The Lost Train

April 15 is the 80th anniversary when British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. That is the camp where I spent 14 months of my life, as a 4-5 year old. British troops surrounded the camp and negotiated a peaceful handover and on April 15, 1945, British troops entered Bergen-Belsen without a shot being fired. The German SS guards were keen to leave the camp as SS soldiers were dying of typhus.

After the British entered, they found 10,000 unburied bodies scattered throughout the camp. and 50,000 to 60,000 ill and starving prisoners, including about 500 children under the age of 14. Prisoners were dying of starvation and typhus.

Bergen-Belsen was not just a camp for Jews. It also held POWs, political prisoners and gay community prisoners. Most Jews were kept in an area called Star Camp, where my mother, my four-year-older brother, and I were kept, in Barrack 22. My father was in Barrack 11.

Bergen-Belsen started as a POW camp, though towards the end, it was a death camp, where nearly 60,000 were murdered, including up to 3,000 children. The British army entered Bergen-Belsen carrying movie cameras. Unfortunately, the British government decided that the film was too explicit and could not be shown to the public. Finally, in 2014, the movie, entitled, “Night Will Fall,” was released.

After evacuating Bergen-Belsen and taking into account that many British troops were dying of typhus, the British decided to burn Bergen-Belsen down, barrack by barrack.

On April 15, 1945, the day the British liberated the camp, I, my father, my mother, and my brother were on a train to nowhere. It became known as the “Lost Train.” German command had decided that all the Jews who had been kept in Star Camp, in total, about 6,000, were to be transported, in three trains, to Theresienstadt, in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.

My family was on the third train, which held about 2,500 prisoners, mostly Dutch. That train left Bergen-Belsen on April 9th, only six days before the British liberated the camp. We were pushed into cramped cattle wagons with no food or water. Because the allies were bombing the railway tracks the train had to zigzag North, East, West and South before it reached Berlin, 10 days later on April 19.

The train stopped many times, and when that occurred, my mother and other prisoners would jump off the train to steal food from farms. The German command were not aware of the train and had no idea what to do with the train. After two days, the Germans decided to send the train to Poland in the east. On April 23rd, near a village called Trobitz, the train was surrounded by the Russian army, which killed most of the Nazi guards. After 14 days on the train, we were FREE.

The Russians marched us to Trobitz, where they put the 2,400 remaining Jews (400 died on the train) into flats, hospitals and schools. My family slept on a mattress on the floor of school. The Russians took good care of the Jews, but after Russian soldiers started to die of typhus, it was decided that the sick, including my mother and me, as we were then also suffering from typhus, would be sent by truck to a place called Risa, near the city of Leipzig.

We were there for about a week and then started to make our way to the west and to our home country; Holland. (the Netherlands) We arrived on June, 13, 1945, after 624 days of living in hell.