The liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945 was portrayed as the jewel in the crown of British victory over Nazi Germany. Yet a quarter of the 55,000 survivors of the ‘Horror Camp’ died over the next five weeks, and for many others there was disillusionment and despair. Evacuated to a nearby army barracks converted into a Displaced Persons’ camp which became the largest such camp in Europe they lived behind barbed wire and under military rule, and continued to suffer endemic health problems. Josef Rosensaft, the political leader of the Jewish organisation in Belsen DP camp, described the first twelve months of freedom as being ‘more oppressive to our souls than the years in the hell of Auschwitz and Belsen’. He added that when the hoped-for ‘day of Liberation’ came, ‘we saw before us a new kind of world, cold and strange’. Strange New World takes the reader into the untold story of the survivors’ first year of freedom. Despite the alienating circumstances of the post-war world, this is also a story of new life and hope, and of survivors asserting their own agency and independence. ‘A huge step forward in the historiography of Bergen-Belsen.’ Dr Thomas Rahe, former director of the documentation centre at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial
