Letters From Belsen 1945

"When British troops arrived at Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 they found 40,000 desperately ill men, women and children and 10,000 unburied bodies. In a final act of cruelty the Germans had withheld food and water from the inmates for a week. Typhus was raging and conditions were chaotic." "Muriel Knox Doherty arrived soon after as Chief Nurse with the task of creating a hospital, scrounging supplies and saving as many of the camp interns as possible. In letters written to her mother and friends in Australia, Doherty describes her experiences at Belsen in moving detail." "She tells of the plight of Jewish survivors unable to return home, and the challenge of rebuilding their health and their self-respect. She is inundated with appeals from desperate families trying to find their loved ones among the former prisoners and the many displaced people at Belsen. For one particularly memorable day she attends the Luneberg Trials, where Belsen survivors gave evidence against war criminals." "One of the few accounts of a concentration camp written by a non-Jew, this remarkable collection of letters is illustrated with drawings by one of the Belsen survivors and period photographs. It is a compassionate tale of the effects of war and the effort made to heal Europe after World War II."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

When British troops arrived at Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 they found 40,000 desperately ill men, women and children and 10,000 unburied dead bodies. In a final act of cruelty the Germans had withheld food and water from the inmates for a week. Typhus was raging and conditions were chaotic. Muriel Knox Doherty arrived soon after as Chief Nurse with the task of creating a hospital, scrounging supplies and saving as many of the camp survivors as possible. In letters written to her mother and friends in Australia, Doherty describes her experiences at Belsen in moving detail. She tells of the plight of Jewish survivors unable to return home, and the challenge of rebuilding their health and their self-respect. She is inundated with appeals from desperate families trying to find their loved ones among the camp survivors and the many displaced people at Belsen. For one particularly memorable day she attends the Luneberg Trials as Belsen survivors gave evidence against war criminals. One of the few accounts of a concentration camp written by a non-Jew, this remarkable collection of letters is illustrated with drawings by one of the Belsen survivors and period photographs. It is a compassionate tale of the effects of war and the effort made to heal Europe after World War II.

Letters written to and by Nazi concentration camp prisoners were subject to the scrutiny of extensive regulations: letters had to be written in German and were censored by S.S. personnel; sending money was permitted but packages were not; requests to speak to or visit prisoners were prohibited; and newspapers were permitted but only if ordered through the concentration camp post office. Though inmates could, in theory, send or receive two letters or cards each month, the regulations governing correspondence could be suspended arbitrarily and without notice. Collected here are the correspondences of non-Jewish concentration camp prisoners; in a final blow of 'regulatory' inhumanity, mail privileges were denied to Jews.

These letters were written by a Jewish boy, Ben Wessels, as he struggled to survive in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They document the move from the ghetto to the camp, as well as life in the camp up to the time of Wessels' death in 1945. Also included are reports from the Dutch underground press, tracing the history of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Fifteen pages of photographs are included. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

“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.

A moving, deeply researched account of survivors' experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors--their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors' immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead.

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.