Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  On 8 November I became an Ensign and an intelligence officer. Some wag in the HQ coined the phrase ‘The nearest thing to an intelligent FANY’. It was mildly irritating, but perhaps better than being called a ‘doll’.

  The front line was moving slowly and painfully northwards up the Italian peninsula. The FANYs remained at their base at Bari, with occasional exciting forays on leave to Rome and Florence, where they (respectively) attended Mass with the Pope and bought silk underclothes. Then in March 1945 Margaret’s unit was flown in a Dakota up to Siena. ‘The impact of my first sight of this delectable place was one that has never left me … Buildings reflected a pink light which was quite unforgettable, turning everything into shades of terracotta.’ The girls strolled around the medieval centre, ‘quite stunned by the beauty around us’. Their accommodation was in a gracious eighteenth-century villa across the valley from Siena; Margaret’s annexe was named Paradiso. Evenings at that Tuscan villa were enchanted, with the sound of the city’s bells tolling down the valley, and fireflies darting in the lengthening shade.

  On the walls of another requisitioned Palazzo, they affixed their huge campaign maps, studded with myriad coloured pins and flags to display enemy formations, Partisan units and SOE missions. The task that lay ahead was to mobilise the Partisans for a planned offensive which would drive the Germans out of Italy. Weaponry was being dropped for use by their units, and over 200 agents were working behind enemy lines. The Intelligence traffic meant a constant flow of signals from field to base, a large portion of which was deciphered, interpreted and communicated by the SOE FANYs. Sixty-five years later, Margaret still recalls the details of her daily life in Siena:

  I concocted my reports in the evening, but if anything came up in the morning, they had to be changed. So I kept my wireless beside my bed, and also some notepaper. And most days I would wake up before 6, and I’d be lying there in my indestructible stripy army pyjamas – much too small for me (all the big sizes had gone) – propped up in my camp bed, listening in to what the Germans had to say, and taking notes.

  She often worked ten-hour days.

  My job was to tell the people with whom I was working where the Germans were, and where they were moving to. But of course the Germans never said ‘We are moving to so-and-so …’ You had to piece it together. So if for example they said they were ‘fighting valiantly’ for a village, which was north of the village they had been ‘fighting valiantly’ for the day before, that meant they were moving north. Then we also had people on the ground reporting on the German movements, who could recognise their vehicles. And they might report that certain vehicles were moving west … and one had to judge whether it was safe to drop someone there. Anyway, it was a jigsaw puzzle …

  Well then I’d get up. We had no baths (we had to go into town twice a week for a bath). Breakfast was tea and British Army bread, and fig jam. We didn’t eat off the country at all because the Italians were almost starving … And then the trucks came to take us into Siena to the Headquarters.

  And then at 10 past 8 all the officers of the Headquarters would come along for a ‘sit rep’, and you had to tell them what had been happening both to our own troops, and the Germans, during the past twenty-four hours.

  As an Intelligence officer during the final dramatic phase of the war in Italy, Margaret was party to some of the most fascinating intrigues of that campaign. Her field contacts included daring secret agents like Dick Mallaby and Massimo Salvadori. Mallaby was parachuted into northern Italy and captured by Fascists, but secured an interview with the acting military commander of Italy, the German General Wolff, which encouraged him to start talks with the Allies about a German surrender. Salvadori had been dropped into occupied Milan in February 1945, where with false documents he passed himself off as a civilian, while acting as under-cover head of the SOE missions in Lombardy and liaising with Partisans and the regular forces.

  After the winter attrition, pressure was building against the Axis. In bed, or travelling in the truck to the mess, Margaret was rarely without her earphones, her wireless tuned to the broadcasts from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. ‘The enemy was in retreat. It was tremendously exciting.’ On 9 April the German lines were subjected to a massive aerial and artillery bombardment. Two days later all Allied forces in Italy – including the SOE FANYs – received a special order from Field Marshal Alexander. ‘Final victory is near,’ he wrote, continuing with an exhortation ‘to play our decisive part’. The Partisan wires were humming with traffic from the north. All leave was cancelled, and the FANY operators and coders were at full stretch, straining every nerve to interpret the incoming flow of messages. International armies were converging on Bologna, the gateway to the north. With the Germans in retreat Massimo Salvadori was instrumental in the uprisings of the northern cities, and the taking of German and Fascist prisoners.

  On 28 April, a FANY wireless operator at HQ received an unambiguous signal from the field:

  MUSSOLINI KILLED TODAY

  and on the 29th the German chiefs in Italy signed an unconditional surrender at Caserta, with a ceasefire to take effect at midday on 2 May. Exhausted and dazed, the FANYs had worked themselves out of a job: ‘there was no longer an enemy’.

  Until Belsen

  While Margaret Herbertson was spending her waking hours tracking the German retreat in Italy, QA Joy Taverner was still nursing in Eeklo in Belgium. In March 1945 the Allies crossed the Rhine; the army moved on, and life in the Belgian convent settled down somewhat.

