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Holocaust Remembrance Day at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Dore Gold - Israel Foreign Ministry Director-General Dore Gold spoke at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on May 4 in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Seventy years ago, Bergen-Belsen emerged as one of the key concentration camps established by the Nazi regime for the purpose of exterminating the Jews of Europe. Thousands died in Bergen-Belsen from disease, starvation, exposure, and sheer exhaustion, especially after the death marches in the winter of 1944-45 from the evacuated camps in the East as the Germans transferred their surviving Jewish prisoners to camps within the borders of the German state. Jews from all over the Nazi Empire were forced into Bergen-Belsen - from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, France, as well as North African states, like Libya and Tunisia. The commandant of Bergen-Belsen at the end of 1944, Josef Kramer, previously had been in charge of the main killing center at Auschwitz. My own mother-in-law, Dina Sherman, was also relocated from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen along with her sister, Esther, who died in her arms in this place. Five days after the British army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, a BBC reporter, Richard Dimbleby, entered the camp and made a tape recording of the former Jewish prisoners rising up with their frail bodies, and breaking into a Hebrew song, "Hatikvah," which means "the Hope." It was to become Israel's national anthem. The Jews at Bergen-Belsen were reminding the world of the 2,000-year-old hope that dated back to when the Jews lived as a free people in their own land. They were also saying that it was time to go back home. Chaim Herzog, who became Israel's sixth president, served as an officer in the British forces that entered Bergen-Belsen in 1945. In 1987 he came back and declared that the Jewish people would never again be helpless. We will never allow anyone to do this to us again.