Ilka Witte stops at the memorial stone for Anne and Margot Frank. “Flowers and letters are left here almost every day,” says the 25-year-old history student. But Anne and Margot are not buried under the simple stone that their cousin had erected as a memorial, but somewhere on the site of the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle. Ilka Witte walks with a group of young people across the park-like heathland with the mass graves. There are few reminders of the place where the Jewish girl, her sister and more than 52,000 other concentration camp prisoners perished.
Madi Kiss is still impressed. He still has the images from the exhibition at the memorial in his head, showing piles of corpses pushed together. “The pictures speak for themselves, harrowing. How can anyone do such a thing?” he says, walking on in silence. The 17-year-old from Slovakia is one of around 20 young people from four countries who are taking part in the international youth work camp “Spring School” until Sunday. The Landesjugendring Niedersachsen, in cooperation with the memorial, invited to this for the 29th time, always in the spring before the anniversary on April 15, when the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops in 1945 is commemorated.
“After an interruption due to Corona, we are starting again for the first time with full attendance, still with a smaller group,” explains Norik Mentzing, youth education officer at the nearby Anne Frank House. In previous years, young people had come from Israel and South Africa, among others. Now, in addition to Germans, groups from Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania are represented – and a Vietnamese woman. Mai Ngo is currently studying in Gießen. She found out about the workcamp through an advertisement on the university bulletin board, she says.
Now she is standing in front of the wall of inscriptions that commemorate the victims of the camp and is thinking about German history in a way that wasn’t even close to coming up in class in her home country. Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp, but initially a so-called exchange camp. “I thought that meant survival for the detainees, but here people were tortured to death in other ways, through starvation, disease, lice,” she says. “It was a life and yet not a life.”
During the tour, teamers Ilka Witte and Marcin Schink provide further insights that are more complex than some previously thought. A cloth bag with the inscription “What does Bergen-Belsen mean today?” dangles around Ilka Witte’s shoulder, in which she transports pictures and other illustrative material. The 25-year-old points to a bronze plaque on the floor, which was only inaugurated in 1999. “Why was that necessary?” she asks, explaining that all of the camp’s victim groups were listed there for the first time, including Jews, political opponents of National Socialism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. “Many of the groups mentioned here were still discriminated against after 1945 and some were imprisoned.”
The plaque also mentions prisoners of war. The fact that Bergen-Belsen was also a prisoner of war camp, in which around 20,000 mostly Soviet prisoners of war died, was long ignored during the Cold War with Russia, explains Marcin Schink.
Before the tour, the head of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, Elke Gryglewski, wished the young people a successful day. “You are very important in these times,” she told them. The final round shows that a lot has to sink in first. Ieva Tribuisyté from Lithuania says: “I am sad and disappointed by the people and what they can do to each other.” The 18-year-old from the former Soviet republic also looks to the present and the future. “There are areas in the world that are at war today,” she says. “War and political conflict will probably always be part of our lives.”
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