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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: This Canadian soldier helped liberate Bergen-Belsen—80 years ago today
Description: Eighty years ago, on April 15, 1945, the notorious Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen, in Germany, was liberated by Allied troops. To their horror, British artillery crews discovered about 60,000 starving and deathly ill survivors, as well as 10,000 corpses lying, unburied, on the ground.
It was a sight and smell that the late Jack Marcovitch never forgot. The Ottawa veteran had only turned 22 when he arrived there as an army private in the closing weeks of the Second World War. His family believes he played a role in one the war's most iconic scenes: the arrest of Bergen-Belsen's commandant, Josef Kramer...