On a march from a factory near Hanover to Belsen, Moshe Oster later recalled how prisoners had to pull three wagons full of SS men’s property for more than forty miles. During the march, eighteen of the marchers were shot dead.15 On April 4, near Gotha, Jews working in quarries were driven to Buchenwald. Before leaving, some were shot.16
***
On April 4, United States forces reached the village of Ohrdruf. Just outside the village they found a deserted labour camp: a camp in which four thousand inmates had died or been murdered in the previous three months. Hundreds had been shot on the eve of the American arrival. Some of the victims were Jews, others were Polish and Russian prisoners-of-war. All had been forced to build a vast underground radio and telephone centre, intended for the German army in the event of a retreat from Berlin.17
Among the Jews who had been held at Ohrdruf was Leo Laufer. Four days before liberation, Laufer had been fortunate to escape, as the evacuation of the camp began. Running off with three fellow prisoners, they had left their wooden shoes behind in order ‘to run faster and not make any noise’. For four days they had hidden in the hills above Ohrdruf. When the American forces arrived, Laufer accompanied them into the camp. Many of the corpses which they found there were of prisoners who had been in the camp dispensary at the time of the evacuation of the camp four days earlier.18
The sight of the emaciated corpses at Ohrdruf created a wave of revulsion which spread back to Britain and the United States. General Eisenhower, who visited the camp, was so shocked that he at once telephoned Churchill to describe what he had seen, and then sent photographs of the dead prisoners to Churchill, who circulated them to each member of the British Cabinet.19
In Belsen, still under German control, thirty thousand prisoners watched in fear and agony as the SS prepared to leave the camp, but without knowing when liberation would come, or if it could possibly come in time. Fania Fenelon later recalled the first week of April:
Hastily built to last a few months, our temporary barracks were half-collapsing; the planks were coming apart. Looking at the damage, a scornful SS man said, speaking of us, the Jews: ‘They rot everything, even wood.’
It was true, we were rotting, but it was hardly our fault—their presence alone would taint the healthiest beings.
THE LIBERATION OF THE CAMPS
A few days later, I too had typhus. My last vision as a healthy person was of the women of the camp, like everyone else, outside naked, lining up to wash our dresses and underclothes in the thin trickle of water from the pierced pipe. On the other side of the barbed wire, the men were doing the same; we were like two troops of cattle at the half-empty trough of an abattoir.
Now the illness took me over entirely; my head was bursting, my body trembling, my intestines and stomach were agony, and I had the most abominable dysentery. I was just a sick animal lying in its own excrement.
From April 8 everything around me became nightmarish. I existed merely as a bursting head, an intestine, a perpetually active anus. One tier above, there was a French girl, I didn’t know; in my moments of lucidity, I heard her saying in a clear, calm, even pleasant voice: ‘I must shit, but I must shit on your head, it’s more hygienic!’ She had gone mad; others equally unhinged guffawed interminably or fought. No one came to see us anymore, not even the SS. They’d turned off the water….20
On April 8, almost all the Jewish inmates at Buchenwald, many of whom had only reached there three months earlier, from Birkenau or Stutthof, were marched out, leaving the non-Jewish prisoners to await the arrival of the Americans. The Jews were driven east, then south, to the concentration camp at Flossenburg. Other Jews, in camps at Aschersleben and Schonebeck, were driven south, then north again, then back south, first on foot and in trucks, then by train, through the Sudeten mountains, to Leitmeritz. A third group was sent to nearby Theresienstadt, sixty being murdered at the village of Buchau.21
A few Jews had managed to hide in Buchenwald during the ‘evacuation’ of April 8. One of them, Israel Lau, was only eight years old. He had been kept alive by the devotion and ingenuity of his elder brother, Naftali, aged nineteen. Three days after most of the Jews had been marched out of the camp, American forces arrived. One of the American officers, Rabbi Herschel Schechter, later recalled how he pulled a small, frightened boy from a pile of corpses. The rabbi burst into tears and then, hoping to reassure the child, began to laugh.
