A British nurse told my mother she was

V ON APRIL 7, 1944, 14-year-old Rachel Genuth sat down to the Passover Seder with her family, including her five siblings, and an aunt and her baby. Her uncle had been drafted into munkaszolgálat (Hungarian forced labour).

That her father had returned from that same wartime service was a miracle. A year earlier, Moshe Genuth had survived a massacre: Hungarian officers set a barn containing more than 600 Jewish labourers on fire; they gunned down those who tried to flee the burning building.

Since her father’s return, Rachel would not leave his side. And on that April evening, in the midst of a raging war, in their small apartment in Sighet, Transylvania, the Genuths enacted rituals to remind them of the oppression of their ancestors in ancient Egypt.

Neither Rachel nor anyone in her

Rachel Genuth in 1953 and (right, in profile) Brigadier Glyn Hughes

isolated hometown could imagine what was about to happen. Within two months, Rachel’s entire family, save her older sister Elisabeth, would be murdered. Nearly half of Sighet’s population — its Jewish community of 11,000 — would vanish from the face of the earth. And Rachel would struggle to endure an alternative universe called Auschwitz.

In the shadows of the crematoria, Rachel begged privileged prisoners for anything they might spare — a few grains of salt might help her survive. During harrowing selections, she pinched her cheeks and covered her sores in efforts to appear capable of work. She volunteered for hard labour that earned her a piece of bread.

In mid-summer, Rachel and Elisabeth were among 500 women sent

from Auschwitz to a labour camp. Their relative good fortune lasted only until they were forced on a death march in the winter of 1945.

After a five-week trek and a week in a locked freight car — where, starved and parched, the sisters picked fat white lice off of each other’s clothing and bodies — they landed in Bergen-Belsen. It was mid-March — the month in which 18,000, including Rachel’s iconic peer Anne Frank, succumbed to starvation and disease. Rachel soon became inured to the sight of dead and dying lying everywhere. She soon contracted tuberculosis, and was herself at death’s door.

*** tion camp in northwest Germany now contained the largest number of victims of Hitler. Brigadier HL Glyn Hughes, Deputy Director of Medical Services (DDMS) of the British Second Army, found himself responsible for an unprecedented situation: nothing had been done to accommodate 60,000 inmates, most of who had been evacuated from concentration camps in the east. No habitable housing. No sanitary facilities. No food. No water. In his vast experience of war, the decorated medical officer had seen “nothing to touch it”.

One year earlier, Hughes, as DDMS of Britain’s 8 Corps, had been busily preparing for the evacuation and treatment of battle casualties. From Operation Overlord (D-Day) to the fighting in Normandy, to ensuing battles in the Netherlands and finally, in Germany, he oversaw the work of medical units, commandeered hospitals, coordinated with military leaders, and tackled problems including “exhaustion”, the Second World War version of shell shock.

Facing Germany’s Waffen-SS divisions — fighters who would go to the limits of endurance for the Volk, Führer, and Fatherland — inexperienced British soldiers met booby traps, surprise attacks and the enemy’s powerful, dreaded weapons.

Hughes himself experienced frightful surprises. While on the road during the Battle of Arnhem, he saw enemy bullets shatter the windshield of the jeep ahead of him. He organized drivers of nearby lorries to fire a barrage at unseen targets, making a show of resistance. In Venraij, Holland, he and his men found two asylums. Hiding in cellars, nuns kept hundreds of patients safe, but could not manage the dire lack of hygiene. Other horrors came to light as Hughes and his men uncovered stalag (POW) and oflag (officer) prisoner camps in Germany. Nothing, however, would compare with Bergen-Belsen.

In February, while Rachel was on a

No housing. No food. No sanitary facilities. No water

Aerial reconnaissance photo of the Bergen-Belsen death camp