Train stands at end of train tracks at Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum
Train stands at end of train tracks at Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museumFlash 90

A memorial event for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was attended by Holocaust survivors from 16 countries.

According to the Juedische Allgemeine, 60 survivors and 100 relatives planted flowers in memory of the 52,000 prisoners who were died at the death camp in northern Germany.

Most of the survivors came from Israel, the UK, France, the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Slovakia and Poland.

The ceremony commemorated the liberation of the camp 77 years ago.

The open-air event at the memorial site saw the survivors placing wreaths on the inscription wall. They also placed stones there in memory of the dead.

Mark Dainow, the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, spoke at the memorial. He said that the Jewish community that exists today in Germany “symbolizes the Jewish people’s will to survive.”

The Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth urged the German people to recognize the painful history of Nazi atrocities committed in concentration camps.

“Bergen Belsen was a place of torture, a hell set up by people,” she said.

She warned that “every kind of antisemitism and attempts to relativize the unique crime against humanity, the Holocaust, must be resolutely opposed.”