Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Item three on that same page is in sharing this recovered memory experience with your analyst, he atypically suddenly tells you a story that he was watching a documentary on Nazi concentration camps and all of a sudden he recounted to you that he realized that I was there.

And he then remembered, again as if for the first time, that he was part of the group that liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Which, as you say, you were touched by his telling you that story.

It was no doubt touched, but it was also a real moment between the two of you.

They can, to quote Freud, only be repeated.

Unconscious memories are repeated, not remembered.

And so the fact that he shared that deeply personal anecdote about Bergen-Belsen was also a counter-transference enactment.

He was fulfilling what I was looking for with my father, that he would really share something personal and meaningful with me.

They found on him letters between him and his Jewish girlfriend because he had fought before the wars in mandated Palestine, part of the British Army, and he'd been injured and he'd been recovered in a Je- Jerusalem hospital where he fell in love with a Jewish woman.

And the Germans said to him, "We're gonna treat you like a Jew," because they found these letters, and he was put in Belsen, but he wasn't put in there as a, a prisoner to die.

He was put in there as a, a worker And he was literally shoveling dead bodies for the last part of the war.

Can you imagine?

[laughs]

In 1945, um, uh, the Belsen trials begin when, um, the British Army and civilian personnel begin prosecuting Josef Kramer and 44 SS aides.

And this is, this is interesting, isn't it? That this is, there's a whole lot of stuff before Nuremberg.

There's actually...

He joins a completely different unit, an armored unit, and gets sent out to Northwest Europe, and he's there up in, um, uh...

And he ends up to Bad Fallingbostel, which is near Belsen, and he is amongst those being part of the liberation of, you know, in April 1945.

After the war, he gets finally, he finally gets commissioned, and he retires-

Right

state.

2,500 Jewish prisoners from Bergen-Belsen were crammed inside on their way to another concentration camp.

On April 13, 1945, in the final weeks of the war, advancing American soldiers came upon the stopped train near Magdeburg, Germany, and provided care for the survivors.

What

Apparent variable.

In his London home, Lantos told us how he was just five years old when he was put on that train with his mom.

When you had to leave Bergen-Belsen, what

were you thinking? It was my mother was doing the thinking, and her thinking was anywhere can be better than Belsen.

... they'd have, yeah

And first shots of Belsen came up, and my mother put her hands in front of my face and said, "Don't look." And she said to my father, "Put your hand in front of Rita," my sister.

And of course, I peeped through my fingers.

Those images will never, ever, ever leave me.