Survivor: ‘I hope good may come from pandemic’
A BELSEN survivor says the coronavirus pandemic might help remind the world “people are people” and slow the rise of far-right populist parties.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 94, said Covid-19 “might wake people up to have better attitudes towards each other.
“In Auschwitz people were murdered in the most sophisticated manner, in Belsen
How Mirror reported event
The Pit of Belsen”. The caption beneath the disturbing image read: “This pit lies at the end of the path which Germany trod at the call of Hitler and the Nazi Party.”
It was the first time British readers were properly aware of the full extent of what the
Nazis had perpetrated against Jews and other groups. Until then, the reality of Hitler’s “Final Solution” had not fully been understood.
Belsen was the first camp to be liberated by British troops. But the horror carried out there was on such a scale that the BBC at first refused to broadcast a full report by its journalist on the scene, Richard Dimbleby, for fear of
they didn’t need that. In Belsen you just simply perished. That was the difference between the two camps.”
Cellist Anita, who was moved from Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland where she had been a member in the famous Women’s Orchestra, continued: “Belsen became so overcrowded the Germans just gave up. They just left us to die. It was distressing listeners. The broadcaster reported that he had “passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of nightmare”.
Describing one prisoner, he said: “She was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes.”
chaos.” Asked whether the world might forget the lessons of the Holocaust, she said: “Of course, we are all worried, but we are worried about something else [coronavirus] now.
“This disaster might wake people up to have better attitudes towards each other.” Anita settled in the UK, married, and was later awarded an MBE.
Belsen survivor Anita