Survivors’ children gather at Bergen-Belsen
HANOVER, Germany — Seventy years after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by British troops, some 100 people personally touched by the history returned to the site to share their memories and warn against forgetting.
Among them were children born at a displaced persons camp for survivors less than two miles from the camp.
Survivors who recovered started new families. In fact, an estimated 2,000 children were born at the DP camp — the largest in postwar Germany — before it closed in September, 1950.
Aviva Tal was one of them. Her parents, who had married before the war but were torn apart and survived several concentration camps, were reunited at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, where they shared a room with 12 other survivors.
The women “became pregnant right away, including my mother,” Tal, who was born in February, 1947, told JTA. “They put me in a basket in the middle of the room, and I was the most pampered child, always being held. My feet never touched the floor.”
Tal was one of several children of survivors to speak over the weekend at a panel on Holocaust memory led by Menachem Rosensaft, who was born in the DP camp on May 1, 1948. He recently edited a volume of essays, G-d, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors.
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