Eighty years ago, the gates of Bergen-Belsen were opened—not to freedom, but to the unspeakable. It was not merely a camp that British troops encountered, but a kingdom of ashes. A place where time itself had collapsed under the weight of atrocity. What they found was the obscene residue of a humanity systematically dismantled: piles of corpses, men and women reduced to shadows, children robbed of both flesh and future.
Bergen-Belsen was not Auschwitz. It had no gas chambers. But let us not be seduced by taxonomy. Evil needs no architecture. It thrives equally in chaos and silence. Here was a camp where death took its time—where hunger was the executioner, typhus the silent assassin, and neglect the final insult. And it was British boots that stepped into this inferno, bearing witness not as conquerors, but as mourners.
Today, as memory flickers in the tempest of our present, we must ask: What have we done with this inheritance of horror?In what cruel irony do we now find ourselves—where, under the banners of “justice” and “liberation,” the descendants of those who screamed never again are once more accused, isolated, and reviled?
The Shoah is no longer denied—it is appropriated. Its dead are summoned not to warn, but to indict. The camps are not forgotten, they are contorted. And in this tragic masquerade, Israel becomes the accused in a theatre of hypocrisy whose script is written by the same ghosts we swore to silence.
Let us be clear: to remember Bergen-Belsen is to stand guard. It is to reject the new pieties that excuse hatred, reward terror, and adorn violence with the garb of virtue. It is to say, with clarity and without apology, that antisemitism—whether dressed in the colours of the Left or cloaked in revolutionary zeal—remains what it always was: a contagion of the spirit.
We do not honour the victims of Bergen-Belsen by wreaths alone. We honour them when we stand firm against the desecration of truth. When we insist that no cause, however fashionable, justifies the blood libels of old made new. When we recognise that history does not merely repeat—it returns in masks, with new names and slogans, but the same thirst for erasure.
To remember is not enough. One must resist.
Bergen-Belsen cries not for pity, but for vigilance.
