Newly revealed footage of a Nazi train jolted Dr. Mark Nusbaum back to the past
The first name of the boy depicted in the passport was “Marek.”
“I took on that name, and that’s how I became Mark,” says Dr. Nusbaum.
The Nussbaums now held the coveted passports that would miraculously lead them away from the evolving peril. According to the original plan, the Nazis should have shipped the Nussbaums off to Palestine in exchange for trapped Germans but, bewilderingly, that never happened. “The Nazis placed us on a train – not a cattle car but an actual passenger train – and sent us off to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, although we initially did not know where we were going.”
It was now the summer of 1943. There were thousands of prisoners being held in Bergen-Belsen, but the Nussbaums, along with the others on the train, were led to a segregated area, surrounded by its own double-layered barbed-wire fence. The group wouldn’t have known it but this, in fact, was the initial purpose of Bergen- Belsen’s construction. Established in April of 1943, it was originally intended to hold hostages of the SS in exchange for German citizens being held abroad.
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