Meditation on Bergen Belsen

On a lowering autumn afternoon that alternated spatterings of rain with sudden wan sunlight, I came again to Bergen. It is a village as moulded in its setting as if nothing had happened there since the Thirty Years’ War. Some of the half-timbered houses still have the double-headed horse emblem on the roof-trees, the pagan protection against witches that would later evolve into the stallion of the House of Hanover. The inn courtyard is gay with polka-dot beach umbrellas over open air tables. But as I passed by, the umbrellas were drooping damply in the ebb of the tourist season. Already I could see the sombre green of the beech leaves turning to bronze.. In the outlying fields the rye and wheat of the delayed summer still stood unharvested.

Four miles beyond the village, past the stone barracks of a British military reservation, is the site of the old Belsen camp. Now it is a memorial park. The stones on either side of the entrance are cut deep:

FR

About the Author

Francis Russell

Featured Tags

On a lowering autumn afternoon that alternated spatterings of rain with sudden wan sunlight, I came again to Bergen. It is a village as moulded in its setting as if nothing had happened there since the Thirty Years’ War. Some of the half-timbered houses still have the double-headed horse emblem on the roof-trees, the pagan protection against witches that would later evolve into the stallion of the House of Hanover. The inn courtyard is gay with polka-dot beach umbrellas over open air tables. But as I passed by, the umbrellas were drooping damply in the ebb of the tourist season. Already I could see the sombre green of the beech leaves turning to bronze.. In the outlying fields the rye and wheat of the delayed summer still stood unharvested.

Four miles beyond the village, past the stone barracks of a British military reservation, is the site of the old Belsen camp. Now it is a memorial park. The stones on either side of the entrance are cut deep: