their hands. And the town Major stopped us doing it due to
disease so we had to use the bulldozers but we didn't put the earth
back - we made them put it back with their hands."
Manya
Stern, who now lives in Salford, was an inmate at Belsen when the
British troops arrived. The Dewsbury commemoration will be the first
time she has spoken in public about her wartime experiences.
Manya
lived with her family in Sosnowiec, Poland until one day in July
1943 when all the Jews in the town were ordered by the Nazis to
report to a field to have their ID cards stamped. After three days
in the rain, with no shelter, food, drink or change of clothing
and surrounded by armed Nazis, the men, women and children were
lined up. A Nazi at the head of the queue gestured each left or
right and despite her family's efforts to stay together, they were
forcibly separated. She never saw her father, mother, sisters or
their children again. Manya was sent first to Graben, a labour camp,
where she was forced to do hard labour for 12 hours a day but in
November 1944 she was sent to Bergen-Belsen.
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| Walter
Stott today |
At
Belsen, there was no food, no water, no beds, no change of clothing
and people relieved themselves in a large hole outside in full view
of everybody else because there were no toilets. Manya remembers
the 'magical moment' when British soldiers drove through the camp
gates on motorbikes. She remains greatly indebted to the soldiers
who liberated the camp, saving the inmates lives. Her brother, who
had been sent to Buchenwald, was reunited with her shortly after
liberation but did not recognise her - she was a living skeleton.
She says: "If they had come just a few days later, I feel I
would not have survived."
For
Walter Stott arriving at Belsen was like nothing else he had experienced
during the war: "Belsen was a big place and there were thousands
in there. I couldn't believe that anything like this had happened
in the world. Although we had been fighting, fighting's different
to a concentration camp - terrible!"
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