I agree it was very moving and had me 'removing dust from my eyes'.
Just visiting a monument to a Nazi extermination camp in Kiev (Babi Yar) made me feel physically sick,
This struck a chord with me. When my son, a British army seargent, was stationed in Germany at Bergen a couple of miles up the road from the Bergen-Belson camp, we went for a visit and I too felt sick at both the film footage and the life size photos of the heaps of hundreds of bodies, being shifted by a bull dozer.
In the museum there were things like a baby's shoe, locks of hair and false teeth, masses of photographs of unknown now dead people.
In the camp arena outside you can hear no birds or insects and nothing grows on the perimeter, it is just grey dust. Everywhere is eerily silent, even though the camp was quite close to the main road, traffic could not be heard.
Apparently, there, the butcher and baker in Bergen made a stash of money from the Nazi's supplying rotten meat and stale bread to the camp. The film footage showed the Brits and American liberation soldiers lining up the townspeople including the Lord Mayor and making them look at the remains of the dead, when they denied knowledge of what was happening on their own doorstep in the camp. Of course we have to remember that though the vast majority of inmates were Jewish, there were also Gypsies, black people, communists, the mentally insane or feeble minded, disabled people, Polish people, Russian people and gay people, and not forgetting ordinary Germans who opposed Hitler.Worst of all little innocent children and babies. They all had their own special badge to wear so the guards knew instantly what they were.
I balled my eyes out whilst I was there and couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks. The film was recorded in several languages, shown at different times. I read recently that German school children have a compulsory visit to one of the camps as part of the curriculum so that such atrocities will never happen again. Thank goodness the main contenders, the camp commandant, known as the Beast of Belsen, and others, including several women, were were made to shift rotting dead bodies by hand. After a war crimes trial they were all hung.
Listening to 'Tracing Your Roots' yesterday on Radio Four, it was apparent that as early as 1937 the Jewish population, who were able, through money, were desperately fleeing Germany, mostly to the US but many did come to the UK, but they had to leave parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles behind.
If they, themselves knew then what was happening how come we in the UK didn't realise that there was a reason for this sudden influx of immigrants? It is a mystery to me how this country can say, despite the spy planes flying over Germany, they never knew about the camps until virtually the end of the war.
I'll get off my soap box now.
Pennine.
