by Jon E. Lewis
ELIE WIESEL
Liberation was not necessarily salvation. The richness of the food offered by Allied troops – tinned meat, dried milk, oats, chocolate – caused many inmates to die.
On 5 April, the wheel of history turned.
It was late in the afternoon. We were standing in the block, waiting for an SS man to come and count us. He was late in coming. Such a delay was unknown till then in the history of Buchenwald. Something must have happened.
Two hours later the loudspeakers sent out an order from the head of the camp: all the Jews must come to the assembly place.
This was the end! Hitler was going to keep his promise.
The children in our block went towards the place. There was nothing else we could do. Gustav, the head of the block, made this clear to us with his truncheon. But on the way we met some prisoners who whispered to us:
‘Go back to your block. The Germans are going to shoot you. Go back to your block, and don’t move.’
We went back to our block. We learned on the way that the camp resistance organization had decided not to abandon the Jews and was going to prevent their being liquidated.
As it was late and there was great upheaval – innumerable Jews had passed themselves off as non-Jews – the head of the camp decided that a general roll-call would take place the following day. Everybody would have to be present.
The roll-call took place. The head of the camp announced that Buchenwald was to be liquidated. Then blocks of deportees would be evacuated each day. From this moment, there would be no further distribution of bread and soup. And the evacuation began. Every day, several thousand prisoners went through the camp gate and never came back.
On 10 April, there were still about twenty thousand of us in the camp, including several hundred children. They decided to evacuate us all at once, right on until the evening. Afterwards, they were going to blow up the camp.
So we were massed in the huge assembly square, in rows of five, waiting to see the gate open. Suddenly, the sirens began to wail. An alert! We went back to the blocks. It was too late to evacuate us that evening. The evacuation was postponed again to the following day.
We were tormented with hunger. We had eaten nothing for six days, except a bit of grass or some potato peelings round near the kitchens.
At ten o’clock in the morning the SS scattered through the camp, moving the last victims towards the assembly place.
Then the resistance movement decided to act. Armed men suddenly rose up everywhere. Bursts of firing. Grenades exploding. We children stayed flat on the ground in the block.
The battle did not last long. Towards noon everything was quiet again. The SS had fled and the resistance had taken charge of the running of the camp.
At about six o’clock in the evening, the first American tank stood at the gates of Buchenwald.
Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves on to the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families. Nothing but bread.
And even when we were no longer hungry, there was still no one who thought of revenge. On the following day, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes – and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.
Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald I became very ill with food poisoning. I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.
One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.
The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
A BBC Reporter Visits Belsen, 20 April 1945
P. GORDON WALKER
From Gordon Walker’s private diary:
Friday 20 April 1945
Got to Belsen. It was a vast area surrounded by barbed wire. The whole thing was being guarded by armed Hungarian guards. They had been in the German Army and are now, immediately and without hesitation, serving us. They are saving us a large number of men for the time being. Outside the camp which is amidst bushes, pines and heath – all fairly recently planted – were great notices in red letters: ‘DANGER TYPHUS’. We drove into what turned out to be a great training camp – a sort of Aldershot. Fine two-storey buildings – brick – with asphalt road – Adolf Hitler Strasse, Rommel Strasse, Fredericus Rex Strasse, etc. A fine officers’ house at the end to which we drove and where we found officers of the Oxfordshire yeomanry. Colonel Taylor in command was a pupil (a very idle one) of mine at Oxford. They made princie and made me welcome and we had a drink with them.
They began to tell us about the concentration camp. It lies south of the training area: it is behind its own barbed wire. The Wehrmacht was not allowed near it. It was guarded entirely by SS men and women.
This is what I discovered about the relief of the camp – which happened on the 15th. I got this story from Derek Sington, from officers and men of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry.
Typhus broke out in the camp and a truce was arranged so that we could take the camp over. The Germans originally proposed that we should by-pass the camp. In the meanwhile thousands and thousands of people would have died and been shot. We refused these terms and demanded the withdrawal of the Germans and the disarmament of the SS guards.
Some dozen SS men and women were left behind under the command of Hauptsturmführer Kramer – who had been at Auschwitz. Apparently they had been told all sorts of fairy-tales about the truce – that they could go on guarding – that we would let them free, etc. In fact all that had been agreed was that the camp should for a few days be a neutral zone so that we could take over and prevent the inmates breaking out and spreading typhus.
Sington (who has done a magnificent job of work) arrived with a few trucks – and was met by Kramer who showed them round the camp. There were volleys of cheers all the way – people broke out of the compounds to greet the British spearhead.
Kramer seemed to expect us to accept his attitude as quite normal. He did not expect us to be shocked by the things we saw. He had been the man who stood by the ovens at Auschwitz and picked out those to be burned at once. He described the inmates of the camp as asocial – anti-social, useless people. He clearly regarded them as cattle. As we drove in the SS opened fire from their towers on people who broke out of a compound to get at a potato field. This was stopped quickly. We only had a handful of men so far and the SS stayed there that night. The first night of liberty, many hundreds of people died of joy.
