´óÏó´«Ã½

"This story was submitted to the site by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with John Haywoods permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

I arrived at Belsen in 1945. I was attached to the 6th airborne division and they were on their way to Berlin for the victory parade. When we got to Belsen we’d been walking about 400 miles a day. The people in the camp were working — they had no idea that we were nearby. From outside the camp it looked like it would be a lovely place. Straight away we had to find billets and I was billeted in the Dr’s house.

Everything in the camp was neat and tidy. Before you entered the concentration camp there was a twenty foot high barbed wire fence. After crossing that, the first thing that you saw was a pile of footwear the size of house. There were two people hanging from gallows and dead bodies everywhere, it was unimaginable. Everyone was just skin and bone. We were dumb struck but realised that we were there with a job to do.

The smell of the camp was one of death and we soon noticed that no birds flew over head. There were two notices in the camp that simply said typhoid and typhus. When we first started working in the camp we had to move people as well as feed them. It was hard to know how to feed people because if we gave them too much food or something too rich it would have killed them. While at the camp they’d just been fed a watery soup. If they ever tried to eat anything else they would have been shot, or stripped naked and left to die. There had been no sympathy in Belsen.

I met a Jewish lady called Luska — she was a lovely lady who had been kept healthy so that she could work on munitions. She was fit and lovely looking.

Whilst working on the camp I saw the ovens. Ten ovens just like you would see in a crematorium. The story was that some of the families had had to lock their children in the ovens and then stand there and watch them die. Nearby the ovens there was a plush swimming pool for the Germans to swim in — it was terrible.

The first night I was there I didn’t sleep a wink.

In the shower block was the gas chambers. The people would laugh and chat because they were pleased that they were having a shower after so long. They’d then die screaming and panicking as the gas was turned on and no water ever came.

The German barracks at the site were really nice. They had a cinema and nice brick buildings, everything they could have ever wanted. The officers wives lived in Bergen, a village nearby. All the villagers claimed that they had not known what was going on. We took them to the camp to see for themselves, they kept crying out because they didn’t want to see. They must have known something was going on because the stench was gruesome.

I was at the camp for about six weeks — I couldn’t have standed it any longer. Every day and night something crops up which reminds me of Belsen. It made me turn against God.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.