♪♪ -It was beautiful.

White birch trees standing peacefully in silence.

I thought this is a lovely place.

Nothing bad can happen to us here.

♪♪ -I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare.

Dead bodies, the some of them in decay, lay strewn about the road and along the rutted tracks.

On each side of the road were brown wooden huts.

There were faces at the windows.

The bony, emaciated faces of starving women, too weak to come outside.

-Those words into the world of a nightmare have always haunted me.

They were spoken by my father 75 years ago, in April 1945.

He was a BBC war correspondent accompanying the British Army as they fought their way across Europe towards Berlin.

And the nightmare he was referring to was Bergen-Belsen, the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by the British.

-I was hearing my friend saying, "She's the next one on the heap."

Because the yard was full of bodies.

-Up until then, in the British Army, I'd been fighting to survive.

But that was the first time that I actually realized why we were there.

It haunts me.

I can't get rid of it.

♪♪ -So what was Belsen?

What happened there?

How?

Why?

And what was the effect on those that survived and their liberators?

♪♪ -I've seen many terrible sights in the last five years.

But nothing -- nothing approaching the dreadful interior of this hut at Belsen.

The dead and the dying lay close together.

I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom.

-My father's radio report revealed for the first time the full horror of Belsen.

It was so shocking, indeed, that when his bosses at the BBC heard it, at first they weren't willing to put it out, and it was only when he threatened to resign that they relented.

His words soon ricocheted around the world because radio, not television, was the only source of broadcast news.

75 years on with those words in my ears, it's not hard to conjure up the -- the images, the sounds, and the stench of death.

♪♪ -I remember the first body.

Somebody said, "Somebody's dead here, has to be taken out of the block."

And I'm such a peculiar person, I thought, "Well, I'm going to do that."

Didn't take very long and there were more and more bodies.

And then the big influx of people started.

-As the Soviet armies attacked from the east, those Jews who had survived Auschwitz, like Anita, were herded westwards.

Along with the remnants of similar camps, they were eventually dumped in Belsen.

The contrast with Auschwitz was unnerving.

-In Auschwitz, there was order.

Belsen -- was disorder.

That's the only way I can describe it is complete, utter disorder.

-As a small child, Tomi Reichental lived in the women's camp, wooden huts that are now just clearings in the trees.

The place engraved in his memory.

-This was hut 207.

-And this was where you were?

-This is where I was, yeah.

And I recognize that.

This is just incredible.

I know the position, how the hut was, where I was in the hut.

That was the entrance in the side.

And the other room was on the right side.

And when we went to the roll call, we saw these skeleton walking around, half starved, half dead.

We had sort of a green area for playing.

So when we saw one of those skeleton falling down, we would stop playing and watching what will happen next.

Because if one of these women got up, we knew she has another day to live.

But most of them never got up.

We saw it every day.

♪♪ -You can't tell today, but there was just a narrow track down here on either side.

Encampments, row upon row upon row of huts.

But on this device, this 3-D device, you can actually see in clinical way what it was like.

The huts running down both sides of fence behind, and then you can pan around and you can see the watchtowers looking down on the people who are here.

-Bergen-Belsen had started life as a prisoner of war camp in 1940, so the first prisoners of war were French and Belgian.

Then 41, it became a Soviet prisoner of war camp, and they died under the most gruesome circumstances.

-Belsen became a vast complex of camps.

Among them, as well as the large women's camp, there was a men's camp.

And most bizarrely, what was called an exchange camp, where those Jews with foreign passports were held as hostages to be bartered for German nationals interned by the allies.

Some escaped by this means, most did not.

At Belsen, they didn't line people up in rows, shoot them, and then throw them into pits.

They didn't exterminate them in gas chambers as they did at Auschwitz.

At Belsen, they were killed by the inhumanity, the barbarism of the Nazis.

Belsen was already full when, from December 1944, a further 85,000 victims began to arrive.

They found starvation rations and an epidemic of killer diseases.

-The switch is the appointment of a new commander on December 1, 1944.

Josef Kramer, formerly at Auschwitz, becomes the commandant at Bergen-Belsen.

