Bergen-Belsen

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Eva Figes
At her first school in England, Eva suffered the hostility of other children and often took sanctuary in the house next door. This house operated as a refuge for German-Jewish children who had reached England...
Textual Features Gillian Allnutt
The poem The Swastika Spoon precedes 1945, but similarly contemplates how the Second World War affected GA 's father, whose army regiment participated in the liberation of Belsen , a Nazi concentration camp located...
Textual Features Nina Bawden
The novel is about Annie May, a phenomenally courageous young woman, who as a child has survived first abandonment and ill treatment (on a hill farm in Wales where she was a wartime evacuee), and...
Textual Features Muriel Box
MB 's book is fun and funny to read. A late, deadpan, unstressed detail has David, now happily married to Hermione, known therefore as Dr David O'Hannagan. The story also goes deeper than a mere...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Gillian Allnutt
Lisa Williams writes that poetry about family and familial inheritance is risky, but Allnutt does not fall prey to sentimentality, partly because objects like the spoon . . . serve as the locus for memory...

Timeline

4 August 1944
The Dutch Jewish family of Otto Frank , including fifteen-year old Anne Frank , were betrayed to the Gestapo after more than two years of hiding in their secret annexe above the offices at 263...
March 1945
Adolescent diarist Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, probably of typhus. The camp was liberated by British forces a month later.
15 April 1945
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British soldiers (one of whom later became the father of the poet Gillian Allnutt ). Buchenwald too was liberated, by Americans.