George Albert Buckfield

I am writing to ask if I would please be able to add my dad, George Albert Buckfield to the list of liberators on your fantastic website which I came across while doing some research about Belsen concentration camp.

My dad was a private and served in the Buffs East Kent Regiment. I have a couple of quite grainy photos of him which I could include. He sadly died at the age of 41 in 1960 from lung cancer and as I was only 9 years old at the time I do not have many memories of him, but I do remember him occasionally talking about the fact that he was at Belsen for the liberation and was on motorcycle duty, guiding the lorries in and out of the camp.

The one thing I can always remember him saying was that he could never get rid of the smell from the camp that he encountered while there, but apart from this he spoke very little of what he saw and experienced. I learnt from my mum as I got older that he was also onboard the RMS Lancastria which was sunk on 17th June 1940 just off the coast of St Nazaire, France, during the evacuation of British Nationals and troops. He was in the water for over 4 hours before being rescued by a French fishing boat which took him back to France before he was eventually able to get back to the UK. He took a lot of oil into his lungs while in the water and this was thought to have been a contributing factor to his death from lung cancer at such an early age. As I grew up I always took an interest in the holocaust and over the years have done a lot of research about both Belsen and Auschwitz.

I am 73 years old now and retired in 2018. Just before my retirement I was very lucky to meet and have lunch with Rudi Oppeheimer who visited the school where I worked, to give a talk to the students about the awful experiences he and his family endured at Belsen. I told him that my dad was one of the troops at the liberation and he told me that it was the first time he had met a relative of one of the liberators. I heard that Rudi sadly died the following year in 2019, but it was a great honour to meet him and chat with him, and it certainly was something I will always remember.

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