‘How old are you?’ he asked Israel Lau, in Yiddish.
‘Older than you.’
‘How can you say that?’ asked the rabbi, fearing the child was deranged.
‘You cry and laugh like a little boy,’ Lau replied, ‘but I haven’t laughed for years and I don’t even cry any more. So tell me, who is older?’22
***
On April 10, Adolf Eichmann made his last visit to Theresienstadt. There, he was heard to say: ‘I shall gladly jump into the pit, knowing that in the same pit there are five million enemies of the state.’23 Three days later, one of the death marches, mostly of Auschwitz survivors, reached the area of Belsen. One of the survivors, Menachem Weinryb, later recalled:
One night we stopped near the town of Gardelegen. We lay down in a field and several Germans went to consult about what they should do. They returned with a lot of young people from the Hitler Youth and with members of the police force from the town.
They chased us all into a large barn. Since we were five to six thousand people, the wall of the barn collapsed from the pressure of the mass of people, and many of us fled. The Germans poured out petrol and set the barn on fire. Several thousand people were burned alive.
Those of us who had managed to escape lay down in the nearby wood and heard the heart-rending screams of the victims. This was on April 13.24
Trapped in the barn, the Jews had tried to escape by burrowing under the foundation walls. But as their heads appeared on the outside, they were shot by the Germans surrounding the barn.25
On April 13 the Red Army entered Vienna. One of the last trains to leave the city before the arrival of the Red Army reached Theresienstadt on April 15 with 109 Jews. This was the last deportation of the war organized by Eichmann’s department.26
On April 14, United States troops reached Gardelegen itself. There, in yet another camp established for the death marchers, they found, in a huge open pit, the still burning logs on which the bodies of the dead had been cremated.27
On April 15, the first British tanks entered Belsen. By chance, three of the British soldiers in the tanks were Jews. But the survivors did not realize what had happened: ‘We, the cowed and emaciated inmates of the camp, did not believe we were free,’ one of the Jews there, Josef Rosensaft, later recalled. ‘It seemed to us a dream which would soon turn again into cruel reality.’28
At Belsen, the ‘cruel reality’ came swiftly, as those first British tanks moved on, in pursuit of the German forces. For the next forty-eight hours the camp remained only nominally under British control, with the Hungarian SS guards in partial command. During that brief interval, seventy-two Jews and eleven non-Jews were shot by the Hungarians for such offences as taking potato peel from the kitchen.29
When, finally, British troops did enter Belsen in force, the evidence of mass murder on a vast scale became immediately apparent to them. Of ten thousand unburied bodies, most were victims of starvation. Even after liberation three hundred inmates died each day during the ensuing week from typhus and starvation. Even after the arrival of massive British medical aid, personnel and food, the death rate was still sixty a day after two weeks and more.30
Among those who died after liberation was Miriam Fintz, one of the deportees of July 1944 from Rhodes to Auschwitz.31 ‘Men and women, clad in rags,’ Colonel Gerald Draper has recalled, ‘and barely able to move from starvation and typhus, lay in their straw bunks in every state of filth and degradation. The dead and dying could not be distinguished.’ Men and women ‘collapsed as they walked and fell dead’. In order to cope with what they found in
‘verminous and stinking barracks’, Draper added, the British army doctors ‘marked a red cross on the foreheads of those they thought had a chance of surviving’.32
Fania Fenelon has recalled, of those first days of liberation at Belsen:
A new life breathed in the camp. Jeeps, command cars, and half tracks drove around among the barracks. Khaki uniforms abounded, the marvellously substantial material of their battle dress mingling with the rags of the deportees. Our liberators were well fed and bursting with health, and they moved among our skeletal, tenuous silhouettes like a surge of life. We felt an absurd desire to finger them, to let our hands trail in their eddies as in the Fountain of Youth. They called to one another, whistled cheerfully, then suddenly fell silent, faced with eyes too large, or too intense a gaze. How alive they were; they walked quickly, they ran, they leapt. All these movements were so easy for them, while a single one of them would have taken away our last breath of life! These men seemed not to know that one could live in slow motion, that energy was something you saved.33
Photographs, films and articles about Belsen circulated widely in Britain by the end of April, making so great an impact that the word ‘Belsen’ was to become synonymous with ‘inhumanity’. For these were not reports of discoveries by the Red Army in the distant eastern regions of the Reich, but of horrors as seen by men from London and Manchester, from the Midlands and the north of England, battle-weary soldiers familiar enough with the horrors of war by April 1945, but shocked as they never thought they could be by the sights that confronted them. ‘There had been no food nor water for five days preceding the British entry,’ a British army review reported. ‘Evidence of cannibalism was found. The inmates had lost all self-respect, were degraded morally to the level of beasts. Their clothes were in rags, teeming with lice, and both inside and outside the huts was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags and filth.’
