November, 1944: Concentration Camp Shipment

Belsen Concentration Camp, A Personal Acccount by Major Leonard Berney, British 2nd. Army On 12th. April our Corps HQ was at Winsen, about 50 Km North-East of Hannover; we had just crossed the Aller river. The front line was rapidly moving East. A Colonel Schmidt of the German Army was escorted through our front line to our HQ; he was in a motorcycle and side car and was waving a white flag. He met with our Brigadier Chief of Staff. Schmidt said that we were approaching a camp called Bergen-Belsen which contained civilian political prisoners and that typhus had broken out there. He had been sent by his general to propose that the area around the camp should not be fought over for fear that the prisoners might escape and spread the disease to both armies. I arrived at the camp entrance just as the 63rd. arrived. About 30 SS guards (some were women, all were armed), with Captain Joseph Kramer at their head, had lined up as a reception committee. As I recall, Kramer had some document ready for Col. Taylor to sign. At that point we heard shooting coming from the camp (we could not see into from where we were). Kramer explained that some of the prisoners were trying to escape and that the guards in the camp were having to open fire on them. More...

Towards the end of October, we were served a one-day notice to prepare ourselves for a journey. The destination - concentration death camps. The first station for us four families was Strasshof, where several thousands of our fellow Jewish slave laborers gathered. After a few days we were again herded into boxcars ready for shipment. The date may have been the first or second of November, 1944.

This was a very dark era in the history of mankind, when a group of beings who called themselves humans perpetrated such unheard of evil deeds against millions of innocent, defenseless people. With incomprehensible brutality they exterminated their victims. And why? Because we belonged to the Jewish faith, the religion of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses - the Prophets whose holy tenets were accepted by almost half the world. The Jewish people gave mankind its most precious book, the Bible. Yet Nazi Germany sentenced us to annihilation, the spark of hatred mercilessly spreading the fire of death.

The boxcar with its human cargo was advancing from Austria through Czechoslovakia in the direction of Berlin, Germany. The human cargo consisted of the Jewish slave-laborers of the twentieth century, stripped of all their human rights, banished from their country of birth by the government, mercilessly thrown to the clutches of Nazi Germany in order to be annihilated. We sat crammed on the naked floor, asking no questions as to our pending destruction. It was pitch dark at night. Under the influence of months of agony we lost our own free will, and just accepted the treacherous instructions and followed the perilous hands wherever they took us. Our minds were in a state of terror then, with the effects lingering long after.

© David Muskal, 2001