Marching to Bergen-Belsen

As our march continued, a big red stone school building stood out on our right. But now, it housed uniformed Hungarian soldiers. They, too, just stared at our unfortunate group. I soon discovered that some of the Nazi soldiers escorting us also spoke Hungarian, and gathered up enough courage to ask one of them where we were going and what sort of work we would have to do. Quite some time elapsed before he thought of what to say, but when his answer finally came it sounded disastrous. He told us the blunt fact that we were marching into a death camp. Then he said something like, "I really cannot understand those Germans; within two months they exterminated twenty thousand Russian prisoners of war".

How much desperation can a person overcome? What is more agonizing - starvation or the constant fear of death? Now I had to deal with both. Within my dark and hopeless world, I plodded along until I saw a high barbed-wire fence with the words "Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp" inscribed atop the heavy stone gate. Reading just those four words made my blood freeze in my veins. I did not have the courage to check if there were more words written - there probably were, but I was not interested in reading them. The only thing I was interested in before entering Bergen-Belsen was how to get out of it!

Sentry boxes marked each side of the gate, which was guarded by two armed German SS Nazis. I was scared stiff. With a feeling of great torment I entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, or more correctly, death factory. Bergen-Belsen's condemned residents perished mainly from systematic starvation, or from machine-gun bullets. The ever-burning crematoria served to get rid of the thousands of corpses while belching clouds of dark, noxious smoke into the sky.

The camp consisted of many separate blocks, with residents of one block prohibited from speaking with residents of another block, and each block locked. Each block housed people of a certain nationality, or people grouped together for other reasons such as the type of punishment they were to be inflicted with. Several kitchens were spread out throughout the camp, each serving a couple of blocks. A huge pine forest encircled Bergen-Belsen. A slow and steady rain continued to fall as our group of over fifteen thousand was herded into Block 10. We stood outside, starving, for many hours.

© David Muskal, 2001