60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

6.15.56pm UTC (GMT +0000) Fri 15th Apr 2005

Brief Statement from Ed Fordham, Liberal Democrat candidate for Hampstead and Highgate

"My grandfather was one of the first through the gates of Belsen - he was truck driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, but

because he spoke fluent German he was moved up to the front line to assist as surrenders and liberations took place. It

was something he rarely chose to discuss, but my father refers to the 'darkness' that my grandfather would speak of.

"But most of all my generation owe a huge tribute - to those who survived to tell the tale, to those who fought, to those

who died, but also of respect and the need to learn. Gratitude and toleration are my lessons, but today sadness and

remembrance should be in our thoughts."

Notes:

Holocaust survivors and their liberators are marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen

concentration camp. The Nazi death camp, near Hanover in Germany, was the first to be liberated by British troops, on 15

April 1945. An estimated 70,000 people died at Belsen.

Bergen-Belsen was originally created as a transit centre, but later became a fully-fledged concentration camp in all but

name. By 1945, it housed thousands of prisoners who had become too weak to work, left to die of starvation and disease.

There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis. One of the reasons

the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased.

The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women within full view of

several hundred children held at the camp. The gutters, too, were filled with bodies. In the weeks that followed, British

troops buried 10,000 bodies in mass graves.