Remembering Bergen Belsen

[amberdreams]

Seventy years ago today, the British army liberated Bergen Belsen. Richard Dimbleby, war correspondent from the BBC, reported on what they found and put his career on the line to force the BBC to broadcast it when they told him it was too awful to share.

The thing is, we need to keep sharing. We need to listen to the testimony of the survivors and the people who witnessed their suffering, because there are people in the world today who want to pretend this never happened. There are people who think that they are better than the Nazis and that killing a person who believes differently than they do is somehow a lofty ideal and a cleansing thing to be doing. It isn't.

There are people who think it's okay to say all immigrants should be 'sent back to where they came from' and don't see that this is just a tiny step away from the mentality that would send these immigrants to work camps and then death camps to be rid of them. It doesn't take much to get from one raging, irraltional fear and prejudice to a much more sinister version, and for the killing to start.

This isn't about any particular religion or belief, it's about being human, and retaining what is good about being human in the face of the kind of hate bred by intolerance.

Do not be silent today - read a page or two of Anne Frank's diary, join the one minute video campaign being run by the Anne Frank Trust - #notsilent

Listen to Richard Dimbleby's dispassionate report and remember. And think what it took him to record this terrible story - how many times he broke down and had to start again before they managed to get this report recorded. If you can't bear to watch, at least listen.

Comments

[fufaraw]

Thank you so much for sharing this. It's so painful to watch, to listen to, to think about. It's much easier to just sidestep and go on with the busyness of our lives and 'let someone else' be responsible for awareness and remembrance. Of course if everyone does that, then no one's responsible, either for remembering, or for being vigilant about the symptoms of history repeating itself.

So thank you.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

It is so hard to watch, and made even harder in some ways knowing that similar atrocities have happened since then - when everyone would have hoped that seeing what happened under the Nazis would mean it could never happen again.

Thanks for looking, listening, remembering.

[crucis01.livejournal.com]

It will never cease to amaze me how people can hear these records, see them, then deny this happened.
Under Nazi theory, my son-in-law, my daughter and grandson would not have been allowed to live. As my father had a mental illness, he would have been euthanized if we were in Germany or a conquered country.
I have never understood how this happened, how so called civilized people could reach such depths of depravity. Was the veneer of civilization really so thin on the Nazis and their allies? Yes, we know it was.
You would think we had learned, but Rwanda and the brutality of the Yugoslavian break up taught us differently.
To kill someone simply because they were born? I don't understand and hopefully one day this will never be possible or even thinkable.
I hope we grow into the human species we want to believe we are capable of being.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

I don't understand it either - any more than I understand what the IS are doing, or how al-Shabaab could go into a university and kill young students just because they weren't muslim. None of it makes any sense.

But I share your hope that the humane side of humanity will prevail.

[big-heart-june.livejournal.com]

I havent been able to watch the second video yet as I just can't right now. I just...omg, I just literally feel ill. How??? I have read Anne Frank's entire diary. Thank you for sharing though as this must NEVER NEVER NEVER be forgotten.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

They were playing sound clips of Dimbleby's report this morning on the radio when I woke up, and I was in tears straight away. It really is incomprehensible that people can so casually and sytematically do this to other human beings. It's not something we want to be reminded of either, it's so uncomfortable - but I suppose even if we only think about it one day a year, it's a wake up call for the rest of the time.

[brutti-ma-buoni.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

It felt a bit heavy for posting but - well. Anyway, thanks for reading.

[brutti-ma-buoni.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have people from both sides of the 20th century wars. It's never easy to think about. Including this, above all. Imagine having even a tiny fraction of yourself, your past, responsible for this.

[jackfan2.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it takes a war to do the humane thing. Someone posted on my FB the other day, a comment from an American politician wherein he stated something like 'If you are tired of paying for the care of injured Veterans, stop sending them to war!'

My response was to ask if the poster and perhaps the politician, who is a Jewish American and quite old so I would imagine he was around in WWII, do you believe there is no one reason then that we should go to war? Lots of Americans didn't want us to get involved in WWII and we stayed out of it for a long time but then Pearl Harbor happened and we jumped in. War is, sometimes, a necessity.

My other response was to say- equating the service and sacrifice of the veteran to mere dollars and cents is to be wholly ignorant to the understanding of the heart of a veteran. As the daughter of a veteran, the sister of a veteran, and the sister-in-law of a veteran, and the mother of a current service man, these men and women deserve better than that kind of disingenuous rhetoric.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

i would say I'm largely a pacifist, but there are some regimes, some ideologies that are fundamentally so wrong that sometimes taking up arms against them is the only right course of action. As for the people who serve in the armed forces, generally I have nothing but respect for them, and I'd agree, their value is not something that should be measured in terms of money.

[jj1564.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing this, yes it is completely harrowing and very hard to watch, but we all do need reminding that this atrocity really did happen. I went to Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum, in Jerusalem many years ago and the things I saw there have lived with me ever since. The most disturbing thing though was finding out that many people think the holocaust never happened, just unbelievable.

PS I completely missed the #notsilent campaign, so thanks for mentioning that too.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

These kinds of acts (sadly the Nazis weren't the only ones, possibly just the most organised) are so awful they are hard to believe, which I suppose is how the holocaust deniers manage to spread their lies so successfully with some people.