Charles Salt

From The Telegraph dated 17/04/2005

She was a Polish Jew who, along with countless others, had been sent to Bergen-Belsen to die. She was unconscious when British troops finally entered the gates and discovered the horror.

He was a British military policeman, told that he had been "volunteered" to help with the concentration camp, drawing up lists of the survivors and helping to bury the tens of thousands of dead.

But Renee and Charles Salt did not meet 60 years ago when the camp was liberated. Soon after they did, a few years later, they married.

"I was pleased that he had seen what I had seen," Mrs Salt, 76, said yesterday. "It meant that he could understand."

Yet this understanding took the form of an unspoken contract between the two not to talk about what they experienced; an agreement that remained in force for half a century.

"It was too much, we could not talk about it," she said. "Of course we knew where we had both been during the war, but we never really talked about it."

Mrs Salt's journey to Bergen-Belsen took her from her home town of Zdunsk Vola, near Lodz in Poland, through ghettoes and even to Auschwitz. Even before reaching her destination, and still in her teens, she had been so kicked, beaten, starved and humiliated that there was little more to do but wait for death.

"By 1945 I had lost just about everything," she said. "Family, home, money, education, country, hair, even my teeth - it had all been taken away from me. I was left a skeleton with nothing."

Yet having become almost inured to the sight of death, the pain of beatings and the constant fear that a casual decision by a stranger might end her life, Renee was shocked when she got off the train at Bergen-Belsen.

"The scene that met our eyes was impossible to describe. Here we saw skeletons walking. Their arms and legs were like matchsticks, their bones poking through their poor skin.

"The bodies had their eyes open, they were all over the place, you couldn't tell who was who.

"Even in Auschwitz all that time there was a grain of hope. When we came to Belsen, I was just praying to die quickly."

Having tracked down her dying mother in the same camp, the then 16-year-old collapsed into feverish unconsciousness and missed the next 10 days - and the arrival of the British, among them her future husband.

"In the main camp there were just hundreds and thousands of bodies," said Mr Salt. "We got German civilians to dig trenches and we had to bury the bodies, but we also had to feed the survivors. What do you do?

"Some people were so desperate that they would find a tin or a piece of glass and open a body to eat the offal." Now 87, Mr Salt suffers from the gait and frailty of an old man and the weekend trip to Belsen from London was a long and tiring one for both him and his wife.

There were 23,200 bodies for Mr Salt and his fellow soldiers to deal with, as well as thousands of survivors, 13,000 of which were so starved and sick that they died soon after. Huge ditches were dug around the camp and up to 5,000 bodies were buried in each one.

Renee woke up 10 days after liberation in a delousing room. As she came to, someone was killing the fat black lice that had covered her since she entered Belsen.

"They gave me a quarter of a slice of bread with a teaspoon of stewed apple on it," she said. "That was the first thing I ate."

Two years later, having found the surviving two aunts out of 12 aunts and uncles in her family and - like many other survivors - suffered a nervous breakdown, she turned her back on Poland and moved to Paris.

There she met and fell in love with Charles, who decided to take Renee to London, where he went on to set up a delicatessen.

"We hadn't seen each other at Bergen-Belsen but we talked briefly about where we had been and realised we had been in the same place," said Mrs Salt.

She could not even tell her son and daughter, and only recently brought up the subject with her grandchildren. "For 50 years we didn't talk about it," she said. "We saw things on the television and then started to talk, putting it together piece by piece."

Mr Salt said yesterday: "It was so different when I was first here; there were huts all over the place. Now there is just grass. What they have done here with the memorial is great."