It’s awful, what they have done to mankind. The darkest scenes from the Middle Ages or the Inquisition are reproduced and multiplied here to the extreme. Their monstrous “revival” will forever leave the mark of shame and infamy on the “civilized” and “cultured” Germany of the twentieth century.

The darkest and most degrading slavery imaginable has made it so that life in this camp has nothing in common with life as humans conceive it.

It is indeed a cuel plan aiming to cause the systematic and certain end of thousands of human lives. Of that, there is not the slightest doubt, not the slightest doubt. It requires nothing but to see clearly and to follow attentively everything that goes on in order to deduce, with no hesitation: this camp is not made to hold civilian deportees or prisoners of war for a specific period of time, to temporarily deprive them of freedom for whatever political, diplomatic, or strategic reasons with the intention of holding them and releasing them alive before or after the cessation of hostilities…No: this camp is consciously and knowingly organized and arranged in such a way as to methodically exterminate thousands of human beings according to a plan.

If this continues for only one more month, it is highly doubtful that one single person among us will come through.

—

Hanna Levy-Hass in April 1945, Diary of Bergen-Belsen

Hanna Levy-Hass (1913-2001), a teacher and Yugoslavian Jew, was an inmate of Bergen-Belsen who kept a diary in secret, recording in great detail what was happening in the camp and the differences between a “death factory” such as Auschwitz and death at Bergen-Belsen.

September 16, 2012, 1:19am / 31