  It was in mid-April that Joy received the orders that would change her life for ever. She and a group of her fellow nurses were told to pack their things: they were to be taken into Germany to set up a field hospital. They were given no other information, before being taken to Celles airport, loaded on to a Dakota and flown north-east over Lower Saxony. It was the first time Joy had ever been in an aeroplane: ‘a frightening experience’. They landed near Bergen and were piled on to an army truck. It was 17 April 1945, just two days after the British 11th Armoured Division’s eastward advance had brought it to the gates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A British reporter, Richard Dimbleby, accompanied the troops, and famously told BBC listeners what he saw there:

  In the shade of some trees lay a great collection of bodies. I walked about them trying to count, there were perhaps 150 of them flung down on each other, all naked, all so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons …

  It was Dimbleby’s job to give a voice to the suffering, to try to make sense out of the senseless. But talkative, Irish, plain-speaking Joy, who had arrived two days earlier, was left incoherent, speechless with horror and incapable of describing what she found until forty years later. She was just twenty years old. ‘My faith deserted me after that terrible experience and I have never regained it.’

  The nurses of 29th General Hospital had a job to do and they did it. As soon as they could, they set up their tented hospital. Blankets, clothes and supplies were requisitioned from local shops. The sister collected the starving babies, put them under cover and tried to feed and revive them. Belsen was huge. Ten thousand bodies were lying there unburied, but up to thirty thousand prisoners were still alive when the camp was liberated. Bodies that showed any signs of life at all were collected on stretchers. The prisoners were starved, lice-ridden and suffering from cholera, dysentery, typhus and typhoid fever. Every day people died. The nurses put a board up outside their makeshift hospital and wrote on it the numbers of bodies to be collected and taken for burial in mass graves by German POWs. As a nurse, Joy was appalled at the Germans’ disrespectful treatment of the dead. Uncovered corpses were being thrown into the graves, bulldozed and dismembered. At her instigation, lengths of fabric were acquired, and the dead were decently wrapped. ‘Our Padre would go along
and pray over each truck load.’

  This sketch of a concentration camp survivor was made by Eric Taylor, a serving British soldier.

  The stench of excrement, death and burning bodies was excruciating; Joy would never forget it. She stayed at Belsen for nine agonising weeks. Before returning to England, she was taken for decontamination. Every inch of her was sprayed with DDT: ‘It was in her ears, in her knickers, in her bra. And her family home was visited: they had to be warned about the lice she might be carrying, and what precautions they had to take.’ But nothing could ever purge her of the memories, which were to give her nightmares for the next ten years:

  We had no-one to talk to – we just had to keep going. Two of our sisters started drinking heavily and were sent home. I don’t really know how we survived – we all supported each other and cried every night with our arms around each other …

  We had been through the war but this was something so terrible that it took some time for us to come to terms with what we saw …

  I cannot really write about everything that happened there. I have tried over the years to forgive the horrors …

  Joy’s daughter Sue believes her mother’s inability to talk about Belsen was in itself a manifestation of the trauma she had experienced. But, unknown to Sue till later, Joy had found an outlet. Soon after her return from Germany, she sat down and struggled to find the words to describe what she had been through. The resulting poem, ‘Until Belsen’, is an attempt to express her sense of powerlessness and inadequacy, faced with perhaps the twentieth century’s most inexpressible horror:

  Until Belsen

  We thought we had seen it all

  Our cheeks bloomed like peaches,

  Bright eyes, quick light movement.

  Flashes of scarlet, snow white caps

  We thought we had seen it all.

  The London Blitz, bombs, fires, headless corpses,

  Screaming children: Yankee Doodle Dandy!

  We thought we had seen it all.

  Scabies, Lice, and Impetigo, T.B., Polio

  And unmentionable V.D.

  We thought we had seen it all …

  Our souls sank deep and deeper still,

  Until with nowhere else to go, soft hearts

  Hardened and cocooned themselves.

  Laughter broke like glass over fields and orchards

  And from tent to tent.

  We tried; we really tried, but some they died.

  We thought we had seen it all.

  Until Belsen.

  There are no words to speak.

  We hid within our souls, deep and silent.

  We clung together trying to understand,

  The smell pervaded the mind and the sights and sounds

  Reached those souls buried deep within and for so long

  Encased in rock.

  Bitter scalding tears melted the rock

  Our hearts were broken.

  We had seen it all.

  After she wrote that poem, Joy believed her heart would never mend.

  *

  Maggie Joy Blunt could hardly remember having seen such a beautiful spring. As the month of April drew to a close the suburban streets of her home town – Slough, in Berkshire – gloried in an early burst of lilac and wallflowers:

  Last week 70º in the shade, everyone in summer frocks & without stockings, trees in leaf everywhere almost overnight … It has been wonderful, beyond describing …

  ‘God is pleased,’ said N, ‘that we are freeing the concentration camps in Germany.’

