GERMANY: Six decades on, the horror of the Nazi era lives on for survivors, reports Derek Scally in Bergen-Belsen.
In the hot Sunday sun yesterday, Bergen-Belsen camp appeared to be nothing more than a huge open field. But the silver birch trees, swaying in the breeze, are broken up by huge, heather-covered mounds of earth which conceal a horrific story.
"Here rest 1,000 dead . . . 2,000 dead . . . 5,000 dead . . ." An estimated 70,000 people, from 40 countries, died here. There are 12 mass graves containing more than 23,000 bodies.
A well-worn path through the grass leads to a small black gravestone, covered in tulips. It is a symbolic resting place for Bergen-Belsen's most famous victim, Anne Frank.
Just weeks before liberation, she succumbed to the typhoid fever which was rampant in the camp.
Esther Brunstein managed to hang on to life, a skeletal 16-year-old with typhoid fever in a bunk beside three dead women.
Now a sprightly 77-year-old with blonde hair and a slight limp, she returned to Bergen-Belsen camp for the first time in 60 years yesterday.
"I don't remember the day of liberation. I had a fever, so I missed what could have been a very exhilarating moment for me," she remembers.
At 3pm on another hot Sunday afternoon 60 years ago the prisoners in the camp heard a loud British voice: "Hello . . . Hello . . . You are free. We are British soldiers here to free you . . ." Esther Brunstein fell unconscious still a prisoner and woke up free.
"They didn't expect me to wake up. I saw smiling faces saying: 'It's over, it's over.' I thought I had died and gone to heaven."
She passed out again and awoke later to find four portions of black bread and four tins of condensed milk. She burst into tears and could not eat. "That probably saved me, because our stomachs were so shrunken and there are so many people who died after finally getting food."
She sat silently at the memorial service yesterday, murmuring prayers, her eyes closed.
The Belsen camp was established in 1941 for allied prisoners of war and it was enlarged by the SS in 1943 into a detention camp for Jews whose freedom could be "bought" by foreign governments. In 1944, with the allies pressing in on both sides, Belsen was flooded with thousands of prisoners from other camps.
"What can you say? I'm still numb. I know the reaction will come later," said Ms Brunstein.
She arrived at Belsen in 1944, mistakenly optimistic that her wartime torture was over. She was born into a working-class Jewish family in Lodz, a thriving Polish city of 250,000 Jews, who made up about one-third of the population.
That world disintegrated after the Nazis marched into Poland in 1939. Her father and one of her two brothers left Lodz and were killed while on the run from the Nazis. Esther, her mother and her other brother were forced, along with 180,000 others, into the Lodz ghetto, a grim, barbed-wire enclosure.
They only left when they were removed during the ghetto liquidation of August 1944.
As they were hurried on to cattle trucks Esther remembers her tired, gravely-ill mother asking: "What could be worse than the Lodz ghetto?" When the barred doors of the trucks reopened, endless hours later, they soon found out: Auschwitz.
Remarkably, Esther got out of Auschwitz alive, but without her mother, Sarah. She was first transported to another camp and then to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945. "It was a living inferno. Barracks were already overcrowded with living and decaying corpses. There was total chaos and the stench of dead bodies everywhere," she said. Even six decades on, she still shakes her head in amazement that she survived Bergen-Belsen and was reunited with her one surviving brother in England in 1947.
Her story mirrors that of 80-year-old Betty Goldberg. She narrowly escaped the gas chambers at Auschwitz and barely survived the death march to Bergen-Belsen.
Once there, a close friend, Adela, caught typhus and was in the camp's isolation block on the verge of death when Betty heard that the huts were to be burned down to contain the disease. "I had to go and take her, carry her like a thief in the night, back to my barrack, so no one would see her," she says.
Both women survived: Adela went to Sweden and Betty emigrated to Israel. "It took me a long time to deal with the feeling that I had been left alive as a punishment to be on my own and try to survive."
Esther Brunstein walked out of Bergen-Belsen for a second time yesterday with numb feelings.
"I'm glad it wasn't all in vain. I have two daughters and five grandchildren," she said. "But when I think of all the lost young lives, I wonder sometimes how can I be grateful to God?"