The ecology of liberation: animals, nature, geography

This work offers an ecocritical reading of the Holocaust from the perspective of liberator accounts concerning the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It focuses on how Allied military personnel expressed their descriptions in two distinct ways. First, liberators offer a unique spatial orientation in their narratives, communicating values that are presented through geography and ecology. Second, the survivors were repeatedly viewed by liberators through the lens of animal metaphors, a type of zoomorphic language. This paper argues that the horrific suffering experienced by the survivors in Bergen-Belsen created a linguistic frontier or divide between themselves and Allied military personnel.