  As the news from the camps was released piecemeal over the ensuing weeks, it sent out a sickening shockwave, a sense of anger and shame for humankind. Photographs and newsreel footage gave the horror a hitherto unparalleled immediacy. Anne Popham’s job in the Photograph Division of the Ministry of Information put her in the front line when the pictures started to come in. The girl at the next desk to hers was sorting them out. ‘Hundreds of them were arriving. Some of them had to be censored – they were too nasty to be exhibited. I knew that concentration camps existed. But they were so much worse than anyone could possibly have imagined. I hadn’t realised the people there were starved to death.’ Maggie Joy Blunt was equally appalled: ‘One suspected the Nazis of a certain amount of brutality & sadism, but not on this scale involving the death by starvation & deliberate degradation of 1000’s & 1000’s of men, women & children – the children worst of all.’

  Joan Wyndham’s party spirits were utterly quenched by the cruelty. Horrible doubts set in, about the religion she had grown up with:

  18th April

  Spent a Benzedrine-ridden night crying for the suffering of the children, and railing against God for allowing such torture …

  My mind lately has been in a state of turmoil. I just don’t know whether I believe any more or not. It is the first time that doubts have ever entered my mind, but I think I’d rather have an imperfect God than none at all, and no meaning to anything.

  Clara Milburn listened to the broadcast describing the liberation of Buchenwald camp with disgust and outrage. ‘Oh, these evil Germans! And those poor, poor souls.’ Clara, a fervent patriot, had believed throughout in the righteousness of the cause. For her, the revelations of the concentration camps reinforced an implacable morality: ‘How can one forgive such horrible deeds – or even forget them! We must not forget.’ Vere Hodgson shared her anger. The Germans had described themselves as a Master Race. That claim now rang hollow. She had seen the Sunday Pictorial photographs which showed the unrepentant, smug faces of Belsen’s women warders. ‘They have no public conscience.’

  Others reacted more with sorrow than outrage. Naomi Mitchison had witnessed political oppression in Austria and had tried to tell the world back in 1936, but nobody would listen. ‘What was wrong with the German soul?’ she now pondered. Sheila Hails, a pacifist, felt a bitter anger at the short-sightedness of government. ‘I saw the films, and just felt utter horror. The British government had known about these camps for a long time, and they didn’t do anything – all through the rise of Hitler.’ Frances Partridge, as usual, explored her feelings in her diary. The gloriously unseasonable weather had prompted the Partridge family to pack a picnic and go bathing at a nearby mill-pool; but the monstrous images that Frances had seen in her morning paper imprinted themselves on her brain and wouldn’t go away: ‘a lorry stacked with naked corpses; others in the last stages of emaciation … in ghastly rows, waiting to be buried … They haunted me all day.’ Ralph and Burgo bathed. Frances sat by the millrace, racked with grief and anguish about humanity. The sanity of the world seemed to have received ‘a fatal blow … I can’t stop thinking of it and all it implies.’

  Thelma Ryder’s concerns were more material. Still working at her aircraft components factory in Lymington, she went to see the newsreel in her time off:

  It was terrible – all those bodies piled up. But the German people must have known those things were happening. How could you not know? It must have been a hell of a smell around, you know?

  Oh, God, I think it’s terrible. Fancy treating people like that!

  This Incredible Moment

  The shockwave that convulsed Joy Taverner, Anne Popham, Frances Partridge and Thelma Ryder was just as seismic in its impact on their male counterparts. In the camps, babies and small children had been murdered; women and men alike had laboured, starved and died. In their crimes, the murderers – of both sexes – had not differentiated. Horror-struck, the public were united in their abhorrence of the atrocious regime which had perpetrated them. The Nazis’ contempt for human values prompted a humanitarian consensus: such evil must never be forgotten or ever allowed to happen again.

  For nearly six long years, the anti-Fascist banner had rallied diverse nations, from Britain to the Soviet Union. As their victory approached, and in the face of the Holocaust, it may have seemed – briefly – that the age-old sexual conflict could also be dispelled. The images of indiscriminate truckloads of corpses we
re a memento mori from a horror film. The pictures projected across cinema screens worldwide reminded audiences everywhere of their common vulnerability and humanity: ‘… composed like them / Of Eros and of dust’. The lines are W. H. Auden’s, written in 1939, before he had known about Belsen:

  There is no such thing as the State

  And no one exists alone;

  Hunger allows no choice

  To the citizen or the police;

  We must love one another or die.

  Whether politically or from either side of the gender fence, the desire to be seen first and foremost as human was one to affirm, surely?

  In his history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes (1994), Eric Hobsbawm dissects the international consensus against Fascism: ‘[It] succeeded in uniting an extraordinary range of forces. What is more, this unity was not negative but positive and, in certain respects, lasting.’ His historical hindsight, however, does not provide Hobsbawm with much in the way of optimism:

  As soon as there was no longer a fascism to unite against, capitalism and communism once again got ready to face each other as one another’s mortal enemies.