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$Unique_ID{bob01146}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter X: The Survivors - Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{camp
world
day
liberation
holocaust
survivors
felt
left
jewish
jews}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter X: The Survivors - Part II

Anthony F. Van Velsen

     We survivors are asked to tell you, and by you the world, what we felt at
the moment of liberation.

     We heard a row of speakers during this conference giving their impression
of what they felt at the time of liberation and now so many years after the
liberation.  We all heard of gratitude, because they, the survivors, and what
was left of their relatives could go on at that time after the liberation to
take part in that great adventure that is free life.  This picture, however is
somewhat oversimplified.  I was in Birkenau where the actual gassing took
place for more than two years, and few persons stayed as long as I did in
Birkenau.  I know exactly what took place, and I gained an insight into the
feelings of quite a lot of companions in the camps.  I can speak, therefore,
with some authority about matters of life and death in Hitler's
man-destructing machinery.

     I am still with the former inmates, for I am a lawyer nowadays.  I
represent them in courts when their rights as men who came out of the camps
are at stake.  I know for that reason that quite a lot of the survivors who
are not present here are not happy.  They lead a life that is full of
frustration in which the "KZ syndrome" makes them prisoners again every night
and tortures them anew.  Their liberation was only a physical one.  In the
psychological sense, they were not liberated and will never be liberated.  The
end of their anguish can only come when they shall die one day.

     We should bear that clearly in mind.  For them, Auschwitz is still there,
and they are still in the psychological grip of the horrors of yesterday.  For
them is not the peace they longed for.  Quite a lot of them have the
additional drawback of the so-called "survivor syndrome," that is, the
constant self-accusation that they, in one way or another, did not manage to
bring with them out of this inferno a beloved friend or relative. I said
"inferno," but I should like to speak of a state of anti-life.

     They are under the never-ending reproach that they themselves think they
failed.  We know from undeniable medical evidence that there are serious
problems in the second generation; failures in life are connected with the
mental wounds of the parents.

     Of course, they are thankful for their liberation, but their sorrow still
exists.  There needs to be an all-out effort to come to the help of these men
and women who are still battling with the Holocaust.  I bring here to you
their screams for help and for your understanding.  They still are not dead,
and this road to their world end is a terrible, awesome path.

     Other voices also cannot be heard in this conference.  I am convinced
that my experience in the camp gives me the right, the duty, to translate in
front of you what they felt when they were on the threshold of death.

     I should like to have at this very moment the strength of voice to reach
the ears of all the inhabitants of our world to tell you and them that there
was no gratitude when they had to bid farewell to their lives. No.  No.  No.
They felt utterly desolate and lonesome.  They felt that their living
contemporaries in and outside the camp - the politicians, the armies, and the
whole population of their respective countries had let them down. They felt
not only hatred for the Nazi extermination machinery, but also a reproach to
the free world that no direct action was taken to save their lives.

     I, as a Christian, living in the midst of the Holocaust with the Jews,
from almost the beginning of the organized gassing and extermination in
Auschwitz-Birkenau, was ashamed of what the Christian world as a whole had
failed to do to help the Jewish and Gypsy people, because the Gypsies - and I
was in the Gypsy camp, too, there - were also gassed.

     Of course, lots of individuals helped the Jews go in hiding, but the fact
cannot be denied that this failed for six million Jews.  As a matter of fact,
only a handful of non-Jewish people fought the battle against the Holocaust in
Auschwitz-Birkenau.

     As a survivor of this unbelievable fight with almost insurmountable odds
and barriers, I have the right, even the duty, to bring to you these
complaints that left the lips of six million children, men, and women on the
threshold of death.  We, the non-Jewish people, were utterly too late.

     Please don't misunderstand me.  I don't want to suggest that it was a
fault on the side of the liberators.  It was due to the circumstances.  No,
the reproach goes to the community as a whole - the hesitation of people to
accept the intrinsic evil of Nazism and the lack of foresight on the side of
politicians to prepare the community as a whole to counteract.  Six million
people fell out of Europe and my hands because they were not in the hearts and
the souls of the community as a whole.

