thesilkroadtoday
By Santosh Kumar Pokharel
Prologue: When the Guns Fell Silent
The world war was over in May 1945 after the fall of Berlin to the Soviet Red Army. Hitler was nowhere to be traced, captured and punished for what he had done. And while the world hunted for one man, the German lagers of torture still stood. Auschwitz had been shattered by the Soviets in January 1945. Belsen had not. These infamous lagers, where human cry had been suppressed with guns, diseases and hunger, were the climax of a brutal, inhumane terror—the crime of German soldiers at its peak.
I write this not as a historian. I have never walked the heath at Bergen-Belsen, never held a document in an archive, never sat with a survivor. What I know comes from reading, from testimonies others gathered at great cost, and from the accounts of the soldiers who pushed those gates open. I do not know whether Gurkhas stood among them. I would rather say I do not know than invent a comfort for myself. Whoever opened those gates, whatever flag they carried, they were the resurrectors of the captives.
I have written elsewhere on the diplomatic history of the Second World War—its causes, its consequences, the settlements that followed. That was the war seen from the conference tables, the treaties, the maps redrawn. This is the same war seen from the ground, from inside the wire, from the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl who died three weeks before the gates opened. The diplomacy explains how the war began and how it ended. It does not explain what it cost. That is the part I am trying to reach now.
Poetry is a literary tool for expressing oneself in a few lines. When the task is to set out a grievance in full—every hour of it, every name, every silence—poetry may not be sufficient. You go looking for another tool. I have not found one more stringent than the prose narrative, and so I take shelter in it now, in a compassionate mood, hoping to harbour and nurture whatever compassion the reader carries for what was done to people across Europe at Belsen. Had poetry served this purpose, I would have employed my Pokhrelian stanzas—the Pokhreliknots.
I am not trying to write history. I am trying to put one thing in front of you that I cannot get out of my head: a human life is precious beyond argument. The men who ran Belsen believed they would escape. Kramer was hanged. Grese was hanged. Others were never caught, and some of them died old and comfortable in their beds. That is a wound history has not closed. But the ones the world could reach, the world reached. Somebody had to decide to hang them. Nobody was going to do it automatically.
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Part One: The Road from Auschwitz
Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz in January 1945 and found around seven thousand prisoners still alive. Most were too ill to walk. The camp had operated for 1,689 days. By the time the Red Army arrived, the SS had already forced nearly sixty thousand prisoners westward on foot, into the snow, on what became known as death marches. Auschwitz was over. The methods were not.
The road from Auschwitz ran west, across Poland and Germany, to a place called Bergen-Belsen.
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Part Two: A Camp That Was Never Meant to Be This
Belsen began as a prisoner-of-war camp for French and Belgian soldiers in 1940. By April 1943, the SS had taken over part of it and turned that section into something called an Aufenthaltslager—a residence camp. The name was a lie. It was built to hold Jews who might be traded for German nationals abroad, people held as bargaining chips and treated, on paper at least, as though they were still alive because someone might want them back.
In December 1944, Josef Kramer arrived to run it.
Kramer had spent years at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he supervised the gassings. He brought his habits with him. At Belsen he set dogs on prisoners, machine-gunned others at the burial pits, and announced his policy without embarrassment: “The more dead Jews you bring me, the better I like it.” When diarrhea swept the camp and killed hundreds, his prescription was starvation. He told a fellow officer he had no intention of improving conditions.
Irma Grese was there too, twenty-two years old, already known as the Hyena of Auschwitz. Fritz Klein served as camp doctor and later said he could not help the dying because he had no medicine. Franz Hössler was Kramer’s deputy. Their names are on the record. So are the things they did.
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Part Three: The People
They came from the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Romania. Roma and Sinti. Political prisoners. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Gay men. By early 1945, as the Allies closed in from both sides, Belsen became a dumping ground for prisoners evacuated from camps further east. They arrived on foot and in open freight cars, in conditions that killed some before they reached the gate.
A fifteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank was among them.
She and her sister Margot had been deported from Auschwitz to Belsen in the autumn of 1944. In the crowded barracks, Anne met girls she had known in Amsterdam. Hanneli Goslar was one of them. They spoke through a fence. Hanneli threw a parcel of food over the wire. Anne was already too weak to catch it. The parcel held items from a Red Cross package. It fell. Someone else picked it up.
