Yet if my neighbours brought something of the history of postwar Europe into my middle-class suburban world, I felt there to be an even more powerful link between myself and the people who always seemed to be summed up by a couple of alphabet letters. I knew from fairy stories that the naming of a child involved the bestowal of something magic, and whenever I pestered my mother to tell me why I was called ‘Nadia’ (a most peculiar name in 1950s Anglo-Australia) she would reply, in her breeziest manner, ‘Oh, I named you after one of the DPs.’
‘Who?’
‘Nadia, of course.’
‘Nadia who?’
At that point, my mother would sigh volubly and light up a Craven A, and as she would die when I was nine years old, I would learn from her no more details about my namesake, and indeed nothing more than a picture-postcard version of the Germany where she had spent four demanding and even dangerous years. Yet while my love for my mother made me store up every scrap of personal information I had ever garnered from her, my father was a completely different matter
And so, when I received the newspaper clipping that was my sole legacy after his death, I put it into the box where I kept my parents’ wedding album and my mother’s UNRRA shoulder-flash and the other memorabilia from the time that immediately preceded my birth. It took more than three decades before I went to Belsen and began finding out what my father had been doing there.
*
It is September when I first arrive at Bergen-Belsen. Bypassing the sleek silver bunker of the Documentation Centre, I make my way into the vast open area of the Gedenkstätte (Memorial), where the earth is still wearing its summer cladding of the tiny flowers typical of the Lüneburg Heide, or heath. Notwithstanding the daintiness of this pinkish mauve groundcover, this is a topography as stripped to its bare bones as the bodies in the mass graves that rise out of the flat earth like Neolithic barrows.
HIER RUHEN 800 TOTE APRIL 1945 …
HIER RUHEN 1000 TOTE APRIL 1945 …
HIER RUHEN 2500 TOTE APRIL 1945 …
HIER RUHEN 5000 TOTE APRIL 1945 …
Even my schoolgirl German is up to translating the terrible arithmetic that is recorded in the signs on the stonework facing of the mounds. At each of these collective burial sites there are simple offerings that other visitors have made: a red candle, a line of pebbles, a bunch of twigs, a small basket of heather. As I remember (or feel as if I remember) the bulldozer with its terrible load, the starkness of these anonymous graves seems to me to say all that can be said about a genocide, and much more poignantly than the dozen or so individual tombstones – including one bearing the names of Anne and Margot Frank – that seek to personalise death. Despite the sign carefully explaining that these memorials ‘have only a symbolic meaning. They do not mark graves’, the one for the Frank girls is decorated with bunches and pots of flowers, photographs, pebbles and handwritten messages addressed to the young diarist whose own writing has touched so many lives.
If the earth beneath Anne’s gravestone is empty, so is the landscape. Here the visitor wishing to map the memories needs to walk the place; there are no buildings – either original or facsimile – to give an idea of the size or form of the seventy or so huts where some 40,000 prisoners were once crowded together. (‘This isn’t Disneyland,’ the Gedenkstätte’s archivist says to me a little later on this memorable day. And when I see the historical photos displayed at the Documentation Centre I discover that, after the liberation, the British burned the huts to the ground – primarily to stop the spread of disease, but also to symbolise the destruction of the Nazi regime.)
Making my way towards an obelisk and commemorative wall that mark the western perimeter of the Gedenkstätte, I arrive first at a stone memorial, erected at the time of the first anniversary of the liberation and commemorating ‘Thirty thousand Jews exterminated in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen at the hands of the murderous Nazis’. A couple of hundred metres on, a wooden cross stands ‘in memory of about fifteen thousand Polish men, women and children who were martyred in Bergen-Belsen’. In front of the wall (itself covered with inscriptions in various languages), another stone commemorates the lives and deaths of Juden and Sinti und Roma, of Zeugen Jehovas and Homosexuelle, as well as Soldaten aus der Sowjetunion und aus anderen staaten. The English-language text on yet another stone declares it to be ‘in remembrance of all Jewish and non-Jewish Turkish citizens who were murdered in Bergen-Belsen 1943–1945’.
Although it is at this point that I begin to become aware of the complexity of this memorial site, which reflects the many layers of the camp’s history, it is only later that I discover that the assumption I brought with me – that Belsen was primarily a Jewish camp – does not reflect the way it was initially ‘marketed’ to the English-speaking public. Indeed, one of the most shocking things I would subsequently discover about the history of Bergen-Belsen is that, at the time of the liberation, the British authorities and media were at pains not to mention the fact that the majority of the concentration camp’s inmates (both the living and the recently dead) were Jewish. This was in line with the policy of the British Ministry of Information during World War II, which dictated that stories about the enemy’s atrocities ‘must deal with indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents [such as socialists and communists]. And not with Jews.’ It would take some decades before the historiography would correct this gap in the record, and even today Belsen is often seen as the site of one of Britain’s ‘finest hours’, rather than as a place of Jewish mourning.