-He was like a brute, really.

I mean, you could see his face.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's difficult to fathom out what these people were like.

Really.

-How did you survive?

-Good question.

I don't know.

I don't know.

♪♪ -I was in Bergen-Belsen only three months, but those were the longest three months of my life.

We found all kinds of garbage thrown out.

Some rotten food, some vegetables.

Potato peels were a delicacy, and this helped very much.

I guess the fact that we were young and healthy, helped in a way to survive.

-The craving for food meant taking risks and provoking the sadism of the SS.

♪♪ -I found a knife, which I grabbed and it had the German cross on it, because it must have been from the dining room of the German elite.

And that came very useful.

I could scrape something from the rubbish.

One day, the German guard Irma Grese saw it and said, "What's this?"

I said, "It's mine."

"What?!"

And started screaming -- I didn't understand German or what she said -- and beating me with the back of the knife, which was very heavy.

And I thought she will crack my head.

And in the end she threw it away, kicked me up and said, "Off you go.

Next."

All I wanted is the knife back and the girl standing next to me said, "Don't do it, don't do it.

Don't -- Don't crawl to the knife.

Because if she will see you, she is going to kill you on the spot."

I didn't hear.

I had to have the knife.

And crawled as far as the knife, got it, put it back in my sock, and I have it till this day.

-It seems very kind of uncomfortable for me to hold it, because you feel that Irma Grese's DNA is sort of somehow on the knife.

-[ Chuckles ] Yes.

♪♪ -Getting there into Belsen was just a shock to the system.

You just feel despair and you feel like giving up.

And once you give up, there's no chance of survival.

-My particular luck was that I was arriving there with a group of people, you know, that we were the remnants of the camp orchestra in -- in Auschwitz, and we were like a family.

We looked after each other like crazy.

We were very strict with each other.

Anybody doesn't wash alone in Belsen.

I don't think you had a chance.

-As more and more transports arrived, the death rate began to soar.

Anne Frank, whose diaries were to touch millions, died in the early spring of 1945.

She was 15 years old.

She and her sister were among those tens of thousands whose names would never be known.

In the fortnight before the British arrived, some 9,000 men, women, and children perished.

-At that point, it was actually a microcosm of all the groups persecuted by the Nazis.

So there was the Jews, which was still the overwhelming majority, but also Sinti and Roma, Jehovah's witnesses, gay men, Polish nationals, Soviet nationals that were at Bergen-Belsen.

Members of more than 20 nations.

-I remember sitting inside in this barrack and there were bodies being brought all day long.

So they're bringing them on cots.

But they were exposed dead bodies with limbs hanging either side.

But then these cots, after a time, gave up, and it ended up in someone pulling a naked body by a limb along the road and then just shoving it into this place.

It was quite horrific.

-The big killer was typhus, a disease spread by lice which swept through the camp.

-It was wooden huts we were living, and in the corner of the hut we used to see the lice going like marching army, you know, it was just -- we used to sit like monkeys and doing the lice, you know, that's what spread the typhus, of course.

-I contracted typhus in January 1945, but my friends dragged me out, they held me up, I was counted, I came back, I went back on the bed.

If they didn't, I would have gone.

I would have been gone 'cos I would have gone to the crematorium.

-As the British Army got closer to Belsen, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the principal architect of the Holocaust, decided that the camp should be evacuated without a struggle.

In negotiation with the British, they established a no-fire zone around the camp, which allowed a number of the SS guards to escape before that spring day that no survivor would ever forget.

♪♪ -And that was April 15, 1945, when we were liberated by these amazing British.

-Only the strongest were able to stand for long enough to welcome the troops as they arrived in Belsen for the first time.

-Suddenly, we heard this rumbling, it was in that direction and the British Army was shouting, "This is the British Army!

You are being liberated!"

-It was an amazing time.

I cannot describe to you.

There's something in your life that you dream of.

And...it happens and you can't even believe it.

It is just the most amazing feeling that anybody can have.

I never forget that feeling of liberation.

I'm alive and I'm out.

♪♪ -I saw a man wandering dazedly along the road stagger and fall.

