The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/bergen-belsen//fania.02


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen
Summary: Describes conditions in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
         immediately prior to liberation
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Belsen,Fenelon

Archive/File: pub/camps/bergen-belsen/fania.02
Last-modified: 1993/03/07

Fania Fenelon provides this grim vignette just prior to the discovery of
the camp at Bergen-Belson, with the war nearly at an end - although she
didn't know it, she, too, would come down with typhus within a day or
two...

"The stench had become intolerable; wrapped in my cloak, a priceless
possession, I went out in search of air, to stretch out, to sleep in the
open.  The ground was muddy and cold, so I kept walking.  In front of me, a
pile of corpses balanced carefully on one another, rose geometrically like
a haystack.  There was no more room in the crematoria so they piled up the
corpses out here. I climbed up them as one would a slope; at the top I
stretched out and fell asleep. Sometimes an arm or leg slackened to take
its final position. I slept on; in the morning, when I woke up, I thought I
that I too must be losing my reason. Hounded, I ran to the infirmary, but
Marie's assistant told me that Marie had typhus."

Fania Fenelon weighed 65 pounds the day the British arrived...

"The SS had given the order to destroy us and burn the camp. April 15,
1945; we were to be shot at 3 P.M.; the British arrived at 11 A.M."
(Fenelon, 253-255)

                            Work Cited

Fenelon, Fania, with Marcelle Routier. Playing For Time. New York: Athenium,
1977. ISBN 0-689-10796-X

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