*
In fact, the camp did not begin as a place to detain prisoners – Jewish or otherwise. Innocuously enough, the huts were erected in 1935 as temporary housing for 3000 German labourers who were engaged to build an extensive set of barracks for the Wehrmacht (German army) to use as a Panzer Training School. Situated a couple of kilometres south of the barracks in the vicinity of two villages, named Bergen and Belsen, the camp would later acquire both their names. In 1940, the Wehrmacht used some of the now vacant huts to accommodate 600 French and Belgian prisoners of war. The following year, barbed-wire fences and watchtowers were erected when the camp was prepared to receive the 21,000 Soviet POWs who arrived in July. Without adequate housing, many spent the coming winter in burrows they dug into the earth. By the following March, two-thirds of these prisoners had died of hunger, disease and exposure to the cold. While some of the survivors remained in the 1200-bed camp hospital, the rest were sent out into the surrounding area on work details.
It was in April 1943 that the major change began to take place in the purpose and administration of the Bergen-Belsen camp, and in the composition of its inmates. While the Wehrmacht continued to hold POWs in its hospital to the north of the camp’s main road, the part of the site – representing half the area – lying to the south of the road was taken over from the military by the SS, the black-uniformed paramilitary elite that had begun as a security guard for Hitler and by now was responsible for implementing the Final Solution to the ‘problem’ of the Jews and other enemies of the German state. Notwithstanding this ultimate goal of exterminating all Jews from the territory of the Reich, the Bergen-Belsen ‘holding camp’ (Aufenthaltslager) included an area (unique in the entire concentration camp system) that was established to hold certain special Jewish prisoners whom the German Foreign Office hoped to be able to exchange for German nationals imprisoned abroad.
Only a small number of exchanges were ever made, and conditions in what was called the Star Camp (because of the yellow star that occupants had to wear on their clothing) were far from easy. However, contrary to a widely held misapprehension, Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp. This indeed was a major difference between the camps established on German soil and the camps in the conquered territories to the east of the German border. It was in the east that certain camps were equipped with the gas ovens and other infernal devices that provided the mechanism for Hitler’s Final Solution.
Despite this
important distinction between the eastern and western camps, the boundary blurs because, over the last months of its history, Bergen-Belsen began to receive prisoners who had survived extermination camps in the east and had been sent to the west in advance of the Soviet army. The 8000 women who came from Auschwitz included the two Frank girls. By now the huts were so full that many of the women were provided only with tents for the coming winter; holes in the ground served as toilets. Faced with a camp that was bursting at its seams, in January 1945 the SS took over the northern half of the site from the Wehrmacht and used it for an enlarged women’s camp. This did little to ease the overcrowding. As the Death Marches brought more and more prisoners from camps in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union, the population of Bergen-Belsen increased from 15,000 in December 1944 to 42,000 in March 1945. Yet in the lunacy of that time, 6700 Bergen-Belsen inmates were herded into train-carriages and sent on journeys back towards the east. Despite this, by early April the camp was so full that when another 15,000 prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp arrived, they were housed at the nearby Wehrmacht barracks.
Meanwhile, the regime hardened in December 1944 when Josef Kramer, former commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was put in charge of Bergen-Belsen; other SS personnel from Auschwitz (including women) joined his staff. As part of a deliberate policy that could be described as a form of extermination, the provision of food – always minimal – dropped to starvation level. Water was contaminated and in very short supply. The sanitation facilities collapsed and huts were soon ankle-deep in faeces. Yet as winter gave way to spring, an even worse peril appeared. Spread by the lice that infested the huts as well as every article of clothing and bedding, an epidemic of typhus killed people who had managed to survive years of hunger, forced labour and even the threat of the gas chambers. The number of deaths rose from 7000 in February to 18,000 in March; a further 9000 people died in the first two weeks of April. As the camp’s crematoria could not keep up with the death rate, corpses were left to rot in the huts and on the ground; by mid-April there were 10,000 lying unburied among the living and the barely living.
Ironically, it was the typhus that triggered the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. As the Allied advance from the west pushed closer and closer to the camp, some members of the German military began to fear that the epidemic could spread into the civilian population if the guards were to flee and prisoners were to escape into the countryside. On 12 April, a couple of Wehrmacht officers alerted a nearby unit of British military to the problem, and the area of the concentration camp became a negotiated zone of surrender. Into this no-man’s-land a trickle of British soldiers began to arrive on 15 April 1945. Dispensing with the double-barrelled German name, they simply called it ‘Belsen’. The images recorded by the Army Film and Photographic Unit over the next few days would immediately make the name a byword for evil.
*
Although I have subsequently researched the statistics and the timeline, the layers of history first begin to separate for me during my initial exploration of the memorial site, when I come upon a metal relief map showing how the different areas of the concentration camp were used. With this as my reference point, I walk the country again, this time following the bilingual information pillars that indicate the position of the Women’s Camp, the Star Camp, the Tent Camp and so on. Yet the more I manage to locate the areas indicated on the map, the more I come to feel that I am somehow missing the thing I initially came to find. Where in this multi-layered landscape of memory is the Displaced Persons Camp where my father was medical superintendent?
