On a hot Sunday afternoon exactly 80 years ago on Tuesday, an amplified British voice echoed across the expanse of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Across the piles of emaciated bodies and the stench of death, the disembodied voice repeated: “Hello ... Hello ... You are free. We are British soldiers here to free you ...”
For the countless prisoners delirious from typhus and near death, it might have been the voice of an angel.
Many didn’t live long enough for the liberation; at least 14,000 died soon after. Today, among the silver birch trees at the memorial, massive heather-covered mounds of earth conceal mass graves for about a third of the 70,000 people from 40 countries who perished.
Bergen-Belsen was established in 1940 as a prisoner of war camp but from 1943 Jewish civilians were shipped in en masse.
Among the 60,000 prisoners still alive when the camp was liberated was Anita Lasker, today one of Britain’s best-known survivors, who passed through Auschwitz to end up in Bergen-Belsen at the end of the second World War.
“People starved here,” she told the BBC in a landmark broadcast after her liberation. “There was typhus here, there was dirt, lice, no hygiene, no ambulance, no medication.”
Away from the mass graves, a small black stone is a symbolic resting place for Bergen-Belsen’s most famous victim, the teenage diarist Anne Frank.
Among those who knew Anne and her sister Margo were Rebekka Brilleslijpers, also known as Lin Jaldati, and her sister Jannie. They crossed paths a remarkable three times with the Frank sisters. First at the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands after their Jewish families had been betrayed to the Nazis. Then again at Auschwitz and, finally, from November 1944 in Bergen-Belsen.
Lin Jaldati, later a well-known performer of Yiddish songs, recalled in her memoir how the two sets of sisters still found moments of beauty amid the horror. Such as how in late 1944 they realised it must be Christmas after getting an extra piece of bread and cheese and margarine.
They roasted potato peelings in an oven with a piece of garlic produced by Anne and held an improvised Passover meal, giving each other presents made from pieces of bread.
“We sang cheery songs, Yiddish songs, we told each other stories and dreamed about everything we would do when we came home,” recalled Lin afterwards. “Anne wanted to have dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in Amsterdam. We dreamed and, in this moment, we were happy. We looked each other in the eyes, round eyes with a green shimmer. We had become so thin.”
In early March, hearing the Frank sisters were ill with typhus, Lin and Jannie visited them in the sick bay where they lay together in a bunk. On their second visit the bunk was empty: “We knew what that meant so we searched for them and found them, put them in a big blanket, brought them to the big pit and cast them in.”
Lin weighed just 28 kilos and, delirious with typhus, had no memory of the camp liberation. Returning to her hometown of Amsterdam more dead than alive, she ordered her husband to let her sleep and only wake her if a named handful of people came to call, including Otto Frank, father of Anne and Margot.
“Lin and Jannie were those who had to tell Otto Frank that his loved ones were not coming back,” said Jalda Rebling, daughter of Lin, who carries on her mother’s Yiddish song tradition.
While the world knows of the Frank family betrayal and Anne’s diary, the remarkable story of the Brilleslijpers family has only been become public knowledge in recent years.
Rather than hide in an Amsterdam annex like the Franks, the Brilleslijpers hid in plain view. They rented a huge house in a forest outside Amsterdam, sheltering other Jews on the run until, like the Franks, they were betrayed. The Brilleslijpers sisters lost their brother and parents in Auschwitz.
A decade ago Dutch journalist Roxane van Iperen began piecing the story together after she moved into their old house. During renovations she discovered specially-constructed hideaways, some still containing traces of their daring strategy.
Van Iperen’s 2018 bestseller ‘t Hooge Nest, translated into English as The Sisters of Auschwitz, pieced together their full story and shattered many postwar national narratives. Far more common than Dutch resistance, Van Iperen points out, was Dutch collaboration with the Nazis – and betrayal of their Jewish neighbours.
Eight decades on, as new nationalist leaders take aim at new minority groups across Europe, Rebling sees her family story as much as a warning for the future as from the past.
“Even freedom-loving people like the Dutch, with their obstinacy and with rights for Jews since the 18th century, still flipped,” said Rebling. “Within just 1½ years they became willing executors of the new occupying power. When the final numbers were published, I was shaken to find that nowhere did the deportations of Jews work as well as in the Netherlands.”
