Mon April 21, 2025
Hi All. We decided since we saw all of Hamburg yesterday that we’d go somewhere outside of Hamburg today. So we chose the excursion to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp where both Anne Frank and her sister Margot were interned and died. We’ve been to several concentration camps and if you’ve never been, it is very moving and somber. But you go to understand history in the hopes that it will never happen again.
It was a long and somewhat tiring tour given the weight of the topic as well as the long bus drive to get there and back. We drove 1.5 hours each way.
We started with a visit to the Memorial Center which is located at the former concentration camp surrounded by army training grounds. Sadly over 70,000 Jews, POWs and other “political enemies” died in this camp mostly due to the hard living conditions, lack of food, diseases and at the hands of the guards. Despite not having been a termination camp like Auschwitz, the number of victims is staggering.
We then took a guided tour of the camp including the Obelisk, the Wall of Names, the Room of Silence and the symbolic grave of Anne and Margot Frank. We visited the Information Center which had artifacts from former prisoners, audio-video interviews of former inmates as well as photos covering the history of the POW camp. We learned that the camp was liberated exactly 80 years ago on April 15, 1945.
Seeing all that is very draining but also powerful when you see the videos of the survivors and their perseverance. Just amazing that anyone could endure the atrocities of that camp. They believe there are no living survivors of the camp so God help their families to deal with the memories and emotions.
On the way back everyone was numb from the experience so no one talked. We boarded the ship and just chilled and got ready for dinner. I’ll do another update tonight.
The Wandering Italian 