     Realizing that gave me the extra strength in the struggle with my
comrades against the Holocaust.  We were so determined that we dared to set up
an underground movement in Birkenau under the very eyes of the SS and their
constant surveillance, and we succeeded by our own hands to blow up a gas
chamber and a crematorium.

     The political weakness that paved the way for Nazism and, therefore, for
the Holocaust is still there in our world of today.  Nazism is not a way of
political thinking but a criminal attitude towards mankind and should
therefore be destroyed at the very beginning.  That means that there is not in
this world a political force that can kill attempts for a new Holocaust.

     We have heard in the speeches that we should not forget about the
Holocaust and that we, the survivors and the liberators, should speak out and
give eyewitness accounts.  But my dear friends, do you realize that within a
short time we shall not live anymore.  Who will give the eyewitness account
then?  Nobody.

     Giving eyewitness accounts is not bad, but it is only the beginning. It
is not enough.  What we need is an international instrument to stop the
onslaught from the beginning, something that with the establishment of the
Jewish State is an ultimate answer for the problems of the Jews.  Perhaps that
is true in a certain way for Jews, but who stopped the recent holocaust in
Vietnam after the United States of America left that country, and in Cambodia?
No one.

     Even at this moment the holocaust goes on, without anyone to do something
to stop it.  Red Cross activities can't stop a holocaust; only an active
attack, and if needed with weapons.  I am speaking as a retired colonel of the
Royal Netherlands Marines.

     You, the ones who were not in the Holocaust, and you, the youth of the
world, should realize this.  If not, then at some time in the future there
will be a new holocaust, and the survivors will have to go their terrible,
awesome way again.

     This is not a friendly and soothing statement, but please understand that
it is the meaning of a total complaint of six million people who are not here
anymore and in whose name I wanted to speak.

Benjamin Meed

     Mr. van Velsen, the proper thing for us to do after your speech would be
to stand up in silence.  Your remarks covered so much, and I hope that these
remarks will be published as soon as possible and brought to the whole world.

     Two days ago, I was asked to participate in this panel.  Yesterday I
started to write down a few points, but after a few seconds I stopped writing
because what I would like to say would probably not be possible to say in
public.  I do it every night to my pillow.  I still keep that dialogue.  I am
a survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto, and you are right.  I am still in the
Warsaw Ghetto, 38 years later - and I don't think I ever left the Ghetto.

     How does one answer today how he felt the day after the liberation?  As
far as I can remember, this was not a day of joy.  Maybe it should have been a
day of joy, but it was not.

     When liberation came, I remember feeling and thinking that the whole
world was destroyed, not only our loved ones, but the whole world, a whole
civilization had been lost.  I felt then, and I'm feeling today, that
something we left had been taken out of us and that the wounds will never
heal.

     I was liberated on January 16 by the Russian army.  Together with my
wife, Vladka, who took part with me in the Polish uprising in Warsaw, I was
living 35 miles from Warsaw in a small village.  The whole village had only 30
families, and we were living there in that village as Gentiles, as good,
practicing Catholics.  We never missed a Sunday in the church while living
there.

     When the first tanks arrived, we came out to look at the Russian tanks,
and both of us looked at each other.  I don't remember even talking to each
other on that day of liberation.

     After a while I remembered that I had made a promise which I had to
fulfill.  My promise was to my comrades in the Polish uprising, the Jews who
took part in the Polish uprising.  When I left Warsaw in October 1944, I was
not sure that I would survive.  I had left 11 people in a bunker in a house
when the whole city had to leave.  I promised them something.

     All of them were Jewish people, but they couldn't pass as Poles;
therefore, they decided to remain in Warsaw in the empty city.  I remembered
that I had sworn to them that if I survived, I would come back one day to that
bunker.  I would take them out from that bunker and bring them to the Jewish
cemetery.  This was my promise when I left them.  I survived with that
knowledge of that promise, and that same day Vladka and I got on two bicycles
and went to Warsaw.

     I arrived in Warsaw January 17 and went to where my friends supposedly
were buried in that bunker.  I came to the house.  Nobody was living there,
but there was already movement in the city.  I found that bunker untouched,
the way I left it, the way I covered it before I left.  I was sure I had found
them, but I was also afraid they were dead.

