The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with no one to bury them, living people lying beneath them too weak to move, or using them as pillows. Hetty was one of several children interviewed by Gordon Walker, her voice so strong and resolute and light in spirit, in spite of all that she had seen and experienced. Talking now, aged 88, to Mike Lanchin for Children of Belsen on the World Service, she insists, ‘It is not a sad story I am telling you. It’s a story of experience, and plenty of hope and courage.’
Hetty was Dutch and Jewish and aged 11 when the Nazis marched into Amsterdam. She was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen with her family but was soon separated from her mother and father and taken to a special unit where ‘orphaned’ children were looked after by foster mothers (the Nazis hoped to use them in an exchange programme for German PoWs). She was in bed when the British arrived at 3.30 on a Sunday afternoon, recovering from typhus. Her first question for Gordon Walker was how she could find out where her parents were.
We also heard from Julius who was just three when the British arrived and has no memories from that time. He was adopted afterwards by a couple in Finland and until recently never looked back on his childhood. But in 2010 he went back with Hetty to Bergen-Belsen. The huts, fences and guardrooms are all gone, and it’s now a peaceful rural scene, surrounded by trees and punctuated by memorials to the 50,000 prisoners who lost their lives.
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