Next day some men of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry arrived. People crowded round them kissing their hands and feet and dying from weakness. Corpses in every stage of decay were lying around, piled up on top of each other in heaps. There were corpses in the compounds, in the blocks. People were falling dead all around – people who were walking skeletons. One woman came up to the soldier who was guarding the milk-store and doling milk out to children and begged for milk for her baby. The man took the baby and saw it had been dead for days – black in the face and shrivelled up. The mother went on begging for milk – so he poured some into its dead lips. The mother then gibbered and crooned with joy – and carried the baby off in triumph. She stumbled and fell dead in a few yards. I have this story and some others on records spoken by the men who saw them. On the 16th Kramer and the SS were arrested and were very heavily beaten up by our men with boots and rifle-butts. Kramer was taken off and kept in the ice box (with some stinking fish) of the officers’ home. He has now gone back to rear. The rest, men and women, were kept under guard (to save them from the inmates). The men were set to work shovelling up the corpses into lorries. Thirty-five thousand reckoned, more actually than the living – about 30,000.
The SS men were driven and pushed along and made to ride on top of the loaded corpses and then shovel them into the great mass open graves. They were so tired and beaten up that they fell exhausted amongst the corps
es. Jeering crowds collected around them and they had to be kept under strong guard. Two men committed suicide in their cells. Two jumped off the lorries and tried to run away and get lost in the crowds. They were shot down. One jumped into a concrete pool of water and was riddled with bullets. The other was brought to the ground with a shot in the belly and was then finished off with a sten-gun.
The SS women are made to cook and carry heavy loads. One of them tried to commit suicide. The inmates say that they were more cruel and brutal than the men. They are all young – in their twenties. One SS woman tried to hide, disguised as a prisoner. She was denounced and arrested.
The camp was so full because people had been brought here from East and West. Some people were brought from Nordhausen – 5 days’ journey without food. Many had marched for two to three days. There was no food at all in the camp. A few piles of mangoldwurzols [sic] amidst the piles of dead bodies. Some of the dead bodies were of people so hungry that, though the mangoldwurzels were guarded by SS men, they had tried to storm them and been shot down then and there. There was no water. Nothing but these wurzols [sic] and some boiled stinking carrots – enough for a few hundred people. Men and women had fought for raw mangoldwurzols. Dead bodies – black and blue and bloated – and skeletons had been used as pillows by sick people.
The day after we tood [sic] over seven Blockleiters, mostly Poles, were murdered by the inmates. Some were still beating the people. We arrested one woman who had beaten another with a board. She admitted quite frankly to the offence. We are arresting these people.
An enormous buried dump of personal jewellery and belongings was discovered – in suitcases.
When I went into the camp five days after its liberation there were still bodies all around. I saw about a thousand. In one place hundreds had been shovelled into a mass grave by bulldozers. In another Hungarian soldiers were putting corpses into a grave that was sixty feet by sixty and thirty feet deep. It was almost half-full. Other and similar pits were being dug. Five thousand people had died since we got into the camp. People died before my eyes – scarcely human moaning skeletons, many of them gone mad. Bodies were just piled up – higgledy-piggledy in piles. Many had gashed wounds and bullet marks and terrible sores. One Englishman (who had lived in Ostend) was picked up half-dead. It was found that he had a great bullet wound in his back. He could just speak. He had no idea when he had been shot. He must have been lying half-conscious when some SS men shot him as he was crawling about. This was quite normal.
I walked all round the camp. Everywhere the smell and odour of death. After a few hours you get used to it and don’t notice it any more. People have typhus and dysentry. In one compound I went into I saw women standing up quite naked washing themselves: nearby were piles of corpses. Other women, suffering from dysentry, were defecating in the open and then staggering back, half-dead, to their blocks. Some were lying groaning on the ground. Life has reverted to the absolute primitive.
A great job has been done in getting water into the camp. It has been pumped in from outside and carried by hoses all over the camp – with frequent outlet points. There are taps of fresh clean water everywhere. Carts with water move around. The RASC has also done a great job in getting food in.
I went into the typhus ward – packed thick with people lying in dirty rags and blankets on the floor, groaning and moaning. By the door sat an English Tommy, talking to the people and cheering them up – though they couldn’t understand what he said – and ladling milk out of a cauldron.
I collected together some women who could speak English and German – and began to make records. An amazing thing is the number who have managed to keep themselves clean and neat. All of them said that in a day or two more they would have gone under from hunger and weakness. There are three main classes in the camp. The healthy who have managed to keep themselves decent – nearly all have had typhus. Then there are the sick. Who are more or less cared for by their friends. Then there is the vast underworld that has lost all self-respect, crawling around in rags, living in abominable squalor, defecating in the compounds, often mad or half-mad. By the other prisoners they are called the Muselmann. It is those who are still dying like flies. They can hardly walk on their legs. Thousands still of these cannot be saved – and, if they were, would be useless lunatic invalids for the short remainder of their pitiful lives.