By February 1945, Anne and Margot had typhus. The disease moves slowly at first: headache, chills, fever, then a rash, then confusion. A survivor who shared their hut described the last stage as “that slow fading away, a kind of apathy, mixed with revivals, until they too became so sick that there was no hope.” Both sisters died in February. Anne was fifteen.
In the women’s camp, thousands lay on bare wooden boards. Typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis. By April 1945, more than sixty thousand prisoners were crammed into Belsen’s two sections, with over ten thousand corpses unburied. There was no running water. The gutters were full of bodies. The smell of death clung to the clothes of the living.
Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, the senior British medical officer who would later enter the camp, told Reuters he saw evidence of cannibalism, bodies with the liver, kidneys, and heart removed. The daily ration was turnip soup. Those too weak to collect it died where they lay. The Germans, facing defeat, asked for a local truce. They said typhus might spread beyond the camp. They were not worried about the prisoners. They were worried about themselves.
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Part Four: The Gates
On the morning of 15 April 1945, soldiers of the British 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, reached Bergen-Belsen. John Darby was a tank driver with the 11th Armoured Division. He remembered German officers shuffling along the road, speaking in “fractured bursts of English” about “prison camp,” “disease,” “typhus.”
Darby drove his Sherman tank up to the gates and pushed them open.
“I was the first there to discover it,” he said. “We knew it was a camp, but it wasn’t an extermination camp—but people died and were piled up in beds and round and about like rotten logs of wood.”
Inside: piles of naked, emaciated corpses. Children standing beside mounds of dead women. SS guards still shooting at prisoners who tried to climb the wire. Darby’s colonel ordered his men to return fire. Darby shot four young German soldiers. “They were burning documents as fast as they could,” he remembered.
Then a hand touched his leg.
He looked down. A face. Eyes. A prisoner, on the ground, reaching up.
He radioed the Red Cross medics. They told him to move on. He cried. He never forgot.
A member of a British Army Film and Photographic unit described the scene for the cameras: “The bodies were a ghastly sight. Some were green. They looked like skeletons covered with skin—the flesh had all gone. There were bodies of small children among the grown ups. In other parts of the camp there were hundreds of bodies lying around, in many cases piled five or six high.”
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Part Five: The Work
Liberation did not end the dying. It began a rescue operation of a scale no one had planned for. More than sixty thousand survivors remained. Over ten thousand corpses lay unburied. The British soldiers—most of them young men who had never seen a dead body before the war—became grave-diggers, nurses, and witnesses in the space of a few days.
Brigadier Glyn-Hughes directed the relief. Between 18 and 28 April, the dead were buried. The SS guards were forced to collect the bodies with their bare hands. German civilians from nearby towns were brought to the camp and made to walk past the piles. They had said they did not know. Now they knew. When the SS could not keep pace, British bulldozers pushed the remaining thousands into mass graves.
Evacuation of the living began on 21 April. Survivors with any chance were deloused and moved to Camp No. 2, which had been converted into a hospital. British medical students volunteered to travel to Germany and help. As each barracks was emptied, it was burned to stop the typhus. On 21 May 1945, the last hut was ceremonially burned. The first stage was over.
Glyn-Hughes later testified that it took a staff of sixty-eight a fortnight to stamp out the typhus. The soldiers worked with their own health at risk. They lost people. Everyone who worked there lost people. They kept working.
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Part Six: The Reckoning
Kramer was arrested on the day of liberation. He was shackled and put under guard. In September 1945, he and forty-four others, including Grese, Klein, and Hössler, were tried before a British military tribunal at Lüneburg.
The evidence was overwhelming: the mass graves, the survivors’ testimony, the photographs, the camp records. Kramer’s defence was that he had improved conditions at Belsen. He said he had started work on a new sewerage system and enlarged the kitchens. Under cross-examination, he admitted forcing people into a gas chamber at Natzweiler and causing the gas to be turned on, but denied taking part in selections. He defended Grese, saying the charges against her were untrue and that he had only praise for her. The court did not believe him.
Eleven defendants were sentenced to death. Kramer, Grese, and Klein were hanged at Hamelin Prison on 13 December 1945.
It was not enough. Many who ran the camps were never tried. Some lived to old age. But the ones the world could reach, the world reached.
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Epilogue: What Remains
The last hut at Belsen was burned on 21 May 1945. Today the site is a park. Mass graves marked by simple headstones hold approximately fifty thousand people. Anne and Margot Frank are somewhere among them.