But someone else looked down at him, took him by the heels, and dragged him to the side of the road to join the other bodies lying unburied there.

No one else took the slightest notice.

They didn't even trouble to turn their heads.

-It was moments like that that lodged in my father's mind, and made him say much later that the day he entered Belsen, through the gates that once stood here, was the worst day of his life.

It was much the same for British soldiers, who weren't warned in advance of what it would be like, what they would find when they marched in here for the very first time.

-The things in this camp are beyond describing.

When you actually see them for yourselves, you know what you're fighting for here, pictured in the paper, cannot describe it at all.

-I was 21 when we liberated Belsen and that changed my life.

Completely.

So these high barbed wire fences with the turrets spaced along at the crowd of a -- how can I describe it?

Skeletons.

With flesh on them.

How on Earth can one kind sink to this law?

-If we were not liberated at the time that we were, I would have probably succumbed as well.

But we didn't even know what liberated mean.

But we knew that the tables were turned around, we became free, and our guards became the prisoners.

-When Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen as he became known, surrendered the camp to the British, he was at once arrested, shackled by the legs, and incarcerated -- his Belsen legacy.

The many thousands who died here and the many thousands who survived, half dead, half alive.

-What the British found in the main camp of around 38,000 survivors, many barely alive, walking dead, and the war was still going on.

The front line was only a few kilometers or miles away, and no one knew that the war would be over within a few weeks.

-The smell was unbelievable.

75 years later, I still have the most dreadful, sensitive sense of smell, which has really driving me crazy many times.

-The smell came from unburied corpses, 13,000 of them, all of which had to be buried fast.

The survivors were taken to the sanctuary of a makeshift hospital to be sprayed with pesticide, to kill the lice that were killing them.

♪♪ -It's hard to know what anybody's job was, because I was given a stirrup pump full of DDT, and I spent some time spraying people as they were being brought into the barracks.

-They DDT'd us all over.

There were so many lice that when they dropped dead on the floor, it looked like a fitted carpet.

-My father was the chief medical officer at the liberation of Belsen.

They were just learning about the fact that people who had been starved, the inmates, you mustn't give them lots of food.

You kill them if you do.

Just like that.

-As we gazed at them and they looked at us, you couldn't resist throwing something over.

And that, of course, was the worst thing that we could have done.

We didn't know it at that time, but I regret it now because I know that anything that we threw over, the person who ate it would die.

♪♪ -My mother was one of the cases at the age of 42.

She didn't make it.

She died in May '45 because of eating more than her body could absorb.

After so many months of hunger.

-She was not alone.

Several thousand starving people were killed by the compassion of their liberators.

Others continued to die from typhus and dysentery.

In the first month of liberation, 12,000 inmates died.

♪♪ -I started to crawl across the dead bodies to the door, which was half open, it was a wooden hut, and three little steps down, and I sort of fell over the steps on the ground, which was yellow clay and a huge big puddle with yellow water.

I drank it like a dog.

So I remember seeing the stars and the moon, and in front of me was a little light, and I crawled over the corpses to the light.

And it happened to be a Red Cross station and a British officer.

And my first thought was, "Oh, that's not a German guard with a stick.

This is a friend."

Of course he had his orders.

He said, "I'm sorry you can't stay here.

We have a lot to do here, clearing up this camp.

Please leave.

Go back to your block."

And I said, "I don't want to be in your way.

And I would have to ask you to shoot me here.

It will be quicker."

The mosque was crumbling down and underneath was the human face.

He was just looking and say these words, "All right.

You stay here.

And I'll come in the morning and get you."

And went to close the door.

Before he closed the door, I said, "Do you have water, please?"

He returned back and brought me a big jar of water we haven't seen for months.

Clear drinking water.

And left.

-There was no one to take the bodies away when they died, and I had to look hard to see who was alive and who was dead.

All naked.

All so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones.

-My father would never know that his account of Belsen would become an important document in the archives of the Holocaust, but he did know that his words had a major impact at the time, because he knew them to be accurate and incontrovertible.

-The broadcast came at a time when the first reports in the newspapers were appearing, but the spoken word of someone who was seen as an authority, as someone you could trust, were incredibly important in order to inform the British public about what their troops had uncovered.

