The German government established Bergen-Belsen transit camp in July 1943, in a forest in central Germany. It was built to hold 8,000 inmates at any given time, mostly prisoners of war and Jews on their way to death camps in Poland. In the winter of 1944 to 1945, as the Germans evacuated camps closer to the warfront, it became a destination point for thousands of prisoners on death marches. By the time Sol and his father arrived in March 1945, 100,000 men, women, and children were held prisoner in the small camp.
Bergen-Belsen’s German guards, concerned with their own survival, stopped attending to their prisoners as the British Army approached. After the prisoners ran out of food, water supplies became contaminated and typhus spread out of control. In the months before liberation, 37,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen, Anne Frank among them.
British camera crews were present when the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. Vivid pictures of the Holocaust were projected around the world — 60,000 prisoners, in varying stages of starvation, were seen lying among thousands of dead bodies. Fearing an epidemic, the British soldiers used bulldozers to bury the dead. Medical staff and facilities were overwhelmed by the number of patients in critical condition and focused their treatment on those most likely to survive. 28,000 victims of Bergen-Belsen, including Sol’s father, died in the weeks after their liberation.
