Sickness and Death

Fania Fenelon weighed 65 pounds the day the British liberated the camps.

Most of the people unlucky enough to end up at Bergen-Belsen died from being hung, shot, killed by disease or starved to death.

A Bergen-Belsen survivor, Fania Fenelon, provides this grim statement prior to the discovery of the camp at Bergen-Belsen, "The stench had became 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 crematorium 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 a leg slackened to take its final position. I slept on; in the morning, when I woke up I thought that I too must be losing my reason."

The graph above shows the number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen in the last 5 months of World War II