A memorial at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Bergen, northern Germany. Photo / AP
On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp, a Polish survivor and British liberator meet again.
On the surface, Mala Tribich and Nathaniel Fiennes don't appear to have a huge amount in common. Tribich, 89, was born in Piotrkow Trybunalski, a small town in Poland, in 1930, where her father ran a flour mill. She moved to England in 1947, married and had two children, and worked in an office for decades. Now retired and widowed, she lives alone in a flat in north London.
Fiennes, meanwhile, turns 100 in September. He was born in the Victoria Tower at the Palace of Westminster in 1920, where his grandfather, Sir Thomas Butler, who was once Yeoman Usher of the Black Rod, had a grace-and-favour apartment.
He is an Old Etonian and Oxford graduate, officially the 21st Lord Saye & Sele, and a relative of Ralph, Ranulph, Joseph and most of the other famous Fienneses. He is still married to Mariette, his wife of 62 years, has had five children, and worked for decades as a land agent, devoting his energy to restoring and maintaining Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire, the beautiful, moated medieval mansion that's been in his family since 1377.
For all their obvious differences, however, Tribich and Lord Saye are connected by shared memories that have haunted them for most of their lives: 75 years ago today, they were both at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany on the day it was liberated by the British Army.
Lord Saye, then 25, was Adjutant with the 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, which had been marching east, towards Germany, for weeks. They were among the first troops to reach Belsen. Despite hearing of a typhus epidemic in the area, he and two fellow officers pressed on through the pine and silver birch forests that greeted the battalion and explored the recently discovered camp, not knowing what they might find beyond the gates.
"We had heard rumours, and not very positive ones, but we waited to see," he remembers now. "We turned down a small track, and it opened into a sight you would hope to never see again … People being chopped up, people on the ground, pits with three or four hundred dead bodies in each, and huts full of people. It was like something from a nightmare, and the smell was overpowering."
One of the bodies in the huts was that of a 14 year-old Tribich, who lay stricken with typhus. With her 5-year-old cousin, Ann, she had been at Belsen for two-and-a-half months, having been transferred from Ravensbruck concentration camp in February 1945. Three months earlier, the ghetto in her home town in Poland had been liquidated. Tribich was separated from her father and brother, packed on to a cattle truck, and driven away.
"It was like something out of hell," Tribich says of Belsen, echoing Lord Saye. "You could be talking to someone and then, suddenly, they just died."
Even today, she recalls the morning the British arrived with startling clarity. "My bunk was by a little window in the children's huts. I couldn't move a muscle, I was so ill with typhus, but I remember being aware there were people running outside, towards the gates. I thought: 'How does anybody have the strength to run?' But it was because the British had come."
The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was meant to involve events and commemorations across Europe. Tribich was supposed to be at the site of the former camp, where hundreds were to pay their respects to the tens of thousands of inmates who died there. Those events have, of course, been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic (many will take place online this week instead), but remembering what happened at Belsen remains as important as ever.
Around 65km north of Hanover, Bergen-Belsen was established by the Nazis in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp. It later became a concentration camp and, eventually, home to prisoners forced on "death marches" from other camps when Allied forces advanced into Germany.
The site was designed for no more than 10,000, yet its population swelled to over 60,000 within three years. Conditions were appalling, illnesses such as dysentery and typhus spread with ease, food was so scarce that many succumbed to starvation, and corpses could be found everywhere. The 15-year-old diarist Anne Frank – along with her 19-year-old sister, Margot – was among the dead.
The horrors discovered were so extreme that when Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied British troops into Belsen, first filed a report on what he'd found, the BBC hesitated to broadcast it in full, for fear it would upset listeners.
"The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them..." Dimbleby said in the report.
"Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days." That day, he said, "was the most horrible of my life".
As is so common among their generation, Tribich and Lord Saye spent decades rarely discussing their wartime experiences. Lord Saye was mentioned twice in dispatches, yet even his wife, Mariette, didn't know about his role liberating Belsen until he was well into his 60s. Tribich, who was sent to Sweden immediately after the war, before being reunited with her brother (Ben Helfgott, who went on to become a British Olympian and knight of the realm) in England in 1947, also got on with life.
That reluctance to dwell on the past means Lord Saye has never met a Belsen survivor, and Tribich few liberators. Until a few months ago, that is. Thanks to her connections with the Holocaust Education Trust, Tribich travelled to Broughton Castle to meet Lord Saye ahead of the 75th anniversary.
Tribich, who could pass for 65 and is as alert as anyone half that, wanted to express her thanks for what Lord Saye and his fellow liberators had done. She was also excited to visit a castle. Lord Saye – a frail but delightfully bashful man known as 'Nat' to family and friends, who has no airs or graces but a certain twinkle in his eye – told me he was ready "to grovel before [Tribich], because I have such a respect and admiration for her. She is the most remarkable lady … all those survivors are."
Over lunch and photographs in Broughton Castle's great hall, the pair shared their memories of the war, chatted about grandchildren, and laughed as if old friends. Aside from that one day, 75 years ago, their two lives could scarcely have been more different. Yet today they have one common message.
"I would like young people to think about the Holocaust and Belsen, and to learn lessons from it so that we can prevent anything like it from ever happening again. This happened in a country that was civilised, that we expected more of," Tribich said.
Alongside, Lord Saye nodded intently. "We were able to liberate some, but we also saw so many who weren't able to survive. It's so important we mark this, because we must never forget."
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