Soldiers and nurses set to work to save those who could be saved. But even the arrival of food was too much for hundreds of the inmates, who died as a result of the ‘richness’ of the British army rations: dried milk-powder, oatmeal, sugar, salt and tinned meat.34
Among the British soldiers who witnessed the first days of liberation at Belsen was Peter Coombs, who described in a letter to his wife the condition of the survivors:
The sight of these affects one profoundly, for while there is still life and movement, we are interested in their salvation mentally and physically. The conditions in which these people live are appalling. One has to take a tour round and see their faces, their slow staggering gait and feeble movements. The state of their minds is plainly written on their faces, as starvation has reduced their bodies to skeletons. The fact is that all these were once clean-living and sane and certainly not the type to do harm to the Nazis. They are Jews and are dying now at the rate of three hundred a day. They must die and nothing can save them—their end is inescapable, they are too far gone now to be brought back to life.
I saw their corpses lying near their hovels, for they crawl or totter out into the sunlight to die. I watched them make their last feeble journeys, and even as I watched they died.
‘Every other day’, Coombs added, ‘the bodies were collected and buried and there is always an open grave.’ Ninety-eight British medical students had arrived at Belsen, ‘and will take a hut between two of them and see that the inmates get the right medical attention and food in the right quantities.’ He added: ‘I have never seen people looking so ill, so wretched and so near to death. Belsen is a living death, an example of Nazi methods, the best indictment of their government one could ever find, and if it is ever necessary, an undoubted answer to those who want to know what we have been fighting for. One feeble movement of the hand in salutation to us from these people is also an answer, for our coming has saved thousands in this camp alone, but for many it is too late.’35
On the same day that British troops entered Belsen, American troops entered yet another camp at Nordhausen, where hundreds of slave labourers were found, ‘in conditions’, as the United States Signal Corps recorded, ‘almost unrecognizable as human. All were little more than skeletons: the dead lay beside the sick and dying in the same beds: filth and human excrement covered the floors. No attempt had been made to alleviate the disease and gangrene that had spread unchecked among the prisoners.’
The Americans listened in horror, as did the British at Belsen, to the stories of past atrocities that every liberated prisoner could recount. ‘I mention an example of greatest bestiality,’ a United States investigator recorded. ‘A woman in the last stages of pregnancy was thrown down by an SS man who then stepped on her with his boots until birth was forced. In blood and pain the woman died wretchedly.’36
***
The Germans realised that the war was nearly over, and that retribution was imminent. On April 14, a Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, negotiated the release of the 423 Danish Jews who had been held, unharmed, at Theresienstadt, and they were returned to Denmark.37 But elsewhere, the cruel evacuations continued. On April 15, as the Western and Soviet armies drew together, seventeen thousand women and forty thousand men were marched westwards from Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen. A Red Cross official who was present, by chance, as the marchers set off from Ravensbruck, wrote in his report: ‘As I approached them, I could see that they had sunken cheeks, distended bellies and swollen ankles. Their complexion was sallow. All of a sudden, a whole column of those starving wretches appeared. In each row a sick woman was supported or dragged along by her fellow detainees. A young SS woman supervisor with a police dog on a leash led the column, followed by two girls who incessantly hurled abuse at the poor women.’38
Many hundreds of women died of exhaustion in the march from Ravensbruck. Hundreds more were shot by the wayside. Others were killed by Allied bombs falling on German lines of communication; among these bomb victims was Mila Racine, a twenty-one-year-old French girl who in October 1943 had been caught by the Gestapo while on clandestine courier duty, escorting a group of children to the Swiss border. Later she had been deported to Auschwitz. Now she lay dead by a German roadside.39
In southern Germany it was the turn of French troops to stumble across the evidence of mass murder, and of recent killings. Even amid the beautiful spring fragrance of the Swabian Alps and the upper Danube, it was the stench of death that assailed them.
