The Best Australian Essays 2015 (6 page)

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:

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 with 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.

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.