John_Stone Report This Comment Date: November 05, 2005 12:48AM
*An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who
was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.*
*Camp*
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself
were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as
bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes
they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get
used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you walked by them and to
restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to
the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a
day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before
anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy
to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and
nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they
were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of
bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell
the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to
stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over
an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving
themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing
stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which
the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross
arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of
lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for
hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick.
I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius,
sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees
than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with
scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over
their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post
mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone
had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer
merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in
their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity
/Source: Imperial War museum/
fossil_digger Report This Comment Date: November 05, 2005 01:22AM
a friend of my dad's was the first American soldier to enter dockow prison
camp(don't know how to spell).couple of years ago spielberg was compiling info
and came to Dallas to interview him and document his experience. pretty cool.
must have been his final duty in this world, cause he died 1 month later. he
told me he will never forget in detail what he saw that day. horrific is an
understatement
gruff Report This Comment Date: November 05, 2005 01:57AM
dachau
fossil_digger Report This Comment Date: November 05, 2005 02:04AM
thanx