I have read that, in the time of the Reich, this kaserne housed 15,000 troops, and as I am driven around the base I am rendered speechless both by the sheer size of the place and by the way everything seems to be endlessly replicated. Here, the main unit of design consists of a square parade area enclosed on three sides by five two-storey blocks of living quarters; these complexes are set up and down the wide streets of the barracks in a dizzying array of mirror images. It was these ‘squares’ that in April/May 1945 were converted into the emergency hospital, with beds (requisitioned from local civilians, sometimes at gunpoint) ranged in rows out in the open and also inside the dormitory-style rooms of the buildings. Within a couple of months, as the survivors regained their health, clusters of these squares became the separate camps that housed the Jewish and gentile DPs. Both were predominantly Polish nationals, and one of the initial sticking points was the British government’s refusal to recognise the distinct cultural and racial identity of the Jews. Eventually, after the Christian Poles were evacuated either to their homeland or to other assembly centres, this camp became a self-governing Jewish community. With a shifting population of up to 12,000 men, women and children, it formed the largest Jewish centre in Germany until the disbandment of the camp in 1950.
The hundred or so residential buildings were by no means the sum total of the camp. One of the few pieces of good fortune in the Belsen story was the fact that this kaserne began as a state-of-the-art facility for the Reich’s soldiers, who were provided with a cinema, a concert hall and an air-conditioned tent-theatre that seated 5000. For the DPs, these became important community meeting places. Yet it is when I am taken to the building known as the Round House – formerly the mess for the German army officers – that my eyes really pop out. A framed photograph shows this building in 1936 with a large ornamental lake in front; that is now gone, but the façade is intact. So is the enormous dining room, with its crystal chandeliers. Empty now, but it is easy to imagine it in the heyday of the Reich, with the uniformed officers feasting and carousing; less easy to imagine it when the Round House was an outpost of the emergency hospital and this room alone held 300 beds in which the starving victims of the Third Reich were fed the thin gruel that was all their depleted metabolisms were able to digest. By July 1945, it was an isolation ward for patients with incurable tuberculosis. A month later, when my father arrived at the camp, most of the TB cases had been evacuated to Sweden and the remainder had been sent to the part of the barracks that had once been a lazaret or military hospital, and which had been renamed the ‘Glyn Hughes Hospital’ in honour of the brigadier who had developed the plan for the medical relief of Belsen.
In the extraordinary little private museum that a retired British soldier has set up in the cellars of the Round House, I see photographs of this hospital, but when I ask to be taken there I am told that vandals recently got into the building and caused such damage that it is now too dangerous to enter. Given the difficulty that was the mark of the relationship between my father and myself, this barrier against going to the place where he actually lived and worked seems fitting. Yet as my journey has brought me so far, I push a bit and my kindly guide agrees that we can at least look at the hospital from the gate. Getting there involves a ten-minute drive around the back of the military facility, and then along a country road to a deserted area of woodland. (Now I understand how the vandals weren’t spotted.) By the time I stand at the entrance to the old lazaret, the autumn evening is drawing in and the photograph I take of the towered building at the end of the avenue of leafless trees has the palette and atmosphere of a scene from a Cold War spy movie.
Yet this appearance is deceptive. I have allowed the past to lull me into anachronism. As I unravel more of the history of the Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, I find myself in a story that is as contemporary as the latest failed peace talk in the Middle East, or breaking news about the conflict over the borders of the Soviet Union.
*
It is springtime when I return to the deserted hospital. The sky is blue and the branches of the trees lining the roadway down to the main building are now clothed with leaves of an almost fizzy shade of green that we don’t have in the Australian bush. This vibrant rebirth of nature seems symbolic of the renewal of life that came in April 1945 with the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which I have come to commemorate. Today I am with a busload of Belsen survivors and younger family members of survivors, making a tour of the DP camp as a kind of prologue to the official ceremonies of the seventieth anniversary, which will happen in two days’ time. Despite the illustriousness of my companions, for safety reasons the gates to the hospital are locked, and we all stand at the barrier, poking our cameras through the bars to take our snaps. Suddenly a woman cries out, ‘All the children! All the children born here, stand in front of the gates!’
There are five of them – three men and two women. All around my own age, or perhaps a year or so older, they were born in the Glyn Hughes Hospital between 1945 and 1950, and as they line up now for a photo opportunity, camera shutters click and click again. After the Holocaust, every new life was especially precious, and today everyone wants a picture of these children who were born against the odds.
Despite the many differences between the backgrounds of these survivor-children and myself, the thing we have in common is that we are all engaged on a quest to find our pasts; like me, they obviously crave information – any fragment of information, no matter how small. So when finally the cameras are put away and the group is disassembling, I go up to one of the five and tentatively ask, ‘Would you like to see a photo of some babies in the hospital?’ I take out of my bag an A3 photocopy of a spread from the Nursing Mirror magazine dated April 1946, showing a montage of scenes inside the Glyn Hughes Hospital, including one of an Australian doctor, Phyllis Tewsley, with half a dozen newborn babies in the nursery.
