This article was adapted from remarks at the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

This coming Friday, May 1, it will be 67 years since I was born at the Glyn Hughes Hospital in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen. It is, therefore, a unique and most profound privilege for me to stand here today at the cemetery inside the former DP camp where approximately 4,500 victims of the Holocaust who died in the weeks and months after their liberation lie buried.

“Hush, hush, let’s be silent, graves are growing here,” the Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski wrote in the Vilna Ghetto about the killing fields at nearby Ponary where more than 75,000 human beings – mostly Jews but also Soviet prisoners of war and others – were murdered by the SS and their accomplices between 1941 and 1944.

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