75 years ago. My father, 24, was a junior officer with the 11th Armoured Division. They’d landed at Normandy, lost men in the battles around Caen, advanced north-east through Belgium and Holland into Germany, crossing the Rhine at the beginning of April. (1/9)

Heavy fighting at Stolzenau, on the River Weser. Thousands of released Allied prisoners-of-war streaming into the lines. Another village: yellow road signs, edged in black, said “Belsen”. Rumours of a camp, rife with typhus. My father and two other young officers walked in. (2/9)

He remembers seeing bodies with their livers and kidneys cut out. A heap of bodies on a trailer behind a tractor, a guard sitting on top smoking a cigarette. “And then there was an enormous pit, and in it were perhaps 500 bodies, it may have been a thousand, I don’t know.” (3/9)

He remembers smoking continuously – the only way to protect against the stench. And what it was like to go into the huts. “There were rows and rows of people. You couldn’t tell whether they were dead or alive. They might have been either.” (4/9)

He didn’t tell my mother about it until they’d been married for 15 years. The same details came back to him – the stench; the cannibalised bodies on the ground; the emaciated bodies in the huts; the heap of bodies on the trailer, the soldier smoking his cigarette on top. (5/9)

I started recording him talking about these things in 2005. More recently, he's spoken about them publicly, feeling - I think - the duty of bearing witness: "And all I have to say is that if anyone ever denies the holocaust I’m very glad to stand up and say, I saw Belsen.” (6/9)

My dad is 99 now. In February this year, the Holocaust Educational Trust arranged for him and Mala Tribich, 89, to meet each other. Mala had been a prisoner at Belsen aged 14 – taken in a cattle truck from Poland along with her five-year-old cousin. (7/9)

They sat talking, remembering. I will never forget the moment Mala reached out and took my father’s hand, and how for several minutes they held onto each other like that, across time, across such a world of loss and survival. (8/9)

Here they are. They don't want us to forget what they have seen, or all those we have lost. How I wish I could hold your hand today, across our strange isolations, my beloved dad. (9/9) @HMD_UK @HolocaustUK #Belsen75
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/14/remarkable-75-years-survivor-liberator-bergen-belsen-reunite/