-Our most unpleasant task has been making the SS, of which there are about 50, bury the dead.

Up to press, we have buried about 17,000 people, and we expect to bury about half as much again.

-If there were crucial words on radio, there were also vital images on film.

-One of the cameramen said they just held the camera and clicked in order to document what was unimaginable.

So that the world would know what happened.

-One of those given the task of documenting Belsen was the film producer Sidney Bernstein.

-Probably because he had a background in propaganda and psychological warfare, he instantly knew that the scale of the thing was so massive and so horrific that you needed to bring the local burgermeisters in to look at the graves and the corpses, so that Germans could see that their leaders were witnesses to what had happened, that somehow it wasn't manufactured.

-Survivors seized the moment to vent their rage at those who had so recently been their persecutors.

[ Overlapping yelling ] ♪♪ -Sufferers from dysentery leaned against the huts, straining helplessly.

And all around and about them, was this awful drifting tide of exhausted people, neither caring nor waiting.

Few blessed the doctor whom they knew had become the camp commander in the place of the brutal Kramer.

-One by one, the survivors were moved out to a displaced persons camp down the road.

The British then set fire to the huts to eliminate every trace of disease.

On May 21st, the last one was raised.

-I remember that very well when they burnt down the last hut.

Yes, I was there, I saw it.

It was a great pleasure.

-It was something of a symbolic death.

But Bergen-Belsen had an afterlife which endures to this day.

It goes without saying that the trauma of Belsen didn't end with its physical destruction.

The psychological wounds went deep and sometimes never healed.

Belsen scarred the survivors, scarred their families, and scarred the liberators.

I never knew how precisely my father was affected, because he never talked about it to me, In that, he was like many, many others.

♪♪ -I didn't speak about my experiences for 60 years, not because I didn't want to speak, I just couldn't speak.

And my wife passed away in 2003, she did not know about my experiences during the Holocaust.

I never told her.

I didn't speak to anybody about it.

♪♪ -Soon after the war, many survivors of Belsen found their way to Israel, a newly established nation which preferred to look forward rather than back.

-I arrived in Israel a few weeks before the Declaration of Independence in May 1948.

There was no talk about the Holocaust.

On the contrary, when we tried to mention things, people thought that we -- "These youngsters are a little bit fantasizing and telling unbelievable stories."

So, um...

There was very little talk about it.

-I grew up in Israel in the '60s.

It was a big shame to be a survivor or a child of a survivor, especially from concentration camps.

I used to ask my mother when I was very young, "Why aren't you talking?"

She said, "If I will talk, I won't be able to keep on living.

The memories will kill me."

-Liora's mother was so affected by memories of scavenging for food that she hoarded the family's rations.

-We used to argue about everything.

"Why I can't have fresh bread?

Why can't I have a food I like?"

You name it, we argued about it.

[ Laughs ] Bread was a very, very big issue growing up.

I used to come back home from school, I went to the grocer and brought us a half loaf of bread home.

We put those fresh, lovely bread into a bread box and took out yesterday bread -- yesterday's bread, and that's what we ate.

Every day, never fresh bread.

She said "It's better for you."

I don't believe in it, but that's the way I grew up.

-Liora's mother, a survivor, met her father, a liberator, here in Belsen.

Like others, they fell in love and got married here as well.

Their daughter -- disconcerting though it is -- knows she's the child of that Bergen-Belsen romance.

The decision to return is not easy.

How old are you now?

-84.

-Many survivors are, in any case, too afraid.

Others wish to be here only in their memories.

Tomi is here to honor his family.

Until now, Liora has deliberately stayed away.

Then the urge to see the place, which has loomed so heavily over her family, became too strong.

It's a testing moment.

This is your very first time in Belsen.

What is your first impression of being here?

-Depressing.

[ Chuckles ] -Tomi, why do you come here?

-When I come first time here, it was very emotional.

And also my grandmother died here.

And we have a plaque here.

It's one of the places that I go and remember my grandmother.

-Memories of Belsen are passed on from generation to generation.

