I'm not sure how to word this as I would never try to belittle what happened there as it was utterly horrendous, but for me, Belsen shocked me more.
I'm not going to try and use numbers as a reference as to why I think that as humans should never be referenced as just a number but Belsen was harrowing. Especially considering they never actually had gas chambers there (no matter what the Sex Pistols may have sang about)
I suppose it didn't help that my grandad was one of the first wave of troops that helped liberate Belsen. From listening to the people that knew him before that (especially my nan) they all say he was never the same afterwards.
As a kid growing up he would tell me loads of stories about certain parts of the war (he was a desert rat fighting Rommel through Africa/Egypt and Italy). He told me about scratching his name on the sphinx and how his best friend burned to death in a tank that he escaped from, but he absolutely refused to speak about Belsen and what he saw.
One of the great British reporters of the time Richard Dimbleby (father of David Dimbleby) said at the time
"Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life."
Every day of our lives we should be thankful that we have never had to see or live through the absolute horror that people of only two or three generations past had to live.