TORONTO — “I was completely shocked,” said Brian MacConnell. “I had no idea such places existed.”
Brian MacConnell today [Sheldon Kirshner photo]
MacConnell, an 88-year-old veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force and a resident of Toronto, was talking about his brief visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp only days after it was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945.
Brian MacConnell in his wartime RCAF uniform.
To this day, Bergen-Belsen, a place of infamy in the annals of the Holocaust, remains an endearing and searing symbol of Nazi crimes.
As many as 50,000 Russian prisoners of war and 50,000 civilians, mostly Jews, died in this camp in northwestern Germany.
MacConnell, a combat pilot who flew Spitfires during World War II, saw Bergen-Belsen when the stench of death still lingered in the air.
“My whole squadron was taken to Bergen-Belsen,” he said in an interview last week. “I’m pretty sure we were taken there to tell people what we had seen.”
MacConnell’s son, Mike, a Toronto high school teacher and convert to Judaism, said his father’s visit was arranged to ensure there would be “objective witnesses to the atrocity.”
Nearly 66 years on, MacConnell, a retired mining engineer, remembers the visit as if it happened almost yesterday.
He told his story on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which has been observed on Jan. 27 since 2005, when the United Nations designated it a special memorial day under Resolution 60/7.
On Jan. 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious death camp in Poland where some one million people, many of them Jews, were murdered.
MacConnell visited Bergen-Belsen, originally a prisoner of war camp, shortly after his 402 Spitfire Squadron was moved to an airfield nearby.
Two or three days after the British 11th Armoured Division rolled into Bergen-Belsen, finding thousands of decaying corpses on the grounds, MacConnell and 24 other members of his squadron were bused to the camp in Lower Saxony.
“The survivors had been removed, but dead bodies, 70 to 100, were piled up near the fence,” he recalled. “They were all so emaciated, like skeletons.”
The Canadians were taken on a one-hour tour. “We were shown from the outside barracks, gas chambers and ovens,” he said.
The British army officer who acted as their guide said, ‘You fellows probably didn’t realize there were such things.”
He was right.
“We had heard that the Germans were mistreating Jews, but we didn’t know they were being killed. We thought Jews had been shipped to work camps.”
“We were in complete shock,” he added. “I couldn’t believe a civilized country like Germany could do such a thing. I couldn’t understand man’s inhumanity to man. We were glad the war was almost over.”
When the tour was finished, the Canadians were deloused, and MacConnell never saw Bergen-Belsen again.
Born in Toronto and educated in Lindsay, Ont., he joined the RCAF in 1942. After months of training in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia, he received his wings.
He was posted to Britain in June 1944, just days before D-Day, and joined his squadron in Belgium.
A flying officer, MacConnell flew 25 combat missions over Holland and Germany, bombing railway lines and stations and vehicles as well.
“We tried to disrupt the movement of German equipment,” he explained.
Although he had trained on Hurricanes, he flew Spitfires.
Only once did he shoot down an enemy aircraft. “We were flying at about 5,000 feet in battle formation over Germany when I saw a single plane well below us. I pulled out and dove, opening fire on a German plane.”
MacConnell derived satisfaction from downing it. “We all wanted to shoot down German planes. That’s what we were there for.”
With Germany having surrendered to Allied forces, he was demobilized and sent back home. He returned to Canada on Sept. 12, 1945 and married his sweetheart, Emily Barron, whom he had met at basic training, five days later. They were married for 63 years and had five children.
After studying mining engineering at the University of Toronto, he worked in British Guyana and Asbestos, Quebec, before starting a company that manufactured hydraulic equipment. Prior to his retirement in 1987, the government of Ontario employed him as a consultant.
For the past few years, MacConnell has given talks to high school students about his war experiences.
Bergen-Belsen always comes up in the discussions.
“I tell them I saw it. A Holocaust denier wouldn’t get anywhere with me.”
To MacConnell, Holocaust deniers do not acknowledge reality.
“I put them down as being nuts and unbalanced. I don’t know whether they’re fascists or not. They could very well be antisemites. There’s so much evidence that the Holocaust happened. Survivors have told their stories. There was a Holocaust.”