The famous photo below is from news reel footage that was shown in American theaters. It shows a British soldier shoving Jewish bodies into a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen.
The Bergen Belsen concentration camp is the place where Anne Frank died. Remember that as you read this news article: http://theislandnow.com/new_hyde_park-108/holocaust-survivors-share-stories-strength-remembrance-forum/
The following quote is from the news article:
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Memories of the Holocaust are as fresh as they were decades ago for the women who were forced into World War II concentration camps as children and miraculously lived to tell the tale as adults.
“When you look at these survivors, know you’re looking at miracles,” Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County Senior Director of Education Beth Lilach said. “For any child to have survived the Holocaust is nothing less than a miracle because it was a very intentional plan by the Nazis to destroy every single Jewish child, so these people represent the tiny percent of Jewish children that survived.”
Parker Jewish Institute hosted “Stories of Strength: a Holocaust Remembrance” Thursday afternoon to document the stories of three survivors.
Chana Pfeifen, Alice Tenenbaum and Mia Feuer, wife of survivor Samuel Feuer, shared memories with a heartbroken audience as they recounted tales of gas chambers, death marches and the traumatic loss of their parents at the hands of the guards and doctors who imprisoned them.
Lilach opened the forum with a presentation focused around what can be learned from the Holocaust and how many times history could have gone differently with earlier help from countries around the world.
“By looking at the evolution of Nazism, you see so many red flags when the Holocaust could have been stopped,” Lilach said. “We need to look to see if our country is experiencing any of these red flags, and we need to act on it. We can’t be silent — that was an incredibly destructive force during the Holocaust, and we need to speak up.”
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I wrote at length about Bergen Belsen on my website, starting at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/BergenBelsen/Introduction.html
The following quote is from my website:
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Bergen-Belsen was the name of an infamous Nazi camp which has become a symbol of the Holocaust that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews in Europe more than sixty years ago. In 1943, Bergen-Belsen was initially set up as a detention camp (Aufenthaltslager) for prisoners who held foreign passports and were thus eligible to be traded for German citizens being held in Allied internment camps. In December 1944, Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp under the command of Josef Kramer, the former Commandant of the Auschwitz II camp, also known as Birkenau.
A section for sick prisoners, who could no longer work in the Nazi forced labor camps, was set aside at Bergen-Belsen in March 1944. In 1945, when World War II was drawing to a close, civilian prisoners were evacuated from other concentration camps as Soviet troops advanced westward; thousands of these prisoners were brought to the Bergen-Belsen camp which was not equipped to handle such a large number of people.
Finally, Bergen-Belsen itself was right in the middle of the war zone where bombs were falling and Allied planes were strafing the Autobahn and the railroads. British and Germans troops were doing battle on the Lüneberg heath right outside the camp. In February 1945, the situation at Bergen-Belsen became catastrophic when a typhus epidemic broke out in the crowded camp.
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