Category:Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (subject)

The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen occurred on April 15, 1945.

British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. Thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving and mortally ill people were packed together without food, water or basic sanitation. The British Army immediately began to organize the relief effort.

Around 1,000 children were among the thousands of inmates who arrived at Bergen-Belsen in the last weeks of the war. Conditions were desperate because of hunger and disease. 50% of the children perished (including Anne Frank. Around 500 children were found alive.

The Children House of Belsen (Bergen-Belsen Kinderbaracke)

The Kinderbaracke (children’s barrack), was apparently run by the Nazis as a showplace for the International Red Cross.

While the children were supposed to be under sixteen to live in the compound, at least two of them seemed to be older; they had lied about their ages so as to remain with their younger siblings.

The facility was managed by Luba Tryszynska, herself a Jewish prisoner from a town in eastern Poland that is now in Belarus; when she spoke Polish it was with a marked Russian accent, and she seemed to pass for Russian. She was assisted by two other Jewish women: Hermina Krantz, from Slovakia (though I remember thinking at the time that she was from Czechia), and Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, from Sosnowiec, Poland, who had studied medicine in France before the war and served as the doctor for the compound.

In addition to the parentless children overseen by Luba and her assistants, the barrack also housed, across the hall from them, young women with infants of their own.

In the last months of the camp, Luba Tryszynska rounded up 54 (46) Dutch children, none older than 14, who had come to the camp without their parents. Thanks to her personal crusade to keep them alive, 52 (44) survived until the camp in northern Germany was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945.

With them was also a group of around 15 children from Poland and Slovakia, including Coby Lubliner and Yidele Henechowicz, and a group or pregnant women.