Would they like to see it! Not only the five who were born here but also everyone in earshot crowds around the photocopied page – and me. Where did this come from? How did I happen to have it? Indeed: who am I?
I point to one of the other photos, which shows my father, posed as if he is discussing some important medical matter with the matron, and I explain my connection with this uniformed bureaucrat. Immediately, the woman whom I think of as the organiser starts arranging the five ‘children’ in front of the hospital gates again, but this time with me in the middle, holding the photomontage. It would be unbearably rude to jump out of shot but, as cameras snap, I feel invidious, ashamed. If they had known Dr Wheatley, I find myself thinking, they would not have been so quick to include me.
Although the records of his administration make it clear that my father ran the hospital very efficiently, there was a problem with his attitude towards the people in his care. A month or so after he took over the role of superintendent, a French doctor who was in charge of the Medical Inspection rooms wrote a comprehensive report on the camp, in which he stated that ‘Dr W’ had a ‘more correct and friendly manner’ than his predecessor, but ‘unfortunately it does not seem that he has a better understanding of the state of mind (états d’esprits) and the needs of the DPs’. Even more damningly, the UNRRA archives contain a fragment of text from an article published in late 1945 in an American Jewish weekly newspaper, which (in the translation provided from the original German) declared that ‘the UNRRA hospital is under direction of an Englishman Whittley, who only employs former German doctors and nurses who were not quite innocent of the big destruction work’.
Whatever truth there is to this allegation about the culpability of his medical team, it is the case that there were seven German doctors (some of them former Wehrmacht officers) and 131 German nurses working at the Glyn Hughes Hospital in my father’s time, and there is evidence that he was both favourably disposed towards his German staff and reluctant to employ Jewish personnel. It is small comfort to me that his views were shared by a number of much more senior UNRRA officials, including
the Chief Medical Officer for the British Zone (Australian advocate of racial purity, Sir Raphael Cilento) and the Director of Health for the European Office. The aid organisation’s official response to complaints on this politically charged issue was that it had inherited the German medical personnel when it had taken over the Glyn Hughes Hospital from the British military, but the tone of the internal correspondence on this matter reveals an attitude of systemic anti-Semitism.
*
Two days after this bus tour to the old hospital, Mr Ronald Lauder, speaking on behalf of the World Jewish Congress at the ceremony held to mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation, points out that anti-Semitism is once more on the rise in Europe. ‘Today a Jewish boy wearing a yarmulke,’ he declares, ‘cannot walk down the street in Paris or London or Copenhagen without fearing for his life.’
Sadly, the same might be said about a Muslim girl in hijab, I think as I write down his words in a soggy notebook. By Sunday, the blue skies have changed to grey clouds and intermittent showers, and as I sit looking at the obelisk through a sea of black umbrellas, the weather seems the objective correlative of this ceremony that is one of mourning rather than celebration. That is only appropriate, of course, and one thing I notice in the morning’s program is that there is no British representative listed among the speakers. Twenty years ago, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary, there were complaints that the event had been a glorification of the liberators, to the exclusion of the suffering of Belsen’s Jewish victims. That, of course, was in line with the way the media had presented the story to the British public in April 1945. The upshot was a conference of historians and survivors held in the United Kingdom a few months later, and the publication of a book, Belsen in History and Memory. It was after that 1995 conference that the historiography of Bergen-Belsen (at least, the material written in English) began to change.
Certainly on this occasion, testimonies in a medley of languages are given by survivors from Poland, Hungary, France, Israel, America and Ukraine, as well as by a member of the Sinti and Roma community. As the President of Germany stands unsheltered in the rain and expresses his perplexity as well as his regret that the history of Belsen could ever have occurred, I find myself realising another thing that is conspicuously absent from the proceedings. Although the shuttle bus on which I travelled to the Gedenkstätte went through three police check points, I can see no sign of security at the site itself, and the minders around the Bundespräsident are so discrete that when by accident on my arrival I ended up walking in the middle of the official entourage, I only realised who my companions were when I found my progress being tracked by half a dozen television cameras. Some days later, when I mention the event’s low-key security to one of the Memorial staff, he delicately observes, ‘We cannot allow the place to look like a concentration camp.’ In this, as in all matters, I am awed by the sensitivity not just of the people who work at the Gedenkstätte but of the state government of Lower Saxony, which oversaw the organisation of the anniversary and indeed pays the huge ongoing costs of the Belsen Memorial. I find myself trying to imagine a similar level of official recognition being accorded to the victims and survivors of Australia’s frontier wars.
After the speeches are over and dozens of wreaths (including one, I see, in honour of Belsen’s homosexual victims) are laid at the Inscription Wall, it is fitting that we move from the site of the Horror Camp to the other Belsen, where the 29,000 survivors started their new lives.