It was her son Asaf, who helped Liora overcome her qualms, so that she might offer tribute to her parents and to those who died.

-I wanted her to come and visit because she only started talking about it something like 20 years ago.

-[ Crying ] Jews don't put flowers.

They put stones.

So whenever you go to a Jewish cemetery, you'll see those small piles of stones.

-Why do you want to be back here?

-[ Sighs ] My mother used to speak about not forgetting for so many years, and she can't speak anymore.

And I'm doing it now instead of her.

It's symbolic.

-I understand.

Most of the survivors from Belsen settled in other countries, many of them in Britain, and as they tried to start a new life for themselves, many chose to conceal their past here in the hope of fitting in to a different society and in the process, perhaps -- perhaps to forget.

Two years after the liberation of Belsen, Eva Behar moved to London with her husband, who had served in the RAF.

They tried to put the past behind them.

-I've never, ever, ever spoke about it.

-To find out exactly what had happened to my mum took most of my lifetime.

It was to do with a project at my son's school, where he was asked to see if there were any papers that his grandparents had from during the war.

And my mom said, "Yes, yes, on the top of the wardrobe, there's a tin."

-That was a defining moment for Laura.

It drew her to the realization she knew nothing about her mother's early life.

In turn, that led her mother to reveal the truth.

For Laura, it was as though she'd been living in a vacuum of unknowing.

-I have no history.

I feel it every second of every day.

It's very tiring, actually.

-I was protecting her.

-Protecting my brother.

-And protecting my son.

I didn't want them to know.

I didn't want to go back there.

-I can't help it.

It's in my genes.

I just can't put it in a bag and put it away.

I wish I could sometimes.

So it's what defines.

I hate that it did, and I'm trying that it doesn't define who I am and what I am and why I am.

I'm grateful to my mom for trying to protect me.

It wasn't wrong.

-Then there were the liberators.

Those who witnessed the nightmare, but had no means of managing their anguish.

PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was barely known.

Some of those who witnessed Belsen still find it hard to talk about.

-I was a British soldier doing an army job, but these were my people on the whole, and I felt tremendous emotion for the state they were in.

-Now we talk about post-traumatic stress disorder.

-First of all, the sheer enormity of war made any sort of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, er, something which was out of reach of anybody.

-It haunts me because I don't want my sons and grandsons and great-grandsons to go through that terrible time... ...that we had to go through, and my father had to go through.

I would do anything to prevent that.

And not only that.

I can wake up in the middle of the night even yet, I'd think about it.

I can't get rid of it.

♪♪ -May I add to this story only the assurance that everything that an army can do to save these men and women and children is being done, and that those officers and men who've seen these things, have gone back to the Second Army, moved to an anger such as I have never seen in them before.

♪♪ -I know the youngsters look at the medals and they think this is glorious.

This is from hunting.

And you try to tell them that for every medal I wear, somebody died.

Somebody was killed.

♪♪ -There was one thing to be done before the liberators task was over.

This is Luneburg, some 40 miles from Belsen.

Once an historic trading centre where Bach studied as a young choral scholar.

It was here, 75 years ago, that the full force of the criminal law was applied to the horror of Belsen.

♪♪ The building itself is long gone, but it was in this town in September 1945 that Josef Kramer, the commandant of Belsen, and 44 of his guards were put on trial for murder.

It was the first Nazi war crimes trial, and it was conducted under British law in a military court.

The defendants were presumed innocent until proven guilty.

It was very much not a kangaroo court.

-The spotlight of justice has focused on the courthouse at Luneburg, where the Belsen gang now face a British Military court.

Last out of the lorry, is their brutal ringleader, camp commandant Josef Kramer.

Next come the loathsome trope of female guards.

Irma Grese, whose fiendish cruelty was notorious, even among the SS.

-Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was there to testify against the Belsen guards.

-What a great pleasure to be on the right side of the fence.

I was very glad to have a chance.

It struck me as absolutely unbelievable that there should be defense lawyers there.

Most of the time I was furious.

Defending these people?

But I understood of course, there must be a cutoff point.

I mean, that was hell.

Now we are normal again.

