‘Human Laundry’ (1945) by Doris Zinkeisen
Victory in Europe?
‘The picture of Belsen was one of hell, what I imagine hell to be. Skeletons shuffling along. You could speak to someone and they would die in front of you, just collapse where they were. There were dead bodies all around.’
— Mala Tribich, a survivor of Belsen
Bergen-Belsen or Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany. It was originally established as a prisoner-of-war camp but in 1943 was expanded to take Jews from other extermination camps. From 1941 to 1945 over 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war had perished and 50,000 inmates had died along with them.
On 11th April 1945, it was ‘liberated’ by the British 11th Armoured Division. On entering Belsen they found a scene of absolute horror. There were 60,000 people starving and sick, and 13,000 unburied corpses strewn all over the camp. The scenes that greeted the Allied troops were famously documented by BBC’s Richard Dimbleby who was embedded with them:
‘‘…Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your…
