Lt. Col. Mervin Willett Gonin DSO on the Holocaust
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. Source: Imperial War museum. Cited at Banksy.
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
children 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 propping 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.
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