Here the British come into their own, putting on lunch for a few hundred guests in the splendiferous dining hall of the Round House. Just as a wake provides mourners with a much-needed chance to relax and revive their spirits after the catharsis of a funeral, this is a welcome opportunity for those who have travelled from far and wide to catch up with old friends. Soon people are moving about between the tables and spilling out onto the terrace, where some sunshine is finally breaking through the clouds. By the time the official part of the proceedings begins, there is such a hubbub going on that I need to move close to the platform to hear what is being said.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask a nearby military bod as a man in an elegant lounge suit delivers what is clearly the key speech in praise of the role played by Belsen’s British liberators.
‘That’s the Duke of Gloucester,’ I am told in a hushed tone. I must appear unimpressed, because I am swiftly advised: ‘He’s the Queen’s cousin.’
Whatever his lineage, his words seem to fall on mostly deaf ears, but as the Duke finishes his address, a frail-looking man with a gentle face hastens up the steps in what is obviously an unscheduled conclusion to the formalities. Promising he will say only two words – and indeed he is almost as brief as his promise – the new arrival graciously presents the Duke (now halfway across the platform) with a book of which he is the author. As I hear him quietly describe it as testimonies of the children of Holocaust survivors, I realise this to be Menachem Rosensaft, yet another Glyn Hughes Hospital baby, and one whose parents were major players in Belsen’s political history.
Menachem’s mother, Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, managed to survive Auschwitz concentration camp despite the deaths there of her parents, her husband and her young son. Having qualified as a dental surgeon before her deportation, she gave what medical aid she could to her fellow prisoners, both at Auschwitz and later at Belsen concentration camp, and she was also part of the unsung team of survivors who supported the British military’s medical efforts in April/May 1945. Within a month of moving to the DP camp, Dr Bimko became a member of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany, an organisation founded by Mittelbau-Dora survivor, Yossele (Josef) Rosensaft, whom Hadassah later married.
A brilliant political tactician and propagandist, Josef Rosensaft used the name and reputation of Belsen for all it was worth, and quickly won international support (especially in America) to his cause. In a two-pronged campaign, he demanded that the British government change its position on the Mandate of Palestine and open the gates of immigration to provide the homeland of Eretz Israel for the She’erit Hapletah – the ‘surviving remnant’ left after the Holocaust. Simultaneously, he pressured the British authorities in Germany to recognise Jewish Displaced Persons as a nation, and indeed to make Belsen DP camp a segregated haven for Jewish survivors. Although at first the British resisted on both fronts, it only took a couple of years before they were forced to give in. Belsen DP camp became (as I have mentioned) a self-governing Jewish community; as for Rosensaft’s other demand, the outcome needs no elaboration.
As I watch the son of this man who was anathema to the British government unostentatiously make his gift to the somewhat bemused representative of the British crown, it is for me one of the great symbolic moments of this day. Yet if this reconciliatory handshake seemingly passes without notice, it also makes me conscious of another historical event soon to occur in this remarkable place. Within a few months, the British army, which has been based here since the DP camp closed in 1950, is due to leave. While the adjacent training area will remain in the hands of NATO, the German military who will take over the barracks will not require such a huge complex of buildings. Having already seen what has happened to the Glyn Hughes Hospital, I expect that much of this weird Wehrmacht wonderland will soon also fall into irremediable disrepair.
Later, as the day’s pilgrimage of remembrance moves on to the Jewish cemetery at the base, I hear people worrying out loud about whether it will be looked after, when the British are gone. Unlike the mass burial sites of the concentration camp, the graves here are individual, yet many of the tombstones bear the single word ‘Unbekannt’ (Unknown): a poignant reminder that those who are buried here managed to survive until the liberation, and even a month or so beyond, but succumbed before their identities could be recorded.
This final and comparatively small commemoration is very much a Jewish community event, and I feel honoured that it was one of the five ‘children’ whom I met the other day outsi
de the hospital gates who has insisted that I come along. While there are military flourishes to the proceedings (including a bugler playing the ‘Last Post’ and even – strange to my Australian ears – a rousing chorus of ‘God Save the Queen’), this is a religious service. Earlier today, in the testimony of one of the survivors, we were reminded that no fewer than 2000 children were born in the Belsen DP camp. ‘It was these children,’ Dr Ernest Mandel told us, ‘and their children and grandchildren, who defied the Final Solution.’ And as I hear the strength of the voices of these survivors and their family members joining in the recital of the Mourner’s Kaddish, I realise that this new life represents the hope that came to Belsen on 15 April 1945.
*
A few days later, returning alone to the Gedenkstätte to continue my work in the archives, I begin by walking the site, as I first did eight months ago. Today the sky is blue again, the crowds with their black umbrellas have disappeared, and the only sign of Sunday’s events is the blaze of wreaths that lines the Inscription Wall. Yet even when these, too, are gone, the remembering will continue. The very earth of Belsen maps the collective memory of those who survived here, as well as the many thousands who died. Stripped back again to the bare bones of landscape, the place itself bears continual witness to its history.
Griffith Review
Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene
James Bradley
As fires engulfed the hills outside Adelaide in early January it was difficult not to be gripped with an uneasy sense of deja vu. For while there have always been fires and floods, in recent years they have grown more frequent, more intense, more devastating.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 7
