On April 15, 1945, when British troops entered the Nazi concentration camp not far from the German city of Hanover, my parents were among the prisoners they liberated.
The British soldiers rightly called Bergen-Belsen a “horror camp.” Around 60,000 inmates, most of them suffering from typhus, extreme malnutrition and a host of other virulent diseases, were crowded together in subhuman conditions alongside thousands of unburied corpses. Almost 14,000 of the prisoners who were alive on April 15 died in the two months following the liberation.
One survivor, Alice Lok Cahana, described Bergen-Belsen as “hell on earth,” adding, “When we arrived, the dead were not carried away any more. You stepped over them, you fell over them…there were agonizing people begging for water…they were crying, they were begging…You couldn’t escape the crying, you couldn’t escape the praying…it was a chant, the chant of the dead.”
My mother subsequently recalled the grim reality of her first days of freedom. For the liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen, she said, “there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes. We had no place to go, nobody to hug. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We had been liberated from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life.”
For the past 76 years, the survivors of Bergen-Belsen and the other Nazi German death and concentration camps have been the living reminders of the genocide of European Jewry by the Third Reich and its multinational accomplices. The survivors bore witness to the brutal, systematic mass murder of their families, friends and neighbors, and to the destruction of their communities throughout German-occupied Europe.
More than anyone else, the survivors’ children and grandchildren, who grew up listening to their recollections, have an intuitive sensitivity to the spectral dimensions of the Holocaust that cannot be conveyed through dispassionate documentation or with statistical data. Having absorbed their memories, we have become their witnesses, their attestors. And these memories inevitably include stories, songs, prayers, parables, dreams and nightmares.
My mother died hours after the end of Rosh Hashanah in 1997. Six months later, I took our daughter, Jodi, then a college sophomore, to Poland for the first time. She and my mother had been very close and had spent a great deal of time together as Jodi was growing up. We went to Warsaw and Krakow, and then to the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp with the ruins of its gas chambers and crematoria.
We walked in silence past the decaying wooden barracks. After 15 or 20 minutes, Jodi turned to me and said, “You know, it looks exactly the way Dassah” — which is what she called my mother, Hadassah — “described it.” In that moment, I realized that a transfer of memory had taken place. My daughter, born 33 years after the Holocaust, had recognized Birkenau through her grandmother’s eyes, through her grandmother’s memories.
We are in a time of generational transition. With the survivors, the eyewitnesses, sadly fading from the scene, Holocaust remembrance must perforce be recast, recalibrated. We who have been granted the gift of memory by our parents and grandparents must now transmit what we heard from them, what we learned from them to our children, to our grandchildren and to all who will shape our societies’ and our world’s future. But we must do so from our perspective, on our terms.
We are also haunted, much in the way cemeteries are haunted. We carry inside ourselves ghosts of murdered grandparents, of murdered siblings, of countless souls that have taken up residence within us.
I have tried to give voice to my ghosts through poetry. One of my poems, “At Belsen,” is my way of visualizing the essence of Bergen-Belsen and the tens of thousands who were murdered there:
enter a realm
ruled only
by earth
dried grass
which do not conceal
unhidden graves
eyes closed
think of the child
that was
but never
became;
remember them
walking
in the gray wind
under freezing suns;
feel the blood
that would not burn
will not disappear
invisibly soaking
spreading
one stone
above the bones:
lonely vigil
mute prophet
ever prosecutor
try to cry
without tears;
scream
in silence;
mourn
but not wallow
why return?
the dead refuse
to leave
Rosensaft is associate executive vice president and general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities. His poem,”At Belsen,” is from his newly published book, “Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen.”