It must have been horrific... Queen reflects as she meets concentration camp survivors
THE Queen bowed her head in silent, solemn reflection on the horrors of the Holocaust yesterday as she made her first visit to a Nazi concentration camp.
Seventy years after British troops liberated Bergen- Belsen in northern Germany, the Queen, 89, and Prince Philip, 94, toured the site where 30,000 Jewish victims and 20,000 other targets of Nazi hatred died with 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
“It must have been horrific,” the Queen said after hearing stories from survivors and those who liberated them.
Among the camp’s victims were the 15- year- old diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot, 19, who both died of typhus weeks before the camp was liberated.
All around the royal couple on heathland surrounded by forest stood earth mounds bearing the bones of thousands of inmates buried in mass graves. Their visit to the camp, where the prisoners died not in gas chambers but from starvation, brutality and disease, was the final engagement of the royal couple’s four- day State tour to Germany.
The Queen had personally suggested going to Belsen and asked for it to be more personal, private and reflective than other parts of the tour. “It’s the 70th anniversary of the liberation. It was the right time to come,” said a royal aide.
The Queen and Philip paid their respects at the camp’s Jewish Monument and then with only the sound of distant birdsong audible, they walked alone to the House of Silence, a place of contemplation set in a grove of birch trees where they paused for a moment to reflect on the terrors and deprivations suffered by the camp inmates.
They also inspected a wooden Christian monument, the Polish Cross, before rejoining their entourage at the camp’s Inscription Wall and Obelisk.
Accompanied by Dr JensChristian Wagner, director of the Bergen- Belsen Memorial, they viewed a memorial stone to Anne and Margot Frank, who are buried in unmarked graves.
In a short, solemn ceremony, the couple bowed their heads after laying a wreath beneath an English inscription that reads simply: “To the memory of all those who died in this place.” Besides Jewish victims, others put to death included homosexuals and gypsies.
After the ceremony, the couple met Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, members of Germany’s Jewish community and survivors and liberators.
They also watched schoolchildren using a tablet computer to show what Bergen- Belsen was like.
The Chief Rabbi, whose great uncle perished with his wife and 10 children at the hands of the Nazis in Lithuania, thanked the Queen for showing the world that what happened at Belsen and the other concentration camps should never be forgotten.
He said: “For me, to be here today is emotionally very trying, bearing in mind what transpired on this soil.
“The memory of the Holocaust remains such a fundamental aspect of modern Jewish identity that the Queen’s journey to memorialise the victims will be viewed as tremendously significant by Jewish communities across the world.”
British troops found thousands of unburied bodies and severely- ill prisoners when they liberated the camp on April 15, 1945.
Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown, now 96, described to the Queen the scenes he saw when he entered Belsen.
“I told her this was just a field of corpses. She replied ‘ It must have been horrific really’,” he said.
“She was listening very carefully. She was quite affected by the atmosphere here. You can’t avoid it, can you?”