At four villages, the French troops found the mass graves of Jews who had earlier been deported from camps and ghettos in the east. With typical Gestapo thoroughness, the names, ages and birthplaces of the victims had all been recorded. The thirty-nine-year-old Peisach Rudnicki had been born in distant Swieciany, where, in September 1941, nearly four thousand Jews had been murdered, but where several hundred had managed to escape, including his own nephew, Yitzhak Rudnicki. The young Rudnicki survived the war as a teenage partisan with the Red Army. Later, as Yitzhak Arad, he was to become Chairman of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust martyrs and heroes remembrance authority in Jerusalem.
Buchenwald, Belsen, Nordhausen, and more than a hundred other camps and sub-camps had been liberated by the third week of April. ‘We are now reading’, wrote Captain Foley, Britain’s former Passport Control Officer in Berlin, on April 19, ‘about those places the names of which were so well known to us in the years before the war. Now the people here really and finally believe that the stories of 1938–9 were not exaggerated.’ Looking back, Foley added, ‘I feel grateful that our little office in Tiergartenstrasse was able to assist some—far too few—to escape in time.’40
In Berlin, the day after Captain Foley wrote this letter, Heinrich Himmler decided to win some credit with the approaching Allies. At a meeting with Norbert Masur on April 20 he agreed to allow seven thousand women, a half of them Jewish, to be taken from Ravensbruck to Sweden.41
In Croatia, Soviet forces were sweeping the German forces northward to the Austrian border. One last camp remained to be liberated, Jasenovac, where tens of thousa
nds of Yugoslav Jews had been murdered. By April 1945 there were only a thousand Jews and Serbs still alive in the camp. On April 22, six hundred of them rose in revolt. The guards had no hesitation in opening fire, and five hundred and twenty prisoners were shot down. But eighty managed to escape, among them twenty Jews.42
The Second World War was almost over. Yet no corner of the dwindling Reich was free from killing: on April 25, six Jews were taken by the Gestapo at Cuneo, in northern Italy, and shot. That same day, in the final evacuation from Stutthof, two hundred Jewish women were taken to the seashore and shot. The remaining four thousand prisoners, of whom fifteen hundred were Jews, were evacuated on five barges, across the Baltic to the Danish—German coastline. More than half of these evacuees were drowned, or shot by the Germans.43
For the Allied armies, April 25 was a day of historic importance: the meeting at Torgau of Russian and United States forces. Militarily, Germany had been cut in half. Three days later, the Red Cross arranged with the SS for the transport of 150 Jewesses from Ravensbruck, which was still under German control, to Sweden. These were to be the first of the 3,500 Jewish and 3,500 non-Jewish women whom Himmler had agreed should be transferred to safety. On their way out of Germany, five of the Jewesses were killed during an Allied air raid.44 Many of those who did reach Sweden died, like tens of thousands of other survivors, after their rescue and after their liberation. They had been too much weakened by their experiences to be saved, even in surroundings of kindness and care. They had come, these survivors who could not survive, from all over Europe. Rozika Rosenbaum from Warsaw was thirty years old. Rosette Bas from Amsterdam, Helena Hausman from Dresden and Rozalia Katz from Beregszasz were each twenty. Bronislawa Dorfman from Czestochowa was sixteen. All died within a few months of liberation.45
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