Strange New World by Nadia Wheatley

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945 was portrayed as the jewel in the crown of British victory over Nazi Germany. Yet a quarter of the 55,000 survivors of the ‘Horror Camp’ died over the next five weeks, and for many others there was disillusionment and despair. Evacuated to a nearby army barracks converted into a Displaced Persons’ camp which became the largest such camp in Europe they lived behind barbed wire and under military rule, and continued to suffer endemic health problems.

Josef Rosensaft, the political leader of the Jewish organisation in Belsen DP camp, described the first twelve months of freedom as being ‘more oppressive to our souls than the years in the hell of Auschwitz and Belsen’. He added that when the hoped-for ‘day of Liberation’ came, ‘we saw before us a new kind of world, cold and strange’.

Strange New World takes the reader into the untold story of the survivors’ first year of freedom. Despite the alienating circumstances of the post-war world, this is also a story of new life and hope, and of survivors asserting their own agency and independence.

‘A huge step forward in the historiography of Bergen-Belsen.’ Dr Thomas Rahe, former director of the documentation centre at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial

‘Strange New World is a harrowing, forensic and compassionate investigation of the afterlife of Bergen-Belsen as the Belsen Camp for Displaced Persons the good done, the mistakes made, the moral conundrums and persistent prejudices that left Jews who had barely survived the concentration camps feeling ‘saved but not liberated’. Her interest sparked by an unlikely, unexpected family connection, the author’s examination of this extraordinary moment in history helps illuminate the heated politics around Israel and Palestine today.’ Linda Jaivin

‘One tragedy of war is that its destructive effects continue long after the fighting stops. Nadia Wheatley’s powerful study of Belsen’s liberation and post-war existence tells of this sad truth, but also of the human capacity to endure and to find hope in the darkest circumstances.’ Seumas Spark

‘What happened in those first days, weeks and months when the British threw open the gates of Bergen Belsen and stumbled upon the horrific reality of the Nazi genocide? This book tells a startling new history of the aftermath of the Bergen Belsen liberation and the encounters between the mostly Jewish survivors and the well-meaning but often ill-equipped British personnel who arrived to aid in their recovery. Who better to tell this story than Nadia Wheatley, an accomplished writer, an astute historian and remarkably, the daughter of one of the British medics who was there. It is a moving and exacting testimony to the Jewish survivors who defied the Final Solution, and to those who came after them and are still to come. At its heart is also a story of a daughter wrestling with the legacy of a difficult father. This is an astonishing book.’ Ruth Balint

A riveting work of historical merit and storytelling that tells the untold tale of what happened at Belsen concentration camp after liberation.

About the Author:

Over a career of forty years, Nadia Wheatley has published a number of award-winning works of fiction, history and biography. Her most recent books are the memoir Her Mother’s Daughter (winner of the 2019 Waverley NIB Literary Award), Radicals Remembering the Sixties and The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (winner of the 2001 Age Nonfiction Book of the Year and the 2002 NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize). Nadia is also the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions, Selected Essays of Charmian Clift and of Clift’s previously unpublished novella, The End of the Morning. In 2014 the University of Sydney awarded Nadia an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, in recognition of ‘her exceptional creative achievements in the field of literature, her work as an historian and her contribution to our understanding of Indigenous issues, cultural diversity, equity and social justice and the environment through story’.

01 Jul 2026
 

Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom by Nadia Wheatley ISBN 9781923451445