70 years on: the liberation of the concentration camps

For survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, release did not bring freedom from trauma, says Sinclair McKay

Inmates of Ebensee concentration camp after their liberation by American troops on May 6, 1945 Photo: Rex Features

By Sinclair McKay

The Telegraph -  10 May 2015

The term “Holocaust”, used specifically to mean the systematic Nazi extermination of the continent’s Jewish people, was first used in 1957. Until then, few wanted to hear stories of the camps, and survivors not only had to deal with trauma, but had to do so against worldwide silence. Dan Stone’s illuminating book on the Forties and Fifties overturns the idea of the camps’ liberation as “joyful”; for many, it was a time of grief and even further dread.

So many survivors now had no families. The homes they once lived in had been appropriated by their neighbours, who would not relinquish them, and countless eastern European Jews returned to villages and towns that did not want them back. In what conceivable sense was this victory?

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The Liberation of the Camps by Dan Stone

241pp, Yale, (RRP £20, ebook £15.20)