The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with no one to bury them, living people lying beneath them too weak to move, or using them as pillows. Hetty was one of several children interviewed by Gordon Walker, her voice so strong and resolute and light in spirit, in spite of all that she had seen and experienced. Talking now, aged 88, to Mike Lanchin for Children of Belsen on the World Service, she insists, ‘It is not a sad story I am telling you. It’s a story of experience, and plenty of hope and courage.’
Hetty was Dutch and Jewish and aged 11 when the Nazis marched into Amsterdam.
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