War is, as Martha Gellhorn wrote, “a horrible repetition” but it’s also the ultimate dice man, deciding participants’ fate by good luck or sudden tragic blow. Mark Hodkinson’s affecting, grueling story of an ordinary British corporal who set off a world-changing event – the discovery of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – shows very well how the two can go hand in glove.
The strangest aspect of Hodkinson’s story is that it has not been told before, apart from an article written four decades ago in a now vanished Lancashire newspaper, The Middleton Guardian. As a junior reporter then, Hodkinson himself wrote the story after Herbert Kenny, a local man, dropped off at reception a dozen pages of manuscript that told how he had unbarred the gate at Belsen and been the first allied soldier to set foot in the camp.
