'The first thing that hits you is the smell and the smog. The people were like skeletons who would shuffle along until they fell and died...'

EIGHTY years ago British and Canadian troops arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and discovered the true horror of the Nazis' terror regime.

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In huts and barracks and behind barbed wire they found up to 60,000 emaciated, diseased and ghost-like survivors clinging to life amid 13,000 unburied corpses.

Originally established as a prisoner-of-war camp, BergenBelsen had become a site of unimaginable suffering for Jewish inmates and other persecuted people, among them teenage diarist Anne Frank, whose death there symbolises the camp's devastating legacy.

Yesterday more than 1,000 survivors, families and guests gathered to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in northern Germany - Conor Wilson was there to hear of unimaginable loss.

BERGEN-BELSEN survivor Mala Tribich will never forget the day her life changed for ever.

The Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 had implications the world over - but for this eightyear-old Jewish girl they were instant and terrifying.

Her small home town, Piotrkow, was bombed the day after the Nazis invaded Poland, and her family was taken from her.

Still sharp of mind at 94, Mala is able to recall her arrival at BergenBelsen vividly: "I had been at a few camps but this was the worst. I came from Ravensbruck, which was a lot more organised.

"They put us up in a very big tent and we were there overnight and in the morning they took us into the main camp, but there was no room in the barracks and so my cousin and I wandered around the camp. It defies description, it was so terrible.