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Published: July 28th 2013
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Bergen-Belsen
A memorial stone to some of the victims. 11:00
So in order to soothe our disappointment and to cheer ourselves up after our finish yesterday, we are now on the way to... Bergen-Belsen. Nothing says happy like a concentration camp, eh? A lot of the route has been standard European highway (which is kind of dull), but there have been a few instances where the route has been closed for whatever reason and we've had to detour. As a result we've driven through a city we wouldn't otherwise have seen and also driven past some amazing forested bits. We're obviously near some sort of military installation, as there have been several roads with signs saying "military traffic only" that we've passed (in English as well as German - not sure if that means we're near one of the American or Canadian presences in the country or not).
11:07
So we most definitely seem to be passing by a military installation. There appear to be obstacle courses for tanks, storage and bunkers, etc. but it all seemed pretty deserted - maybe someone will be able to tell us what it is.
Lübeck
Outside the city gates 15h27
So, indeed, there was a military base next to Bergen-Belsen. I not entirely sure what to tell you about our visit. It was ... serious. I mean, everyone knows what concentration camps were and has some sense of what they did and how they functioned, but actually visiting the site of a concentration camp was ... powerful. I won't get melodramatic and say that it changed my life, but it has certainly given me a lot to chew on.
It was not, explicitly, intended to be an extermination camp. Instead, it started out as a POW camp, and then later, a camp for "exchange Jews" - those Jews with foreign citizenship deemed important enough to trade with foreign powers in exchange for German POWs, and still later, in theory, the camp was meant to be a "recovery" camp, where those too ill or weak to work elsewhere were meant to be sent to do light labour and/or to recover.
Unfortunately, as the Allied and Soviet lines advanced in either direction, and a camp that was maybe meant to hold a few thousand people ended up with tens of thousands. Conditions quickly became extremely unsanitary, food was in scarce supply, and illness quickly took hold, with people dying at a rate of hundreds per day, compounded by the fact that there was no mechanism in place for removal of the bodies. When the British liberated the camp in April 1945, they were shocked. All you have to do is search the footage from those days, and the photos, to get a sense of what they saw.
There isn't much left of the camp as it was in the 40s. Once the British cleared out the survivors, the buildings were burnt for sanitary purposes. The geographic features and memorials left behind a striking impression, especially the main road through the camp. It hasn't really been preserved in any way, and yet there is still a clear outline in the grass showing where it was - things just seem to be growing slower or in a different direction or something. And those that didn't survive? Bergen-Belsen has mass graves with a total of thousands of corpses that needed to be buried. I think it's just hitting me now that I found my graveyard ... One of the mass graves was a pit dug by the British that has about 5000 people in it. Others have 1000, others 800...
Later on:
Anyway, we made it to Lübeck for late in the evening, and were able to take in a lovely dinner on the canals there, and explore the medieval city buildings a bit - unfortunately we were too late to actually go into anything, but it still was a lovely city to visit.
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