An Abomination' Bergen-Belsen Survivor Recounts Holocaust Horror

For a long time, Lola Hassid Angel did not want to talk about the horrors of her childhood. Her experiences of the second world war had not been light: by the age of eight, the Holocaust survivor had "reached adulthood," seen things she should never have seen, heard sounds she should never have heard, and been confronted by terrors she could neither forgive nor forget.

- Helena Smith

Which is why the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British forces on 15 April 1945 is as much a cause for joy as for the horror to come flooding back.

"But it's also different," Angel, now 88 and a great-great-grandmother, said over tea in her apartment in Athens. "Now I want to tell the whole world what happened. And that's because I want all these men who lead us to know what war really looks like. The Germans had a zeal for death; they had turned it into a science."

Quick to smile, gravel-voiced and diminutive, Angel is among the last of Greece's dwindling Jewish community to have survived Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp complex in northern Germany. "What happened there was an abomination," Angel said. "An abomination that historians will one day refer to as a dark page but which we, as the last survivors, are duty-bound to describe."

Retreating Nazi forces agreed to hand the camp over to the allies on 12 April. It was, by all accounts, a peaceful exchange until the 11th Armoured Division of the British army, backed by the 63rd Anti-tank Regiment, arrived at the complex's barbed wire confines on 15 April.

Witnesses said nothing could have prepared them for what they found. The stench of death was everywhere, in the corpses piled high, some green, almost all emaciated, lying by the thousands in various stages of decomposition. Typhus had spread. So, too, had dysentery and starvation. Of the 60,000 people locked inside, more than 14,000 would die within weeks of liberation because freedom had simply come too late. More than 70,000 people were killed in the camp, most Jewish but also including 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war and other Nazi targets such as Roma and gay men.