I survived horror of Belsen concentration camp – 80 years on I can still smell stench of death as people died like flies
IT is the smell they still remember. Eight decades may have passed but they cannot forget the clawing stench of death.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the day British soldiers liberating northern Germany were met by three Nazi guards waving a white flag.
The Germans claimed there was a “hospital” in the woods nearby and led the unsuspecting Brits to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where they uncovered “hell on Earth”.
Half-dead prisoners staggered among the emaciated corpses of 13,000 Jews whose bodies lay where they fell. On liberation day itself, 800 died.
Thousands more corpses were dumped in huge smouldering piles where they had been set on fire in a desperate attempt to destroy evidence.
Among the survivors was 14-year-old Mala Tribich, one of only two members of her family to survive the Holocaust which claimed the lives of six million.
‘Many were buried alive’
Earlier this month Mala, now 94 and living in Barnet, North London, travelled to Catterick Garrison, in Yorkshire, home of one of the first regiments to discover Belsen in 1945.
There, Mala placed a letter of her memories into a time capsule to be opened in 20 years, on the 100th anniversary of the atrocity at Belsen, where more than 50,000 prisoners, mainly Jews, died.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun she recalls: “When I walked into Belsen, the first thing that hit you was the smog and the horrible smell.
“Not only just excreta but people hadn’t been washed for weeks.
“These emaciated people were just bodies shuffling along. Barely conscious they were dying, literally like flies, from disease or starvation.
“There were dead bodies everywhere, piles of them. It was a shocking sight.
“As well as the awful smell, there was a smog because there were burning bodies.”
Mala had already escaped certain death thanks to the bravery of her mother, Sara.
She, her mother and sister Luisa had been living in a Jewish ghetto in Piotrkow, Poland, when the police arrived. Mala was resting in bed.
Mala says: “My mother said I was not well and the policeman in charge said, ‘That’s all right, she can stay behind’.
“My mother whispered to me on the way out not to move, to just stay there and tell father when he came back from work. That’s how I survived.”
Mala’s mother and her eight-year-old sister were taken with 560 other Jews to the nearby Rakov forest and murdered.
She says: “They were killed in the most horrible way. I know what happened but I never describe it. It’s just horrific. Many were buried alive. And they were doing that all over Europe.”
Later, separated from her father Moishe and older brother Ben, Mala and her five-year-old cousin, Anna, were sent to Belsen.
Anna refused to be split up from Mala, then 12, and the pair were billeted in Belsen with a large group of Dutch kids.
They were the children of Amsterdam diamond dealers who had been sent to Auschwitz death camp where they were murdered after refusing to reveal where their jewels were hidden.
Mala says: “The children ended up in Belsen where the guards were ordered to put them on to lorries, take them outside and shoot them.
“The guards were looking for a place to kill the children when an argument broke out and they refused to shoot them. So these Dutch boys and girls ended up back in the camp.”
Another Dutch girl, Anne Frank, died in Belsen.
Like millions of Jewish prisoners, Mala was made to wear a striped uniform. She says: “To call it a uniform is too respectable a word.
“When they shave your head and take your clothes, they strip you of your identity. It was dehumanising.”
Mala was in bed suffering from the debilitating illness typhus when the British soldiers arrived on April 15, 1945.
She says: “I was lying on my upper bunk by the window. I remember opening my eyes and I could see not only children but adults running to the gate.
“I didn’t think anybody could run, but we were being liberated by the British.”
Private Harry Birdsall, then just 19, ferried Jewish survivors from Belsen, and the horrors he witnessed there have haunted him ever since.
A driver with the Royal Army Service Corps, he carried Jewish survivors in his truck from the camp to Szczecin, Poland.
Harry, 99, of Wakefield, West Yorks, says: “It was the worst experience of my life. Some were just tiny kids, skin hanging off them, it was terrible.
“We took about 35 in each vehicle, they were so relieved to see us, but it was a four-day journey. I did three trips and we lost two or three people each time. It really affected me and still does today.
“I started having nightmares, thinking about Belsen. It was seeing the dead people and wondering how they could be so cruel to do what they did, starving them to death. They were just like skeletons.
