Authors: Virginia Nicholson
This sketch of a concentration camp survivor was made by Eric Taylor, a serving British soldier.
The stench of excrement, death and burning bodies was excruciating; Joy would never forget it. She stayed at Belsen for nine agonising weeks. Before returning to England, she was taken for decontamination. Every inch of her was sprayed with DDT: ‘It was in her ears, in her knickers, in her bra. And her family home was visited: they had to be warned about the lice she might be carrying, and what precautions they had to take.’ But nothing could ever purge her of the memories, which were to give her nightmares for the next ten years:
We had no-one to talk to – we just had to keep going. Two of our sisters started drinking heavily and were sent home. I don’t really know how we survived – we all supported each other and cried every night with our arms around each other …
We had been through the war but this was something so terrible that it took some time for us to come to terms with what we saw …
I cannot really write about everything that happened there. I have tried over the years to forgive the horrors …
Joy’s daughter Sue believes her mother’s inability to talk about Belsen was in itself a manifestation of the trauma she had experienced. But, unknown to Sue till later, Joy
had
found an outlet. Soon after her return from Germany, she sat down and struggled to find the words to describe what she had been through. The resulting poem, ‘Until Belsen’, is an attempt to express her sense of powerlessness and inadequacy, faced with perhaps the twentieth century’s most inexpressible horror:
Until Belsen
We thought we had seen it all
Our cheeks bloomed like peaches,
Bright eyes, quick light movement.
Flashes of scarlet, snow white caps
We thought we had seen it all.
The London Blitz, bombs, fires, headless corpses,
Screaming children: Yankee Doodle Dandy!
We thought we had seen it all.
Scabies, Lice, and Impetigo, T.B., Polio
And unmentionable V.D.
We thought we had seen it all …
Our souls sank deep and deeper still,
Until with nowhere else to go, soft hearts
Hardened and cocooned themselves.
Laughter broke like glass over fields and orchards
And from tent to tent.
We tried; we really tried, but some they died.
We thought we had seen it all.
Until Belsen.
There are no words to speak.
We hid within our souls, deep and silent.
We clung together trying to understand,
The smell pervaded the mind and the sights and sounds
Reached those souls buried deep within and for so long
Encased in rock.
Bitter scalding tears melted the rock
Our hearts were broken.
We had seen it all.
After she wrote that poem, Joy believed her heart would never mend.
*
Maggie Joy Blunt could
hardly remember having seen such a beautiful spring. As the month of April drew to a close the suburban streets of her home town – Slough, in Berkshire – gloried in an early burst of lilac and wallflowers:
Last week 70º in the shade, everyone in summer frocks & without stockings, trees in leaf everywhere almost overnight … It has been wonderful, beyond describing …
‘God is pleased,’ said N, ‘that we are freeing the concentration camps in Germany.’
As the news from the camps was released piecemeal over the ensuing weeks, it sent out a sickening shockwave, a sense of anger and shame for humankind. Photographs and newsreel footage gave the horror a hitherto unparalleled immediacy.
Anne Popham’s job
in the Photograph Division of the Ministry of Information put her in the front line when the pictures started to come in. The girl at the next desk to hers was sorting them out. ‘Hundreds of them were arriving. Some of them had to be censored – they were too nasty to be exhibited. I knew that concentration camps existed. But they were so much worse than anyone could possibly have imagined. I hadn’t realised the people there were starved to death.’
Maggie Joy Blunt was equally
appalled: ‘One suspected the Nazis of a certain amount of brutality & sadism, but not on
this scale involving the death by starvation & deliberate degradation of 1000’s & 1000’s of men, women & children – the children worst of all.’
Joan Wyndham’s party spirits
were utterly quenched by the cruelty. Horrible doubts set in, about the religion she had grown up with:
18th April
Spent a Benzedrine-ridden night crying for the suffering of the children, and railing against God for allowing such torture …
My mind lately has been in a state of turmoil. I just don’t know whether I believe any more or not. It is the first time that doubts have ever entered my mind, but I think I’d rather have an imperfect God than none at all, and no meaning to anything.
Clara Milburn listened
to the broadcast describing the liberation of Buchenwald camp with disgust and outrage. ‘Oh, these evil Germans! And those poor, poor souls.’ Clara, a fervent patriot, had believed throughout in the righteousness of the cause. For her, the revelations of the concentration camps reinforced an implacable morality: ‘How can one forgive such horrible deeds – or even forget them! We must
not
forget.’
Vere Hodgson shared
her anger. The Germans had described themselves as a Master Race. That claim now rang hollow. She had seen the
Sunday Pictorial
photographs which showed the unrepentant, smug faces of Belsen’s women warders. ‘They have no public conscience.’
Others reacted more with sorrow than outrage.
Naomi Mitchison had witnessed
political oppression in Austria and had tried to tell the world back in 1936, but nobody would listen. ‘What was wrong with the German soul?’ she now pondered.
Sheila Hails, a pacifist,
felt a bitter anger at the short-sightedness of government. ‘I saw the films, and just felt utter horror. The British government had known about these camps for a long time, and they didn’t do
anything
– all through the rise of Hitler.’
