In the months following the end of the Second World War, in a gymnasium in Lüneburg, Germany, the Belsen trial took place. Charged were forty-five members of the Schutzstaffel and Kapos from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On September 18, 1945, Colonel T.M. Backhouse, Counsel for the Prosecution, asked witness Brigadier Glyn Hughes, Deputy Director of Medical Services of the British Second Army if he had ever seen anything like Bergen-Belsen. “I have been a doctor for thirty years and have seen all the horrors of war,” Hughes replied, “but I have never seen anything to touch it” (9). He was the first witness called for the prosecution.

Meanwhile, nearly a thousand kilometres away, one of the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, fifteen-year-old Rachel Genuth, was recovering at a converted school in Katrineholm, Sweden. After the war, Sweden accepted thousands of Holocaust survivors to help them recuperate. Genuth and her older sister Elisabeth struggled to put their lives back together in a country where they knew not the language, the people, or the culture.

Bernice Lerner weaves together the story of these two individuals: liberator, Glyn Hughes, and Holocaust survivor, Rachel Genuth, the author's mother. While Lerner's two subjects never met, both ended up at Bergen-Belsen during the spring of 1945, albeit for drastically different reasons. The author traces their stories primarily from spring 1944, Genuth in her native Transylvania, and Hughes in England preparing to follow Allied troops across Europe after the Normandy invasion. A condensed, dual biography, All the Horrors of War explores aspects of both the Holocaust and the Second World War.

In 1944, Genuth and her family were taken from their home in Sighet by Hungarian gendarmes, brought to a train station, placed in cattle wagons, and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of Sighet's Jewish population was killed; Genuth and her sister survived, while the rest of their family was murdered. During the summer of 1944, the sisters were transferred from Auschwitz to Christianstadt, a labor camp attached to a German munitions factory in Upper Silesia. By March 1945, the two were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Prior to their liberation, Genuth contracted tuberculosis and her sister was nearing death.

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the focal point of Lerner's book, was located on the Lüneburg Heath in Northwest Germany. Originally built to house labourers, in 1940 the camp began accepting prisoners-of-war. By 1943, parts of the Bergen-Belsen complex were transformed into a concentration camp. At the time of its liberation in April 1945, there were nearly 60,000 prisoners in the camp, and many were terribly ill. Of the prisoners still alive when British and Canadian forces reached Bergen-Belsen, approximately 60% were Jews (Mark Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap [2015]).

In Bergen-Belsen, the death rate was incredibly high. At liberation, thousands of corpses were strewn around the campgrounds as the crematorium was overtaxed by the number of the dead. Between January and March 1945, approximately 35,000 people were killed at Bergen-Belsen. The death rate continued to accelerate, and in the month of March 1945, another 18,000 people were murdered in the camp. In total, 50,000 people died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp prior to Allied personnel arriving at the camp. Starvation and disease were the principal reasons for death.

Under the approval of Heinrich Himmler, on April 12, 1945 representatives from the 1st German Parachute Army crossed into British-occupied territory and explained that 1500 inmates at a nearby camp were sick with typhus, although the actual figure was ten times higher. A signed agreement set aside a neutral area of forty-eight square kilometres around the camp. On April 15, 1945, Britain's 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment arrived to take control of Bergen-Belsen. Brigadier Glyn Hughes arrived with a team that afternoon. What he discovered altered his life forever.

Lerner does a fine job tracing the wartime stories of Glyn Hughes and Rachel Genuth; for obvious reasons, both loom large in the author's life. Her attention to detail is impressive, and while aspects of this story have been told before, particularly the Allied march from Normandy across Europe, the author excels in retelling events in her mother's life. Genuth's experiences in Hungary, Germany, and Sweden are presented with great care and insight by the author.

However, some questions are left unexplored. As senior medical officer, Hughes developed plans to deal with the sick and starving survivors. According to Ben Shepherd, Belsen held 60,000 prisoners when the British arrived on April 15, 1945. He estimates that 14,000 inmates died after liberation, a 23% mortality rate (“The Medical Relief Effort at Belsen,” Holocaust Studies 12, No. 1-2 [2006]). In other words, nearly a quarter of the total number of prisoners still alive when the Allies first arrived at the camp ultimately met their demise. What could have Hughes and his team done differently to prevent so many deaths after liberation? How did he assess his own plans in the aftermath of the war? Indeed, Hughes's approach in the camp has been criticized by other scholars. For example, Paul Weindling calls his plans “flawed” and explains that the “spiraling death rate” was due to his “initial appraisal [that] was based on a rigid and outmoded sanitarian view of epidemic conditions” (“‘Belsenitis’: Liberating Belsen, Its Hospitals, UNRRA, and Selection for Re-Emigration, 1945-1948,” Science in Context 19, No. 3 [2006], 404, 407). While Hughes and the relief teams undoubtedly saved lives, serious questions remain about his methods.

Overall, this is a unique approach and a story well written. For her research, the author draws on oral histories, interviews, war diaries, and Hughes's private papers. As a topic of study, camp liberation is frequently told from either the liberator's perspective or that of the survivor. All the Horrors of War corrects this imbalance: when the Allied soldiers gaze at the survivors, the survivors gaze back.