     I knew I must continue with my promise.  I started to dig, and I dug for
a few hours, but unfortunately, with a small tool I could not reach the bunker
that evening.  It became dark, and I was afraid to remain and dig.  I decided
to stop digging and went to Cracow to spend the night because there was no
place in Warsaw to stay; everything was destroyed.

     The next morning at eight o'clock, I came back to dig again.  When I
opened that bunker, I found nobody there.  I found out later that my friends
thought that they had been discovered.  Fortunately, they all were alive, and
that night they decided to leave the bunker and to get into the sewers. Three
days later, I found them in Warsaw, but for three days they did not know that
they had been liberated.  This was my first day of liberation.

     Each one of us survivors has a different story to tell, but each one of
us has a collective message - a message not from us, but a collective message
of those whom we left behind.  The Holocaust, the Nazi experience, was just a
trial of how to destroy the world in the 20th century.  It seemed to work.
They picked the weakest of all.  They picked the Jewish people.  But later, as
I told you, I was in the uprising of the Polish people.  They were the next in
line.  Our message to the world is that the Holocaust was distinctly a Jewish
catastrophe of our people.  We lost a third of our people, but I'm afraid that
the next Holocaust will be the holocaust of the world.  Maybe we with our
testimony, we can help avoid it; we can teach the people to be aware.  You are
right, Mr. van Velsen.  We have to do it now by looking at the first symptoms.

Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft

     My name is Hadassah Bimko-Rosensaft.  I am a Jew, born in Sosnowiec,
Poland.  My parents, my first husband, and my six-year-old son were gassed by
the Germans in the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  My entire family
perished during the Holocaust, gassed by the Germans in Treblinka and
Auschwitz.  I was in Auschwitz-Birkenau more than a year, and thereafter I was
in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen where I was liberated by the
British army on April 15, 1945.

     I arrived in Bergen-Belsen from Auschwitz on November 23, 1944, together
with eight other Jewish women.  We were two doctors and six nurses, and had
been sent as a medical team, supposedly to work in the camp's hospital.
Conditions in Bergen-Belsen were terrible.  The camp was filthy beyond
anyone's imagination.  There was no place for the inmates to wash. Everybody
was hungry.  It was a cold winter, and we were all freezing. Diseases were
rampant.  Conditions in the hospital were no better, and, in addition, there
was no medication for the sick.  We were desperate.

     There were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, nor did the doctors conduct
terminal medical experiments on human beings as they did in other camps.
Rather, it was the place to which thousands of inmates from other camps were
sent in 1944 and 1945 as the Germans were forced to retreat from Poland and
eastern Germany before the onslaught of the Allied armies.

     On January 18, 1945, the Germans liquidated Auschwitz, and again
transports with thousands of inmates arrived at Bergen-Belsen.  They were
exhausted from the long journey, starving, sick with innumerable diseases, and
many were literally frozen to death.  With these transports from Auschwitz
came also the monstrous SS guards and SS doctors whom many of us already knew
and they turned Belsen into an indescribable hell.

     Conditions in Bergen-Belsen were at their worst three weeks before the
liberation.  Typhus, tuberculosis and other epidemics were raging through the
camp simultaneously.  In the barracks and in the hospital people were lying on
the floor, starving and dying.  About 1,000 perished each day.  Only a small
group, which had already had the diseases in Auschwitz, were immune and could
resist.  The small crematorium could not cope with all the corpses even though
it was burning day and night.  The unburied corpses were strewn all over the
camp.  The SS, who felt that their own end was near, cut off the water supply,
and we were given one piece of bread per person only three times a week, and a
half a pint of so-called turnip soup a day.  On top of it all, the Germans
kept us in mortal fear by telling us that the camp was mined and that we would
all be blown up.  Such was our situation on the eve of liberation:  disease,
starvation, despair, fear, and not a single ray of hope from anywhere.

     On April 12, 1945, we saw in the distance that the SS were burning
papers, but we didn't know why.  The following day, we saw many SS men and
women leaving the camp, and the few who remained wore white armbands on their
left sleeves.  Rumors started to spread that the camp was bout to be declared
"neutral" as the result of negotiations between the Germans and the British.
Nobody knew what this meant, or where the news came from, and in any event we
didn't believe it.  However, on Saturday, April 14, we received Red Cross food
parcels, one for four people, and we began to believe that something was
happening.

