It's 60 years since British soldiers liberated Belsen. I suggest you spend a minute to remember what has gone on and how lucky we are.

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Taken from BBC News Online:

Holocaust survivors and their liberators are marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The Nazi death camp, near Hanover in Germany, was the first to be liberated by British troops, on 15 April 1945. An estimated 70,000 people died at Belsen.

A low-key ceremony will take place on the site of the camp, which burned down shortly after it was liberated.

London's Hyde Park will also host an official ceremony on Friday morning.

Correspondents say ceremonies marking the anniversary are low-key in Germany because there are so many sites to be remembered this year.


Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks and General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, are expected to speak in Hyde Park from 1030 BST, alongside Belsen survivors and liberators.

A one-day seminar is being held at London's Imperial War Museum. Auschwitz and Belsen survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and camp liberator Major Dick Williams are among the speakers.

Other speakers include Dr Alan MacAuslan, a former medical student who worked on relief effort at Belsen, and Esther Brunstein, survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Belsen.

German surrender

The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women within full view of several hundred children held at the camp.

The gutters, too, were filled with bodies.

One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased.

There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.

In the weeks that followed British troops buried 10,000 bodies in mass graves.

indeed, memorials of these camps should always remain as a reminder of quite possibly our darkest moment and one of our biggest blemishes to date, with only the entire raping of our planet and the slave trade standing shoulder to shoulder with it, as a human species.

If anyone ever wants a fine example for why we should drop our petty feudes with each other then this is it - how something like this can happen is something everyone should sit down and think about, shortly followed by the thought of what if we were rounded up like this just because we didn't fit someone elses ideals of a perfect race and exterminated en masse as how anyone could read about and remember the holocaust without shedding any tears is beyond my comprehension.