04/20/2024
79 years ago today, on Sunday 15th April 1945 as Captain John Webster’s Jeep approached a small German town in what is today Lower Saxony, he ordered his driver to turn down an unmade track. Webster had spotted some low white buildings through the trees which, he recalled, “just didn’t look right”.
Captain Webster, a senior liaison officer with Lowland Brigade HQ of the 15th Scottish Division, had been sent to find an armoured column that had failed to make contact with his unit in the British advance into northern Germany.
He told his driver to proceed cautiously – he didn’t want to blunder into an enemy position. However, what they found was not German soldiers but a sight so extraordinary and so disturbing it stayed with Captain Webster for the rest of his life – hundreds of people, dressed in grey and blue striped uniforms, emaciated and looking “as if they were no longer of this world”.
Ragged lines of ragged grey
Skeletons, they shuffle away
This place was Bergen-Belsen, a N**i concentration camp, a few miles southwest of the town of Bergen.
The camp was liberated a few hours later by the British 11th Armoured Division. Its battle-hardened soldiers were totally unprepared for what they found. Inside were more than 60,000 emaciated and ill prisoners in desperate need of medical attention. More than 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition lay littered around the camp. Disease, particularly typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis, was rampant. In the days before liberation, the prisoners had been left without food or water. An estimated 500 inmates per day died in the days preceding and following liberation. An estimated 50,000 prisoners had died at Bergen-Belsen – including Anne Frank and her sister Margot.
Among the survivors was a young girl called Manya (Mary) Rubenstein. She had been born and raised in Wierzbnik (now Starachowice), a small town in south-central Poland. In spring 1940, Manya was living under the N**i regime, and the occupiers established a ghetto in Starachowice-Wierzbnik. In October 1942, when the ghetto was liquidated, Manya was sent to Polenlager 75, a forced labour camp called Strzelnica, near Wierzbnik. Here she befriended a young man called Monyek (Morris) Weinrib. They were both sent to Auschwitz before being split up – Manya was sent to Bergen-Belsen and Monyek was sent to Dachau concentration camp, a few miles northwest of Munich.
Somehow, they survived and when the camps were liberated (Dachau was liberated on 29th April 1945), quite unbelievably in the chaos just after the end of the war, they found each other once again. Morris and Manya got married in the mess hall at the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp on Thursday 21st November 1946. Mr and Mrs Weinrib emigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1948.
Over the following few years, they welcomed three children into the world. First Suzie, then Gary (or Geddy as we all now know him) and finally Allan…
Manya’s experiences of the horrors of life in Bergen-Belsen were instilled upon her children from an early age and her story was immortalized in Red Sector A.
All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves is stay alive
This post is dedicated to Morris and Mary. Where two halves make two wholes.
And to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. We must NEVER forget…
