Jewish Renaissance article: 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen

Memory, loss and resilience in the 80th year since the liberation of Bergen-Belsen: Hephzibah Rudofsky shares her personal experience of the commemorations at Bergen-Belsen, where her mother was interned during the Holocaust:

In spring earlier this year, I found myself walking, for the second time, through Bergen-Belsen, a place that had haunted my mother’s childhood and, by extension, shaped my own. She was just eight and a half when she arrived there in January 1944, along with her parents. Their survival was a miracle. This return was not simply a visit, but my first time attending an official commemoration – an encounter with memory, loss and the quiet resilience of life.

When my mother was alive, she was invited several times to remembrance events at Bergen-Belsen, including one during Queen Elizabeth's visit in June 2015. It clashed with a long-planned trip to the Bach Festival in Leipzig and my parents chose music over memory. I’ve often wondered if my mother truly wanted to return. When I asked, she’d simply say, "There’s nothing left. Bergen-Belsen was razed to the ground". But that isn’t entirely true. Today, Bergen-Belsen is a memorial site, with a museum, cemetery and monuments. Perhaps this was her way of saying there was nothing left she wanted to face. When I finally visited in 2024, I understood...

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