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.
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 proping 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.