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Special exhibition Children in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

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An exhibition of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation

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The special exhibition Children in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp tells the story of the around 3,500 children under 15 who were imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Based on individual life stories, the exhibition presents the specific conditions under which children lived in the Bergen-Belsen camp and the ways in which they tried to cope with them. Topics covered range from family life and games through roll-calls and violence to fear, hunger, disease and death. The exhibition also touches on less well-known aspects such as births in the camp. The relief measures taken for surviving children after the liberation and full biographies of child survivors also get their own exhibition sections. A final section is dedicated to the around 600 children who lost their lives in the Bergen-Belsen camp.

The exhibition approaches its subject from multiple perspectives and is based on a broad range of images and documents including prisoners’ diaries, drawings and photographs, autobiographical accounts and documentary footage and audio recordings made only a few days after the liberation. At its core are previously unreleased excerpts from video interviews with child survivors of the Bergen-Belsen camp. They give an insight into the specific experiences of children in the camp and the ways in which they reacted to the conditions of their imprisonment.