Captain Douglas Peterkin and his fellow medics struggled to empty the huts in anything like an orderly fashion amid distressing scenes of panic and despair. They would arrive draped in their white anti-typhus overalls and carrying stretchers to discover crowds of people desperate for medical treatment and food, making the job of choosing whom to help first almost impossible. But for those who were carried to Johnny Johnson’s human laundry, and able to tolerate the various food supplements now being offered, the changes could be rapid and remarkable. Three-quarters of the survivors were women and girls and most had been living in a desperate, exhausted and emaciated state for weeks now. The long and detailed equipment lists for 11 Light Field Ambulance never contained quantities of lipstick or face powder, but Peterkin and his commander Mervyn Gonin soon discovered that such things could be lifesavers, too.
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 around about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem 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 tattooed on their arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
Even as they worked 18-hour days, forever checking themselves for the first signs of typhus, the doctors understood that they were involved in something extraordinary and historic. To use the word that Johnson had chosen in his first letter home from the camp, the challenge was truly colossal. But face to face with living − or barely living − evidence of one of the greatest atrocities of all time, they were all determined to try anything that might make a difference. Replacing tattered, lice-infested camp uniforms with proper skirts, blouses and dresses, and ensuring that there was makeup available for anyone who wanted it, was indeed an important part of the cure.
Douglas Peterkin observed that once people were able to stand, eat and wash themselves, and once they were dressed in something that resembled the clothing of their former lives, “the change was very marked as self-respect and a sense of responsibility returned”. The doctors even created a special “store”, full of clothes that the survivors could try on and choose for themselves, just as if they were out shopping back in Budapest or Rotterdam. They filled it with dresses and slacks provided by the Red Cross or else requisitioned from the German towns nearby and even put up a sign outside, on which they wrote the word “Harrods”. Another psychological insight helped with the food powders. A bland and chemical tasting “Bengal Famine Mixture”, made largely from rice and sugar, was eff ective but far from popular, and just the taste of it made some of the inmates vomit. Someone suggested that a small amount of paprika added to the mix might make it taste a little like the food the survivors remembered. And it did.
It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t always successful, but life and hope were slowly being rekindled, even in this most lifeless and hopeless of places. People considered disposable, barely even human, and treated accordingly for years, were now receiving care from an imaginative, passionate group of men and women in the uniforms of the British Army. And then, on 20 April 1945, the Luftwaffe − or what was left of it in northern Germany − launched one of its final attacks of the war, and the target chosen for this grand gesture of defiance was Belsen. There were barely any aircraft in a serviceable condition, but a handful were scraped together for this last vindictive insult to the people most brutalised by Hitler’s regime.
Early in the morning three Focke-Wulf fighters streaked across the camp and headed straight for the improvised medical base that had been set up by 11 LFA. Sweeping low, they shot up equipment and transport, wounding three LFA men and killing a fourth with a bullet straight through his chest. Mervyn Gonin, whose team was working itself to the point of exhaustion day after day to try and salvage what they could from the charnel house bequeathed to them by the Nazi state, was incandescent.
It is considered that this incident is a deliberate contravention of the Geneva Convention. The unit is located at least 1000 yards (and probably more) from any military installation nor are any combatant vehicles of any description parked nearer than 1000 yards from my lines.
This unit is located within 200 yards of 32 (Br) Casualty Clearing Station who are showing the red cross. This unit is located within 500 yards of a German military hospital marked with large red crosses on the roofs of three buildings standing on three sides of a triangle. A red cross flag is also flying from one tall chimney of this hospital … At the height these planes were flying it cannot but have been seen.
As the LFA patched up the damage, more and more medical units came to assist, along with civilian volunteers from the Red Cross. Almost a hundred medical students also arrived and were quickly set to work. They had heard about Belsen on the radio and had immediately volunteered to leave the safety of their colleges in England and Scotland. All knew that they were running a serious risk of contracting typhus. A handful of American military doctors came along, too.
Throughout his long medical career Douglas Peterkin would be a keen observer of the mental as much as the physical state of those under his care. In Belsen he noticed that, even after they’d recovered some weight, many of the former prisoners remained psychologically scarred by their years of undernourishment and anxiety. “The phobia of future shortage was very real to many internees and even some weeks after liberation they would hoard crusts, pieces of meat and other oddments of food under their pillows,” he wrote in his thesis. Another desperately sad legacy of their time in the camps came with a rash of sudden and unexplained deaths. People who were back on their feet, gaining weight and well into their recovery would suddenly collapse and die of a heart attack or develop untreatable liver failure. On the autopsy table the doctors discovered why. All that malnutrition, cold and overwork had caused these people’s internal organs to shrivel and atrophy, so much so that in some cases they resembled those of young children. They were simply not strong enough to support essential bodily functions once their owners started to eat, digest, breathe and move as a normal adult once again.
It would be nice to record that Douglas Peterkin, Johnny Johnson and Mervyn Gonin arrived just in the nick of time, but they did not. Had a deal been done to open Belsen to the British just two weeks earlier, when the three trains departed for Theresienstadt, so much more could have been achieved. As it was, even after twelve days of intensive work and treatment, with the human laundry working all hours, a further 9,000 inmates died, meaning that close to 14,000 fatalities occurred after the liberation of the camp. But almost 30,000 people who had been close to death did recover and were moved into new and decent accommodation, wearing new clothes and sometimes even lipstick.
Then the last bodies were cremated and the camp burned to the ground by British Army flamethrowers, as the world’s press stood around to record the final acts of the nightmare. By now footage from the first few shocking days − and the startlingly frank radio reports of the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby − had been widely seen and heard all around the world. And one of the defining images of the Holocaust − disordered piles of shrivelled human beings bulldozed and heaved into mass graves − had already become fixed. At the end Johnny Johnson recorded his verdict on what the British had found in this quiet corner of a supposedly civilised modern nation, and what had created it.
And finally I wish to make it quite clear in this official document that the conditions found at Belsen were the result of deliberate and bestial cruelty on the part of those responsible. 26,000 people were buried there during the period of our stay; it is my considered opinion that another 15,000 at least would have died within 14 days … but for the entry of our troops. In short the position was one of attempted mass murder.
As for Douglas Peterkin, who had been there for every day of the relief operation and who had spent more time in the huts than anyone else, the unemotional language of his thesis revealed his own health crisis: “In addition the author, along with seventeen other members of the 11th Light Field Ambulance and six medical students working in the camp, had the misfortune to contract the disease [typhus].”
In early May he was sent away for treatment. He would be absent until mid-June, by which time the war in Europe would be over. But he had not yet finished with typhus or the survivors of Belsen, and nor they with him.
Excerpted with permission from 1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World, Phil Craig, Hodder & Stoughton/ Hachette.
