• The British comedian
Michael Bentine, who took part in the liberation of the camp, wrote this on his encounter with Belsen: Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I've tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won't come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy. •
Memories of Anne Frank, a book written by Alison Leslie Gold on the recollections of Hannah Goslar, a friend of
Anne Frank •
Mervin Willett Gonin DSO wrote about the immediate aftermath to the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in his diary. •
Leslie Hardman,
Rabbi and
British Army Chaplain, was the first
Jewish chaplain to enter the camp, two days after its liberation, and published his account in the collective book
Belsen in History and Memory. • In ''
Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student's Journal'', volunteer
Michael Hargrave gives his first-hand testimony of working at the displaced persons camp after liberation. •
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch describes life in Belsen, its liberation and her stay at the
displaced persons camp in her autobiography
Inherit the Truth. •
Shaul Ladany, who was in the camp as an 8-year-old and later survived the
Munich Massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics recalled: I saw my father beaten by the SS, and I lost most of my family there... A ransom deal that the Americans attempted saved 2,000 Jews and I was one. I actually went into the gas chamber, but was reprieved. God knows why. • In his book
From Belsen to Buckingham Palace Paul Oppenheimer tells of the events leading up to the internment of his whole family at the camp and their incarceration there between February 1944 and April 1945, when he was aged 14–15. •
Abel Herzberg wrote the diary
Between Two Streams () during his internment in Bergen-Belsen • British servicemen
Denis Norden and
Eric Sykes, who later became popular comedians, stumbled upon the camp in 1945 shortly after liberation; "Appalled, aghast, repelled – it is difficult to find words to express how we felt as we looked upon the degradation of some of the inmates not yet repatriated," Sykes later wrote. "They squatted in their thin, striped uniforms, unmoving bony structures who could have been anywhere between 30 and 60 years old, staring ahead with dead, hopeless eyes and incapable of feeling any relief at their deliverance." • A number of British artists depicted the aftermath of the liberation of the camp. These included
Eric Taylor,
Leslie Cole,
Doris Zinkeisen,
Mary Kessell and
Edgar Ainsworth. • In his 2011 autobiography
I Was a Boy in Belsen, Holocaust survivor
Tomi Reichental recounts his experiences as a prisoner in the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp. •
In the Dead Years: Holocaust Memoirs (), published by Amsterdam Publishers, survivor Joseph Schupack (1922-1989) tells about his last camp, Bergen-Belsen (pp. 173–174): •
And the Month Was May: A Memoir () by Lilian Berliner traces the life of Berliner, from her childhood in Hungary, to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, to her eventual liberation and resettlement in New York. After a day's journey, we arrived at Bergen-Belsen. This concentration camp was hopelessly overcrowded and we were not accepted. The right hand no longer knew what the left hand was doing, so we were sent to an adjoining Wehrmacht compound. As the soldiers of the Wehrmacht marched out, we moved in. The confusion was unbelievable; this time it was disorder with German perfection. We were moved into clean barracks, equipped for human beings with excellent bathrooms and clean beds stacked three on top of each other. After all we had experienced in the preceding year, this was sheer luxury. There was no mention of the usual camp rituals, no roll calls and no work, but also no food. • CMK Parsons, a British Army chaplain and great-grandfather of British artist
Tom Marshall photographed his time at the camp, including the burning of the huts. His photos were published in 2015. • Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity. •
Belsen Uncovered by Derrick Sington (1946) The twentieth century has so far produced no more terrifying example of collective human wickedness than the Belsen Concentration Camp, a black spot which it fell to the lot of the British Army to occupy. This book is the personal story of the first British officer to enter the camp on its liberation and the last to leave, after a stay of five months. The author and two of his N.C.O.'s between them spoke five languages, so they had unrivalled opportunities for discovering what the inmates, men, women and children, experienced and felt. The evil which produced the concentration camps is fully exposed, and here too will be found a record of how the psychological and medical problems were tackled, as well as such complicated matters as supplies, welfare and rehabilitation. •
Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp: A Personal Account by
Leonard Berney (former) Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney R.A. T.D. (2015) But what should you do when faced with 60,000 dead, sick and dying people? We were in the army to fight a war and to beat the enemy. We were good at that, having been in combat for the last ten months, but none of us had any experience of dealing with the situation in Belsen and we were all more or less traumatized by the sights we had seen. I myself, although a 'senior officer', had turned 25 years of age only a few days before. Most of the men sent to deal with that human disaster were in their late teens or early twenties, even younger than I was. What we suddenly found ourselves faced with was beyond anyone's comprehension ==Media==