“After I got back from Poland, I went to the Medical Officer, because I just couldn’t get the horror of it all out of my mind.
“He simply told me to ‘forget about your past and think about your future, think about somewhere nice’.”
Incredibly, the Girl Guides in Britain trained up adult volunteers to travel to Belsen to help look after the 60,000 survivors. Just hours after the war ended, members of the Guide International Service were in Holland and soon after, made it to war-torn Germany.
Stella Cunliffe, a 28-year-old Guide leader from Ashtead, Surrey, was one of the first civilians to arrive at Belsen. There, she helped with medical care and delousing of survivors.
‘Incredibly harrowing’
The Guides also helped with a clothing store nicknamed “Harrods” as well as transporting displaced people.
Stella’s nephew, Dr Ian Cunliffe, 68, from Guildford, says: “The conditions were horrendous, undoubtedly incredibly harrowing and left a profound impression on her.”
Mervyn Kersh was a private serving with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps when he became separated from his unit, which had gone on to Berlin to tackle gas shells and bombs.
Instead he ended up near Belsen. The D-Day veteran, a 100-year-old Jew from Cockfosters, North London, spoke to many survivors.
He says: “Most of them did not want to talk about how they got there and what happened to their families. But almost all of them had one desire, to get to Israel. It was a beacon of hope for them.”
After leaving Belsen, Mala discovered all her family had been wiped out apart from her brother, Ben. They were reunited in England in 1947.
Mala trained as a secretary in London and two years later met architect Maurice Tribich, who she married in 1950.
Now a mum of two and a grandma, Mala says: “I’m terribly old now and soon there will be no one left who was actually there. Our story must not die with us.”
TRAUMA LED TO ROLE AS MEDIC
PETER LANTOS believes the horrors he witnessed as boy prisoner number 8431 in Belsen inspired him to become a doctor.
Twenty-one members of his family, including his elder brother, were murdered in the Holocaust.
In December 1944, age five, he was sent by train with his mother, Ilona, and father, Sandor, to Belsen from their home in Mako, Hungary.
Peter, now 85, who lives in central London, says: “With every passing day, life became more intolerable.
“Designed for five to six thousand prisoners, towards the end the camp housed ten-times more.
“Severe overcrowding, starvation and lice promoted infections – typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery and tuberculosis were all out of control.
“My father died, age 52, of starvation four weeks before the British Army liberated the camp on April 15, 1945.”
Just over a week before liberation, Peter and his mother were put on one of three trains, each packed with 2,500 prisoners. It is believed they were to be traded for the lives of high-ranking Nazi officers when Germany fell.
After seven days Peter’s train, in a siding near Magdeburg, was liberated by US soldiers.
After the war, Peter trained as a doctor in Hungary and in 1968, came to London, where he rose to be a professor of neuropathology researching Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Peter, who never married, says: “Seeing so much suffering as a child was a decisive factor in my becoming a doctor. The Holocaust remains an indelible blot of inhumanity upon our civilisation.”
'A REMINDER OF PERILS OF HATE'
By Olivia Marks-Woldman, chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
THE liberation of Bergen-Belsen was arguably the moment that shaped Britain’s awareness of the Holocaust more than any other.
Even 80 years later, those haunting images – skeletal survivors, mass graves, barbed wire – are not just distant history.
They are powerful reminders of what can happen when hate and intolerance go unchecked.
Anniversaries are not about dwelling on the past for the sake of it. They are moments of collective reflection – where we face the difficult truths of history so we can protect the future.
Antisemitism continues to rear its ugly head in various guises. Racism, the poison that divides us, still lingers in our society. And the spectre of genocide – the ultimate conse-quence of hatred – still remains a haunting reality today.
Britain’s role in liberating Bergen-Belsen is a source of justifiable pride, but that pride must be tempered with vigilance. The legacy is not a badge of honour to be worn passively – it is a call to action.
Remembrance is not about a moment of silence, only to be forgotten for the rest of the year. It is about what we do every day.
Truly honouring the memory of Bergen-Belsen and the Holocaust means actively standing against hate in all its forms.
Bergen-Belsen is both a painful reminder of a tragic past and a reason to fight for a better future.