The British soldiers who liberated Belsen did not set out to be heroes. They were tank drivers and medics who walked into a nightmare and stayed. They buried the dead, fed the living, and filmed what they saw so the world could not later pretend it had not happened.
John Darby carried Belsen with him for the rest of his life. “I cried and I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. Twenty years after the war, he broke down. A doctor told him he had to talk about it to get better. He talked.
Belsen began as a place of exchange. It ended as a graveyard for fifty thousand people. It did not need gas chambers. It needed neglect, overcrowding, and a man like Josef Kramer to make sure the neglect continued. Atrocity does not always arrive with a factory whistle. Sometimes it arrives quietly, with a signature on a transfer order, and a commandant who says the more dead the better.
Belsen did not go away peacefully. It still stands as an indictment—of the killings in Iran under the Iranian regime, of the killings in Gaza under Israel, and of the men and women held in solitary confinement in the nooks and corners of the world. And meaningless wars and killings in the name of religion still continue.
Every one of those deaths begins the same way. Someone decides that another human being is not quite human. Belsen was built on that decision. So is every mass grave dug since.
On the morning of 15 April 1945, a tank driver felt a hand on his leg. He looked down. He did not see a prisoner, a nationality, or a threat. He saw a human face.
“It’s alright love, you’re free now.”
A tank driver said that to a stranger on the ground. We should listen.
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My heartfelt prayers for eternal peace to the deceased who were no part of that war.
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About the Author
Santosh Kumar Pokharel is a multilingual poet, writer, and peace activist from Nepal. His poetry and essays focus on peace, human compassion, and the moral obligations of memory. He was conferred the Ambassador for Peace Award by the Universal Peace Federation in 2020 and the People’s Diplomacy Special Award by Kazakhstan in 2021 for his work in fostering international literary friendships and cross-cultural understanding.
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References
On Bergen-Belsen and the Holocaust
1. Jewish Virtual Library, “Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp: History & Overview”
2. Britannica, “Josef Kramer”
3. Anne Frank House, “Death of Anne and Margot Frank”
4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Liberation of Bergen-Belsen”
5. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “British soldiers force German civilians to bury corpses”
6. BBC, “Bergen-Belsen liberation: Tank driver John Darby recalls opening gates”
7. BBC, “1945: British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen”
8. Bergen-Belsen Memorial, “Prosecution”
9. Evening Star, “Kramer’s Evidence,” 10 October 1945
10. Imperial War Museums, “Liberation of Bergen-Belsen”
11. Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945 (2005)
On the Author’s Earlier Work
12. Santosh Kumar Pokharel, “A Diplomatic History of the Second World War,” The Silk Road Today, 14 June 2026.
13. Santosh Kumar Pokharel, “A Diplomatic History of the Second World War: Causes, Consequences, and the Post-War Settlement (1939–1945),” Afflatus Creations, Vol. 3, Issue 11 (April–June 2026). ISSN: 3049-4338 (Online). Available at: https://afflatuscreations.com/index.php/current-issue/.
On Contemporary Violations Referenced in the Epilogue
14. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026 (4 February 2026). Documents executions in Iran “on a scale unseen since the late 1980s” and mass killings of protesters, with over 2,000 executions by December 2025.
15. Amnesty International, annual death penalty report (18 May 2026). Records 2,159 executions in Iran in 2025—the highest since 1981 and approximately 80% of the global total.
16. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), press release (31 October 2025). UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato reports over 1,000 known executions in Iran by September 2025 and describes “a deliberate policy of fear and retribution.”
17. UN Human Rights Council, 39th special session resolution (23 January 2026). Deplores the violent crackdown on protests beginning 28 December 2025 and calls for urgent investigation.
18. International Commission of Jurists, statement (19 January 2026). Reports “over 3,000 people, most of them demonstrators” unlawfully killed in Iran since protests began on 28 December 2025.
19. UN OHCHR, press release (31 October 2025). Reports that the June 2025 Iran–Israel–US escalation killed over 1,100 people and injured over 5,600, and describes Israel’s strikes on Iran on 13 June 2025 as “a blatant violation” of the UN Charter.
20. UN Special Rapporteur report to the General Assembly (November 2025). Documents “the unlawful use of force and direct military attacks by the United States against Iran’s peaceful nuclear installations.”
September 12, 2026. Nepal.
[pokharel.santosh@gmail.com]