So says in English court, it has to be like an English court.

So there must be defense lawyers.

-I saw a crown in the dock.

They claimed to have done what they were ordered to do.

Which is, of course, what every soldier does.

And Irma Grese, who was the prominent woman guard, defended herself to the very end and said that she did it for the Fuhrer.

-11 of the guards were sentenced to death, including Josef Kramer.

and Irma Grese.

-My father was also here to witness the trial, and he wrote a dispatch in which he said "The whole world would have been able to see in cold, proven, legal detail, what happens behind the frontiers of a country that sells its soul to a dictator."

♪♪ Belsen is now a memorial site where people come from all over the world, and not least Germany, to find out what really happened here.

And, among other things, to discover what the locals knew at the time.

-I'm sure that people in this area knew what was going on in these camps, perhaps not to the extent that they then saw after the liberation, but they saw thousands of people being taken into the camp, but nobody ever came out.

-Do you feel that today, attitudes towards Nazism and specifically towards Jews are shifting in an uncomfortable direction?

-Oh, sure.

Yes.

Extremists often try to change our opinions and our views with their perspective, they try to minimize what happened during the Holocaust, for example.

And once these things are on the table, they are in a way accepted.

And we have to make sure that certain opinions stay a taboo.

-The voices from Belsen, so quiet for so long, are now being heard, and latterly with a growing sense of urgency as they diminish in number.

And anti-Semitism and racism seem to be everywhere in the ascendant.

-The logic for me is that if they had killed us all, there would be not a single witness.

That the people who can still talk, we are the voices for the people who are lying in these mass graves.

-I am one of the youngest survivors.

And if everybody dies, if everybody takes this, er -- this history to the ground, maybe nobody will remember it in 25 years time.

And I think that would be a crime.

-For this reason, those who still have the strength seize any chance, anywhere, to reach out across the generations.

And especially to the young.

-How old was Mady when she was sent to the concentration camp?

-14.

-How many people are 14 in this room?

Quite a large proportion.

At 14, what kind of freedoms do you have?

What kind of freedoms do you have as a 14 year old?

-Yes.

-The freedom of speech.

-Freedom of speech.

What are you doing right now?

Discussing the Holocaust.

-This is Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, where 14-year-olds are learning about the Holocaust through the story of Mady Gerrard.

Children: Shalom, shalom.

Shalom, shalom.

Shalom, shalom.

Shalom, shalom.

-The Holocaust, I never really knew much about it until I came into secondary school, and when I heard all the horrors that happened, it, like, -- it blew me away how people could do that type of things.

-When Mady came to the school here, what did you think?

What did you think of her?

-It was inspiring because after going through a traumatizing past, she was still so positive.

-We have the voice to speak up about Mady's story, and we're the next generation and we're spreading her word around and so forth.

-Very interesting.

-The difference between these kids and me -- I don't even know how big the difference is.

Not only my background, but my age and my experience and everything else.

And yes, if people could have more of these kind of exchanges of ideas and thoughts and experiences, I think it would be a great help.

-The young people here evidently respond very powerfully.

Personally, does it give you hope?

-I think hope is what humankind needs to work on and motivate them to continue the work, to teach others to fight against tyranny and oppression, and the sheer genocides that unfortunately continue to take place around the world.

♪♪ -We must remember that the Holocaust did not start with gas chamber.

Holocaust started with whisper, then the abuse.

And therefore I urge the student, the young people, if they see somebody bullying because of different color skin or because a different religion -- I'm warning them, you stand up to these bullies because if you don't, we might find ourselves in the same situation, what happened in the '30s and '40s -To be with this, I think, is important.

The systematic attempt to murder people... ...just because there are different.

I regard it not as a piece of history, but also as a present-day choice that people have to make.

Bergen-Belsen, the Holocaust, I would say, is actually an expression of the power of hatred.

♪♪ ♪♪ -My father emerged from the war with a deep conviction that only in freedom under the law, within a democratic framework, can nations be protected from the kind of tyranny that produced Belsen, from where he ended his final report with the words, "There is one other thing that you must do, and that is to vow with all your heart that such things will never happen again."

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