Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on Tuesday, following in the footsteps of his father, who, as a British army officer, helped liberate the site in 1945.

Recounting Chaim Herzog’s first moments in the camp – Isaac’s father and former Israeli president – the leader said he was “standing on top of a wooden box screaming in Yiddish in front of hundreds of skeletons”.

“‘Jews, Jews, are Jews still alive? Are Jews still alive on this earth?'” Herzog recalled his father’s words.

The camp is one of the most notorious of World War II, where over 50,000 people died, including diarist Anne Frank.

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Today there are huge mass graves covered with grass, on which lie small stones as honors for the dead.

Next to a stone that Chaim Herzog brought back from Jerusalem in 1987 when he became the first Israeli President to visit Germany after World War II, his son Isaac urged the two countries to continue the fight against anti-Semitism.

“It is our duty in the name of the past,” he said.

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who accompanied Herzog on Tuesday’s visit, said it took a long time for the Germans to realize that they, too, would be liberated at the end of the war.

He paid tribute to Chaim Herzog and said Germany must “never forget the Holocaust”.

Bergen-Belsen was one of the first concentration camps to be liberated by the Western Allies, who arrived and found it riddled with disease and about 10,000 unburied bodies.

Those imprisoned in the camp included Jews as well as prisoners of war, homosexuals and political opponents.

In a speech on Tuesday before the Bundestag, Herzog said he would “never forget how (his father) described to me the horrors” he experienced in the camp.

“The stench. The human skeletons in striped pajamas, the piles of corpses, the destruction, hell on earth.”

During Chaim Herzog’s 1987 trip, he said, “I bring neither forgiveness nor forgetting. The only ones who can forgive are the dead; the living have no right to forget.”

Isaac Herzog said that on this visit he brought the same legacy to Germany, “burned into my heart”.

At the site, now dotted with pines, oaks and birches, five survivors – Swedish national Jovan Rajs, Israelis No’omi Rinat and Jochevet Ritz-Olewski, American Menachem Rosensaft and German Albrecht Weinberg – also attended the ceremony.

Weinberg, now 97, was 20 years old when Bergen-Belsen was liberated.

He had spent 60 years in the United States before returning to his northern German hometown of Leer, who invited him and had a school named after him.

Weinberg said he goes to school regularly to share his experiences with students “who can’t understand how something like this can happen.”

“I am one of the last survivors,” he told the AFP news agency.

“As long as I can, I will continue to talk about what happened.”