ABSTRACT
Many of the essays in this volume have made extensive use of personal testimony, whether it be in the form of contemporary diaries and reports from Belsen or post-war accounts and oral history. Many survivors fear, not without reason, that the Holocaust could, in the hands of insensitive academics, lose its human dimension. As editors, we believe that the contributors to this book have avoided treating their subject matter as 'just another historical issue'. The final section in Belsen in History and Memory stresses even further the need for historians and others involved with writing on the Holocaust to listen to the voices of those who suffered the brute force of Nazi racialism, and to those who were witness to it, as in the case of the liberators of Belsen. The accounts in this section provide a cross-section of testimony and attempt to achieve a variety of perspectives - Jewish and non-Jewish; women and men; a range of nationalities; children and adults; and survivor and liberator. Through these different voices, we hope that the reader will be provided with another standpoint from which to confront Bergen-Belsen which supplements and sometimes challenges the perspectives offered by earlier sections of this volume.
