Eyewitnesses to history

Particularly in the first months and years after the liberation, many survivors felt the need to recount what they had experienced and to gather and preserve evidence of the crimes. They did so by compiling lists of the survivors and the dead, writing journals, making documentary drawings, and providing witness statements. Other survivors, by contrast, were initially only able to continue living by largely surpressing and never speaking about their experiences of persecution.

It was not until their grandchildren’s generation was born and the social conditions changed that many survivors were finally able to talk about what they had experienced and suffered. The impetus for confronting the memory of Bergen-Belsen often came from external events, including the Eichmann trial (1961) and wars such as the Persian Gulf War (1990) and the war in Ukraine (2022). The death of family members and friends additionally prompted some survivors to face their own history. For many survivors, therefore, remembrance meant the (religious) commemoration of relatives who had been murdered in Bergen-Belsen.

Political and social structures also had a noticeable influence on individual remembrance. The development of a memory culture in the survivors’ new home countries depended on what the survivors meant to the state’s political self-image. This is apparent in how the survivors and their associations were treated in different places. They faced silence and even persecution in some countries, such as Hungary and the former Soviet Union. This stands in contrast to the official reception of the Holocaust in Israel.

In the immediate postwar period – the period after the liberation, when the survivors returned to their home countries or emigrated – the foremost concern was honouring the dead. Sites of personal mourning were established in various countries to compensate for the physical distance separating the survivors from their loved ones’ places of death and for the undignified burial of the dead in mass graves.

In the 1960s, as the Second World War receded into the past and antisemitism was on the rise again, these monuments additionally began to serve as a general reminder and warning of the crimes of the National Socialists. Survivors’ associations arranged for copies of the Jewish monument in Bergen-Belsen to be erected in Jerusalem and Montreal.

Today there are very few survivors of Bergen-Belsen still living. The activities of their associations have now largely been taken over by the subsequent generations. People who were born in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp represent a very special link between the generations. The information collected by the Memorial has become an increasingly important source for the transmission of knowledge within families.