     And then came April 15, 1945.  I will never forget that day.  It was
Sunday, a very hot day; it was quiet; nobody was to be seen outside the
barracks; the camp seemed to have become abandoned, almost like a cemetery. I
was sitting with the children with whom I lived in the same barrack.

     Suddenly we felt the tremors of the earth - something was moving - and
then we heard the sound of rolling tanks.  We were convinced that the Germans
were about to blow up the camp.  But then - it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon
- we heard a loud voice say in German:  "Hello, hello, you are free!  We are
British soldiers, and we came to liberate you!"

     We ran out of the barracks and saw in the middle of the road a British
army car with a loudspeaker on top going through the camp and repeating the
same message over and over again.  Within minutes, hundreds of women stopped
the car, screaming, laughing, and crying, and the British soldier inside was
crying with us. (The soldier was the late Captain Derek Sington.)  It seemed a
dream which soon turned into reality.  How tragic it was that the great
majority did not even realize that we were free, because they were unconscious
or too sick to understand what was happening.

     The British tanks rolled on in pursuit of the German army, and for one
day the camp remained in the charge of a group of Hungarian SS guards who, in
this one day, killed 72 Jews and 11 non-Jews.  The British came back to us on
April 17, this time to stay.  They found 58,000 inmates, both men and women,
90 percent of whom were Jews.  The vast majority were living skeletons; most
of them were too ill and too weak even to walk.  Within the following eight
weeks, 13,944 more died.  In addition, there were more than 10,000 unburied
corpses lying around the camp.  The late Brigadier General H.L. Glyn Hughes,
as the Chief Medical Officer of the British Army of the Rhine, came to see the
camp.  I was asked to take him around.  What he saw was a sea of crying,
screaming bones.  At the sight of the huts with their dead and near-dead,
General Glyn Hughes, a medical officer hardened to human suffering, cried
unashamedly.  He decided on the spot to try to save as many sick as possible
in spite of the conflicting needs of the military casualties for whom he was
responsible.

     Not far from the concentration camp were German army barracks, strong
brick buildings with all necessary amenities.  General Glyn Hughes decided to
transform these barracks into a hospital for some 17,000 patients - the more
desperately ill among the survivors.  I was asked to help, and was appointed
administrator of the hospital for the survivors.  I was honored and privileged
to work with him and the other British medical personnel.  My first task was
to issue a call to the doctors and nurses among the survivors to come forward.
Twenty-eight doctors and 590 female and 30 male nurses reported immediately.
Not all the nurses were qualified, and most of them were still extremely weak,
but they all worked with great devotion. General Glyn Hughes said about them,
and I quote: "I would like to pay a special tribute to those who, although
inmates for a long period, had survived and retained their moral standards and
sense of responsibility.  By their unselfish devotion to others, they must
themselves have saved countless lives.  After the liberation, they continued
their excellent work and were invaluable to the helpers who came in."

     We started to work immediately.  It took several weeks to evacuate the
concentration camp.  Once this process was completed, and all the survivors
had been relocated in the former German military barracks, the British on May
21 burned down the barracks of the concentration camp in order to contain the
spread of the epidemics.

     The burning down of the old camp also marked the beginning of regular
medical attention for the sick of Belsen, instead of the emergency measures of
the past month.

     As far as our own feelings are concerned, it is hard for me to put them
into words.  At first, we paid our respects to the tens of thousands of our
dead brothers and sisters for whom the help came too late, and who were buried
in mass grave after mass grave.

     For the greatest part of the liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen, there was
no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation.  We had lost our families, our homes.
We had no place to go to, nobody to hug.  Nobody was waiting for us anywhere.
We had been liberated from death and the fear of death, but not from the fear
of life.

Sigmund Strochlitz

     It is with a sense of obligation and humility that I will share with you
the grim realities the survivors faced immediately after being liberated from
the Nazi inferno.

     Having forgotten how people live, only knowing how people die - not how
they die in real life, in normal life, but how they die in flames - we
survivors reentered this world, accepted leadership positions, and became a
source of vitality and a testimony to the indestructible spirit of the Jewish
people.

