Bergen-Belsen: Among graves, we were born

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany was the only camp liberated by the British Forces in April, 1945. Prior to that, over 50,000 people were murdered there. After liberation, the British Forces, alongside the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) set up another camp about 2km away, the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons (DP) Camp, the largest DP camp in Europe, where over 2,000 babies were born. Known as ‘Bergen-Belsen Babies’, Susan Schwartz and Karen Lasky were two of the many born there and still hold the label ‘stateless’ after their families were eventually accepted and immigrated to Canada. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation, survivors and Bergen-Belsen Babies gather for the week, trying to fill in the gaps of what happened to their families and reflect on their childhoods. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Heart and Soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Look here, as far as you can see, and what I've been told in my last few visits here is this was all the camp.
0:18.4	Wow.
0:18.5	Concentration camp, and it's such a huge amount of land, but nothing exists anymore.
0:24.2	I mean, what I can see in front of me are just so many trees and shrubbery.
0:28.5	And it's very, very green.
0:30.9	It is.
0:31.5	And so all of this has been planted over the last 80 years as well.
0:38.8	So, I mean, it's growth, it's natural growth that's happened since this whole area was devastated
0:47.5	by the burning of the concentration camp after liberation.
0:53.4	I'm currently in Germany being guided around the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
0:59.1	by a special person.
1:01.6	She's a different kind of survivor, in my opinion.
1:04.9	And as we come upon these mounds that you will see, They're mounds of bodies and mass graves
1:16.6	that the British came upon when they liberated this place
1:22.6	and they just had so many bodies to deal with.
1:31.1	They buried them here and put a general sign.
1:35.5	And you don't know for sure who's buried here.
1:39.2	Wait, so what we're currently looking at right now is a mass grave. That's a mass grave. Wow.
1:41.6	That's why I wanted you to come here because then you can see. I can see, gosh, like six, seven, eight mounds?
1:50.5	Mounds, yes. That's Karen Lasky, a Canadian woman whose presence isn't seen in her height, but rather her energy as she smiles at everyone that walks past.
2:03.1	She has a unique connection to this place.
2:06.8	Her parents met after liberation in 1945.
	...

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