After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 by Ben Shephard

Author:Ben Shephard [Shephard, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

“The moral is,” one of the pathologists later wrote, “that the circulation of a starved person is much less adaptable and of far less capacity than that of a normal.” British doctors, used to treating haemorrhage and shock in well-fed people under wartime conditions with massive blood transfusions, had to “drastically modify their ideas when giving intravenous therapy to the starved.”9

There was, however, no treatment for the condition from which most of the patients now suffered. “The majority of them were obviously and terribly smitten with TB,” Peter Horsey wrote. “The treatment of TB … was nil,” Roger Dixey recalled, “in fact it was impossible to keep the cases in bed, as even if they understood the orders given to them, they were not likely to obey an order limiting their new found liberty. One old woman clad in nothing but a blanket flowing from her shoulders was found at the hospital gates valiantly setting out for Poland, such was her urge to get home.”10

Fascinating as this research was, many of the students who had worked most intensely in the huts now found themselves underemployed. Some were now ill with “d and v” or dizzy spells and ten would ultimately catch typhus, albeit mildly. Others found that, as “nearly all the attention required by the ill was nursing care, our work began to fall off.” Peter Horsey “very quickly realised that my period of usefulness came to an end when [Camp] 1 was evacuated … It was difficult to take the work seriously at this time because of the continual feeling of being superfluous.”

Some of the students were able to monitor their patients’ progress in the new hospital—or even to form new relationships. Andrew Matthews worked in Camp 2 in a women’s ward with more than fifty beds, run by a Swiss Red Cross sister helped by “a diminutive teenage Jew from Czechoslovakia” called Lisl who became his constant companion and changed his “inbred suspicions of Jews to respect and affection which has endured ever since.” But many grew disenchanted. “Most of the women in Camp 1 seem to be getting their self-respect back,” Michael Hargrave wrote. “Now that they are in decent clothes … they are attempting to keep themselves clean and look nice.” But at the same time, “somehow I cannot bring myself to like the internees as they are making such an infernal mess of this camp, and their destruction is so wanton as they destroy anything which is no use to them at the present moment, irrespective of the fact that they might want it later, and they still live by the ‘law of the clutching hand.’ ”11

Hargrave’s feelings may have coloured his judgement. He had worked with great dedication in one of the worst huts in Camp 1 and established an intense relationship with the Polish girls in the hut, several of whom he had persuaded to stay behind to help nurse the sicker inmates. He had also given daily English lessons to the pretty

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