There are a very large number of girls in the camp – mostly Jewesses from Auschwitz. They have to be healthy to have survived. Over and over again I was told the same story. The parades at which people were picked out arbitrarily for the gas-chambers and the crematoriums, where many were burned alive. Only a person in perfect health survived. Life and death was a question of pure chance. I talked to two pretty sisters – Anita and Renate lasker, nieces of Lasker the chess-player. Renate had nearly died of typhus at Auschwitz. The inspection was made. Everyone was told to stand up – those who could not were written down on the death list. Renate could not stand. Her name was written down. She said, ‘I’m the sister of one of the girls who plays in the Orchestra.’ ‘Oh, that’s all right then.’ And her name was crossed off. Otherwise she would have been dead in an hour. Only those who played in the Orchestra or did some similar work had some chance to survive.
At Auschwitz the band was made to play at the station as the new batches of inmates arrived and during the parades when those to be gassed and burned were picked out. At Auschwitz there was a horrible luxury. Rich Jews arrived with their belongings and were able to keep some. There was soap and perfume and fountain pens and watches. All amidst the chance of sudden arbitrary death; amidst work-commandos from which the people returned so dead beat that, if they lived, they were sure to be picked for the gas-chamber at the next parade. All amidst the most horrible death, filth and squalor that could be imagined. People at Auschwitz were saved by being moved away to do work in towns like Hamburg and were then moved back to Belsen as we advanced.
At Auschwitz every woman had her hair shaved absolutely bald – many twice. I met pretty young girls whose hair was one inch long. They all had their numbers tattooed on their left arm. A mark of honour they will wear all their lives.
One of the most extraordinary things was the women and men (there are only a few) who have kept themselves decent and clean. On the fifth day many had on powder and lipstick. The SS stores had been looted – and boots and clothes had been found.
Hundreds of people came up to me with letters which I have taken and am sending back to London to be posted all over the world. Many have lost all their relatives. ‘My father and mother were burned.’ ‘My sister was burned.’ This is what you hear all the time. The British Army is doing what it can. Units are voluntarily giving up blankets – 50,000 arrived while I was there and are being laundered. Sweets, chocolate and cigarette rations are being voluntarily given. While I was there a long convoy of 240,000 hard rations arrived from Military Government – four days’ reserve of biscuit, chocolate, tinned meats, etc.
This first day I recorded the Lasker sisters. They both helped French soldiers over the frontier. I also recorded Charlotte grund, a Berlin woman and a Dutchman.
I met the Jewish Padre with the 2nd Army and we recorded the first eve of the Sabbath service held in the camp.
That evening I went back to the camp with Derek Sington, the political officer. He took me to the women’s block at the end of the camp. We talked for a while to a group of Polish women. They wanted to know about Yalta and the Lublin Committee. They all want to go to Palestine.
We then talked with a pretty Frenchwoman of twenty-four. She had been beaten by the Gestapo and had spent several years in concentration camps. She had done resistance work. We talked in the open compound. In the middle was a pile of old papers and skeletons. Around us were bodies of people who had died in the last three days. There were groaning and raving women lying around. And every few minutes, some women groaning with typhus would stagger out and defecate there in the open. Where the Frenchwoman slep
t there were ten healthy people and fifty sick and dying. She told us how she had seen corpses dragged off, under German command, by the still-living – on ropes along the ground. Their heads were open where people had cut out the brains to eat. There had been cannibalism in the camp. The flesh, brains and livers of people who had died of typhus were eaten.
I gave this woman the good Luftwaffe watch I had been given at Brunswick.
The female SS officer who tried to escape in civilian dress was the infamous Irma Grese.
The Arrest of Irma Grese, Bergen-Belsen, 20 April 1945
CHARLES SALT, BRITISH MILITARY POLICE
Irma Grese, an SS officer, came from Auschwitz with Kramer, the Camp Kommandant and somehow, when Kramer was taken, she escaped the net.
One day, I was in the information post when a woman inmate came in and said, ‘There’s an SS officer going out of the camp wearing civilian clothes.’
I said, ‘What’s she done?’
‘She used to make the selections at Auschwitz and would beat up people.’
I said, ‘Did you see her do this? I need witnesses otherwise it won’t stand up in a court of law.’
She got down on her knees and said, ‘I beg you as one Jew to another.’
So I told a chap standing there to take a jeep with an armed escort and bring her in.
He said, ‘There’s no point. If you bring her in and you’ve no witnesses, she goes scot-free and can’t be charged again.’
But I insisted, thinking there must be someone there who saw her do these things. They brought her in: smartly dressed, very young. She showed me her pass which the British Camp Commandant had given her to travel to Celle, and her SS pass. I told the woman to go and find witnesses, that we could only hold her for forty-eight hours. First day went past, nothing happened; second day, nothing.
I said to the Sergeant, ‘We’ll hold her for another day. If no one comes for her by 4.30pm, that’s it.’
I was going off duty at 5 p.m. that day. By then she had been let out of the bunker; because no one had come forward she was betting on a safe wicket and had stayed behind talking with some of the fellows and having tea. She felt they had no witnesses against her.