In the Gedenkstätte’s Documentation Centre, a display of photographs and artefacts covering 1500 square metres takes me through the timeline of Prisoner of War camp, Concentration Camp and Displaced Persons Camp. Yet there is so much here to comprehend that I still find myself confused as to how the DP Camp slotted into the map. As well as this extensive public area, the bunker-like building houses a library and an archive, and (with a cheek that now makes me blush) I go up to the woman seated at the information desk and ask if it might be possible to talk to the archivist. An hour or so later, I meet the man who looks after not only the Memorial’s extensive collection of records, but also the families of survivors and liberators who keep turning up here, seeking a way to understand the scraps of memory that have been bequeathed to them. By the time I catch the bus back to the town where I am staying, I have twelve pages of hastily scribbled information about the DP camp, as well an invitation to come back and work in the archives.
When I return, some six weeks later, to begin my research, the trees surrounding the memorial site blaze with the gold of autumn leaves and the pastel carpet of heather has been replaced by the vibrant colours and velvet textures of moss and fungi. The air is crisply cold but completely still, and in my lunch hours I can walk in total silence, usually seeing no one but a handful of workmen who are cleaning the inscription wall and obelisk, in preparation for the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the liberation, which is to take place in April 2015. By this second visit I know that while this Memorial holds the story of the concentration camp, the sequel lies a couple of kilometres away as a crow might fly over the woodland.
*
The day after the British army’s first tentative foray into the camp, the Deputy Director of Medical Services, Brigadier H.L. Glyn Hughes, drew up a plan. From the start it was clear that the key to ending the typhus epidemic was to get rid of the lice. In addition to dusting all the survivors with DDT, this meant (as I have mentioned) destroying the huts. As this would render the camp’s inmates homeless, alternative accommodation urgently had to be found. The obvious solution was the extensive facilities of the nearby Panzer Training School, now called Belsen Camp II. With this, history came full circle, because the huts of the concentration camp had first housed the labourers who had built the barracks.
Under Glyn Hughes’ plan, the system of triage established at Belsen reversed the usual order of prioritising the most acute medical cases. In a restricted report made to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, it was noted that:
The situation as to nutrition and starvation is so critical that it has been necessary to attempt to select individuals as to chances for recovery. The result is that those individuals so obviously near death will receive no care in order that the available means may be applied to those who have some prospect of recovery.
Making such decisions over life and death was difficult emotionally as well as practically, and it is easy to see why many of the liberators were haunted for years by what they had seen and done at Belsen. At the same time, for those survivors who witnessed such choices being made about family members and comrades, it was easy to feel that not enough was done. Although the liberation of Belsen has long been proclaimed as one of the great triumphs of British forces in World War II, some commentators have recently pointed to serious shortcomings in the provision of medical aid. Notably, the deaths of 14,000 people – most of them Jewish – in the month after the liberation can be cited as evidence of failure on a grand scale. While the critics maintain that the number of deaths could have been reduced if the British army had allowed Jewish relief agencies into the camp, half of these deaths occurred in the first terrible week, before any teams of volunteers were able to arrive. However, the anti-Semitism evident among sections of the British government and the British military explains why some Jewish community leaders at the time felt that there had been deliberate discrimination. Also, there were indeed problems with the delivery of medical services, caused by confusion in the military chain of command as well as the fact that the troops who arrived at Belsen were not trained to deal with a humanitarian crisis. Shortage of transport and the camp’s location in the middle of a battle zone did not help.
Despite these circumstances, over five intense weeks beginning in mid-April, a massive relief operation was mounted by a small number of military medical officers and soldiers, together w
ith volunteers from a range of agencies, backed up by a hundred young London medical students. It was a struggle waged on two fronts. As one contingent toiled in the original Belsen camp to provide water and food and sanitation, and to get the dead buried as quickly as possible, the other contingent supervised the creation of an emergency hospital comprised of 13,500 beds at Belsen Camp II. By 21 May, some 29,000 survivors had been ferried by field ambulance to the former German army barracks, where they were dusted with DDT and housed in what became, for a couple of months, the largest hospital in Europe.
It is on my second trip to Belsen that I am given the privilege of visiting the place that was originally built as a Panzer Training School, which was subsequently transformed into a Displaced Persons Camp and which finally became the British army base that is currently the home of the battalion known as the Desert Rats. As with the place that I now think of as ‘the other Belsen’, this landscape has memories stacked, layer upon layer.
*
If the site that is now the Memorial has no Disneyland-style recreations, Hohne Camp is like a vast Wehrmacht theme park, a life-size model of a vintage 1930s German barracks. Despite the modern vehicles on the roads and the British Tommies in the canteen, where I am taken for lunch by the hospitable Welsh civilian who is the army’s assistant liaison officer, I feel as if I have fallen into a time warp.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 6
