FRIENDSHIP OUT

Ian’s decades-long bond with a survivor that he helped rescue

MARC MCLEAN

Sitting in his comfy green armchair at home, 96-year-old war veteran Ian Forsyth recalls how he helped liberate a Nazi extermination camp.

“Is it still clear in your mind 75 years on?” I asked him.

“Very much so,” came the quick reply.

Ian may be close to becoming a centenarian, but there are certain horrors that can never be forgotten in old age.

In last week’s Reformer we told how Ian was one of the first men on the scene as British soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp, on April 15, 1945.

The pensioner, who founded the Joint Ex-servicemen’s Association in Lanarkshire, revealed how he and his comrades hadn’t been informed by superiors about what they were walking into.

They were aghast to discover thousands of dead bodies piled up, and tens of thousands starving, diseased Jewish prisoners barely clinging to life.

Among those prisoners on the brink of death was Polish teenager Julien Wieciech.

After initially being overlooked while lying on the ground next to corpses, one eagle-eyed medic noticed Julien’s eyes moving and he was taken for emergency medical treatment.

After a year-long rehabilitation period, Julien was finally able to return home.

Years later he met with Ian — one of his hero liberators — and the pair became friends for life.

Around 10,000 bodies were found piled up by Allied forces at Bergen-Belsen, and another 13,000 died in the days and weeks after through disease and malnutrition.

Another day, perhaps another hour, and Julien would have been one of those victims too.

His son Leszek Wiechiech, who became Polish Consul General In Scotland 50 years later, is convinced his dad would not have made it had the British troops arrived a day later.

“My father lost consciousness,” wrote Leszek in a wartime article just a few months ago. “By the time he was liberated, he weighed 36 kilograms — and the doctors that examined him thought he would die soon, so they took care of other prisoners they thought would have a better chance of survival.

“However, my father wanted to live too much to die a few hours after liberation.

“He regained consciousness, was taken care of by the doctors, recovered and in 1946 returned to Poland.

“If the liberation had taken place several hours later, he probably would have died, and I