Dr Radu Cinpoes, Associate Professor in Politics, Human Rights and International Relations at Kingston University, will welcome Bernice Lerner, author of To Meet in Hell: Bergen-Belsen, the British Officer Who Liberated It, and the Jewish Girl He Saved (Amberley Publishing), to talk about the background to the book, the people who were interviewed and the value of this new addition to the history book shelves.

This moving war story, to be released in paperback in April 2022, is written by a respected US academic and documents the actions of a dedicated British officer who discovered Bergen-Belsen and went on to save thousands of its prisoners.

About the author

Bernice Lerner is the former Dean of Adult Learning at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts and was a senior scholar at the Center for Character and Social Responsibility at Boston University’s School of Education, where she taught courses related to the Holocaust, character and ethics education.

Lerner is the author of The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives (endorsed by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel and Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Coles; published by University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, and, in German, by Wochenschau Verlag, 2013).

At the time of the 70th anniversary of the liberation she published Bergen-Belsen Through the Eyes of its Liberator (National Review Online, 2015) and The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (The Jewish Advocate, 2015) subsequently appearing in media outlets throughout the United States.

She has also been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. Lerner holds a doctorate in education from Boston University and a master’s from the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is a founding member of the Boston Biographers Group.