From The Road

Letters, tips, photos & exploits from you, our endlessly adventurous readers

The bare bones of Bergen-Belsen

Reader Tabitha Green, winner of our ‘One Sight I’ll Never Forget’ online writing competition, recalls a school trip like no other...

They say that the birds don’t sing in Bergen-Belsen. They sing freely in the heath and woodland outside this former concentration camp, but inside, they remain quiet. It seemed fitting.

My father was in the armed forces, and we were stationed in northern Germany for many of my school years. It was only natural that one of my history lessons saw the class visit the nearby site of the camp, famous for having had Anne Frank as one of its prisoners, claiming her life just months before it was liberated on 15 April 1945.

Today, there is little left of the camp, which was burned down by its British liberators, but the mounds of 13 mass graves stood as testament to just some of the horrors of the place. These graves were where the incoming soldiers had hurriedly buried around 10,000 bodies that had been left to decompose when the German guards fled. But many thousands who perished here were not even afforded that small dignity in their death.

Around 120,000 Soviet POWs and Jewish prisoners came through the gates of Bergen Belsen during its operation, and of those, almost half are believed to have died, mostly of diseases like typhus, or simply of starvation. The grounds of the camp are now a memorial to those who had their lives taken from them, and it was a very moving experience to walk around. It was quiet, too – those birds didn’t sing after all.