I came upon this interesting nugget of information. The story is about a graveyard and its interesting “inhabitants.”
Father Michael Morris was born in Listowel, Co Kerry, in 1908. He became a Jesuit and chaplain and served with the British Army. He was with the army at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. If you just look at pictures, it looks worse than you can imagine. The place was originally created as a prisoner of war camp but soon many Jews from other concentration camps.
Reportedly, there were 60,000 human beings in a space built for 10,000. And there were 13,000 unburied dead bodies. Typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and dysentery led to the thousands and thousands of deaths.
Here’s what Fr. Morris wrote in his letters home of his time there:
What we saw within the first few days is utterly beyond description…people crawling on their hands and knees because they have not got the strength to walk, or see them drag themselves along until they fell in the gutters to remain there, was ‘harrowing’.The majority of these people were too weak to leave their beds, so perhaps you get just a faint idea of the atmosphere… The work has been physically the most revolting that I have been called on to do, but it has also been the most consoling.
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