     Let me turn the clock back to those days when the gates of hell were shut
and the chimneys of concentration camps stopped vomiting black clouds of human
flesh, and we were told we are free.

     It was April 15, 1945 - liberation day.  It is anchored in my mind and
even compared by some survivors with the stories of Biblical salvations.  Our
prayers for liberation that we uttered in silence, in desperation, and perhaps
more in defiance, and our hopes to survive that we nourished for such a long
time became on that sunny, bright Sunday morning a reality.  Yet, there was no
joy or any sense of happiness among survivors of Hitler's Final Solution.  We
felt strangely empty, with a submerged sense of guilt for having survived.

     The western world was celebrating victory and rightfully and properly so.
We were the remnants of once-flourishing Jewish communities, broken physically
and mentally, and confused on our liberation day by the sheepish and cowardly
behavior of the Nazi murderers and bewildered by the actions and reactions of
our liberators.  We suspected that the Germans, the perpetrators of the
greatest crimes against the Jewish people and mankind, even though badly
defeated and living in abject poverty, would be able in time on their own soil
to rebuild their lives and their homes.

     Only we alone were facing an uncertain future.  We alone could not go
back.  There were no homes anywhere.  Where once our ancestors lived for
generations, there were no families waiting for us.  Only stones, stinking of
indignity and humiliation, were there to greet us.  This was not a happy
ending.  It was the beginning of something unknown, disturbing.  An empty
victory.

     Furthermore, the hostile or, at best, indifferent behavior of the local
population during the war gave us good reason to believe that we would not be
received with open arms by those who took over our homes and our possessions.

     The cries were loud, and yet mute.  We only sensed freedom in solitude,
reading on one another's despairing faces the knowledge that tomorrow would
bring no one else back to share the burden of facing a new reality alone.

     The natural instinctive reaction during those first weeks of liberation -
as I so well remember - was to look for somebody to lean on.  We were yearning
for something to hold onto, to have faith in, to draw us forward, to bring us
back into the mainstream of life.  But we were looking in vain.

     Our liberators to whom our gratitude was boundless, the victors for whom
our admiration was limitless, traumatized by the experiences of a horrible war
and shocked by what they had encountered in the liberated camps, were eager to
return to civilian life and be reunited with their families.  For the Allied
governments, after years of exhausting fighting, the monumental problems of
postwar awakening were their first priority and, again, rightfully so.

     So, with every passing day, it became more evident to us that we must not
appear before the world as separate individuals, but that we were a community,
a family united by what we had lived through together, by what we had felt
together, and that we were no more the Jews that once lived in Poland, France,
Hungary, or in any other part of Europe.

     We were the Jews, the survivors, who could and must find comfort and
meaning in supporting each other and only hoping that in time the world would
recognize the need to resettle us.

     Accepting that premise was difficult for those few who were arguing that
if they had known what the outside world was going to be like, they would have
given in long ago.  We understood them even if we disagreed. We lived for many
years in liberated camps or in cities among the murderers.

     The gates of Palestine were shut.  Nobody really wanted us.  We finally
became an embarrassment, and with the help of President Truman, those armed
with courage went to Israel to build a Jewish homeland.

     Some attracted by the vision of a comfortable and easy life landed in the
United States, while others scattered and dispersed all over the world not
bitter, not sinking into a paralyzing sadness, somber and riddled with doubts,
but determined not to become prisoners of yesterday, victims unable to meet
new challenges.

     Grief did not become our master.  We chose to rebuild our shattered
lives, raising families in strange cultures, coping with unknown behavior
patterns, making contributions to our adopted countries, and helping to build
societies based on freedom and justice for all.  The pain, however, was
constant, residing silently in the private places of the heart.

     The wounds opened, however hidden in the innermost recesses of our minds.
The past was shared in the privacy of our homes only with those who survived
the cataclysm, even though the desire to bear witness, to tell the world what
happened, was essentially what kept many of us alive.

     Today it is with pride and perhaps a sense of accomplishment that I
whisper, mindful of our irreplaceable losses:  We survivors did not waste our
lives.