UK

041598 - TO MEET IN HELL: Bergen-Belsen, The British Officer Who Liberated it and the Jewish Girl He Saved

By Bernice Lerner

A remarkable story about perseverance and what it means to save another’s life: The book tells the stories of two people whose paths, if not for war, would never have crossed. They were from different realms of Europe: Brigadier Glen Hughes was a British officer, who had captained rugby teams and practiced medicine after his service in the Great War. Rachel Genuth - who would grow up to become author Bernice Lerner’s mother - was born in Sighet, Romania. She and her family would undergo unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, and by war’s end she was near death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Brigadier Hughes was serving as the British Army’s Deputy Director of Medical Services when he was called upon to be the first of the allies to enter Bergen-Belsen in April of 1945. He would go on to liberate the camp, and save Rachel’s life. In To Met In Hell, an accomplished Holocaust scholar turns to the question that was always crucial for her: who was the man who saved her mother’s life? While so many had perished, how were thousands of camp prisoners saved and what was this experience like for those who liberated them? How did Hughes carry the knowledge of what he had seen, and Rachel, what she had endured? Weaving together Rachel’s story and Hughes’ over the course of the momentous final year of the war, we see the personal fallout for both those being crushed by Hitler’s reign and those who fought their way across Europe to stop him at all costs.