The Liberation Of Bergen-Belsen (Based On Eye Witness Accounts) Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Colonel Schmidt came to our front line
Waving a white flag

We were 20km from Bergen-Belsen
A camp holding 60,000 detainees,
And their German warders

A regiment of Hungarian soldiers
Guarded the camp perimeter.
Typhus had broken out

We entered the camp
Open graves were heaped
With rotting corpses

The stench!
The sights!
The walking skeletons!
The horror of the place!
Inhuman charnel house!
Some lay dead in their bunks
Beside the living

We were traumatized
The prisoners were traumatized

The media arrived: Sir Richard Dimbleby
Passed through the barrier,
Into a world of a nightmare, he reported
Where deranged stick thin mothers
Held long-dead babies to their milk-less breasts

After the last hut in the camp was torched we all went home
They went God knows where
The lucky, to America or Israel
The others to a slow death by madness, grief,
Or crippling malnutrition

And yet they followed us, those poor survivors
Flashing up in our thoughts on a day at the seaside
Or over a plate of chips
They step into our dreams. We turn in our sleep and shudder