To Meet in HellBernice LernerLabel: Amberley PublishingDescription: On April 15 1945 Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes entered Bergen-Belsen for the first time. Waiting for him were 10000 unburied putrefying corpses and 60000 living prisoners starving and sick. One month earlier 15-year-old Rachel Genuth arrived at Bergen-Belsen; deported with her family from Sighet Hungary in May of 1944 Rachel had by then already endured Auschwitz the Christianstadt labor camp and a forced march through the Sudetenland. In To Meet In Hell Bernice Lerner follows both Hughes and Genuth as they move across Europe toward Bergen-Belsen in the final brutal year of World War II.The book begins at the end: with Hughes’s searing testimony at the September 1945 trial of Josef Kramer commandant of Bergen-Belsen along with forty-four SS and guards. ‘I have been a doctor for thirty years and seen all the horrors of war’ Hughes said ‘but I have never seen anything to touch it.’ The narrative then jumps back to the spring of 1944 following both Hughes and Rachel as they navigate their respective forms of wartime hell until confronting the worst: Christianstadt’s prisoners including Rachel are deposited in Bergen-Belsen and the British Second Army having finally breached the fortress of Germany assumes control of the ghastly camp after a negotiated surrender. Though they never met it was Hughes’s commitment to helping as many prisoners as possible that saved Rachel’s life.Drawing on a wealth of sources including Hughes’s papers war diaries oral histories and interviews this gripping volume combines scholarly research with narrative storytelling in describing the suffering of Nazi victims the overwhelming presence of death at Bergen-Belsen and characters who exemplify the human capacity for fortitude. Lerner Rachel’s daughter has special insight into the torment her mother suffered. The first book to pair the story of a Holocaust victim with that of a liberator To Meet In Hell compels readers to consider the full complex humanity of both.