Frances Partridge, as usual,
explored her feelings in her diary. The gloriously unseasonable weather had prompted the Partridge family to pack a picnic and go bathing at a nearby mill-pool; but the monstrous images that Frances had seen in her morning paper imprinted themselves on her brain and wouldn’t go away: ‘a lorry stacked with naked corpses; others in the last stages of emaciation … in ghastly rows, waiting to be buried … They haunted me all day.’
Ralph and Burgo bathed. Frances sat by the millrace, racked with grief and anguish about humanity. The sanity of the world seemed to have received ‘a fatal blow … I can’t stop thinking of it and all it implies.’
Thelma Ryder’s concerns
were more material. Still working at her aircraft components factory in Lymington, she went to see the newsreel in her time off:
It was terrible – all those bodies piled up. But the German people must have known those things were happening. How could you not know? It must have been a hell of a smell around, you know?
Oh, God, I think it’s terrible. Fancy treating people like that!
This Incredible Moment
The shockwave that convulsed Joy Taverner, Anne Popham, Frances Partridge and Thelma Ryder was just as seismic in its impact on their male counterparts. In the camps, babies and small children had been murdered; women and men alike had laboured, starved and died. In their crimes, the murderers – of both sexes – had not differentiated. Horror-struck, the public were united in their abhorrence of the atrocious regime which had perpetrated them. The Nazis’ contempt for human values prompted a humanitarian consensus: such evil must never be forgotten or ever allowed to happen again.
For nearly six long years, the anti-Fascist banner had rallied diverse nations, from Britain to the Soviet Union. As their victory approached, and in the face of the Holocaust, it may have seemed – briefly – that the age-old sexual conflict could also be dispelled. The images of indiscriminate truckloads of corpses were a
memento mori
from a horror film. The pictures projected across cinema screens worldwide reminded audiences everywhere of their common vulnerability and humanity: ‘… composed like them / Of Eros and of dust’. The lines are W. H. Auden’s, written in 1939, before he had known about Belsen:
There is no such thing
as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Whether politically or from either side of the gender fence, the desire to be seen first and foremost as human was one to affirm, surely?
In his history of the twentieth century,
The Age of Extremes
(1994), Eric Hobsbawm dissects the international consensus against Fascism: ‘[It] succeeded in uniting an extraordinary range of forces. What is more, this unity was not negative but positive and, in certain respects, lasting.’ His historical hindsight, however, does not provide Hobsbawm with much in the way of optimism:
As soon as there was no longer a fascism to unite against, capitalism and communism once again got ready to face each other as one another’s mortal enemies.
In the new era, nations which had transcended their differences in the face of a common evil would later revert to suspicion and hostility. And, as we shall see, the relationship between men and women would also relapse after the war, becoming troubled and unbalanced.
In 2003 Joy Taverner’s
grand-daughter-in-law asked her for her memories. It was still hard for Joy to talk about Belsen, still hard to come to terms with what she had witnessed there:
Whoever created us humans made some awful mistakes. I only hope that in the future the world will become a more peaceful and friendly place.
*
By the end of April the European war was moving with dizzying speed to its conclusion. At home, the sirens were quiet, and the public were told that they need no longer put up any form of blackout. Mussolini’s grisly end was succeeded with news that the Russian and American armies had met; Berlin was encircled. What did it all mean?
Maggie Joy Blunt was appalled
by the treatment meted out to the Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci, whose corpses had been strung up and abused. ‘[I feel] shocked and depressed. Spitting on the bodies … seems childish and barbarous.’ But her low-spiritedness was short-lived. Having spent the weekend spring-cleaning her living room, she was delighted with its brilliance and beauty. Her beloved cat Dinah had had a new litter of three kittens. And on Tuesday 1 May things definitely seemed to be looking up when the
office canteen served ice cream – ‘the first time for 2 or is it 3 years?’ But the overriding topic at work was: what would happen to Hitler? ‘We wait, wondering whether Hitler is raving as they say, or dying, or dead, or will commit suicide, or be captured & tried and shot, and what his henchmen are doing & feeling.’ In the office Maggie’s female colleagues were discussing what should be done to war criminals. A Jewish woman proposed having Hitler’s eyes put out with knitting needles. Next morning 1½ inch headlines on the front pages proclaimed: ‘HITLER DEAD’. The following day reports came through of the surrender of the German armies in Italy. ‘One can hardly keep pace with the news.’
As one by one the armies of Europe decelerated and inched to a halt, Britain’s sunny skies clouded over. The temperature dropped, a bitter wind started to blow, and by 1 May the country was ‘back to winter’. To make matters worse, Maggie’s ears had started to exude a repulsive discharge which defied diagnosis. In the face of a chilling, sleety blast she trudged to the doctor, who confessed himself baffled, but prescribed an ointment to be applied regularly. Maggie felt ‘like a leper’ and anticipated spending the victory holiday with her cats, in self-imposed seclusion. And thus it was that on the evening of Friday 4 May she found herself in bed, mopping her ears with cotton wool and listening to the radio news announcing that the German forces in northwestern Europe had surrendered to General Montgomery.
It was the end of the war in Europe. But, showing a curious wariness and pusillanimity, no fanfares were trumpeted or flags flown for another three days, as the public awaited their leaders’ permission for the long-awaited holiday to celebrate Victory in Europe. Announcements were withheld at the insistence of the Russian leadership, who did not want VE-day proclaimed until the Germans had also made their surrender to Marshal Zhukov. Across the land tempers were on edge, moods swinging between depression and high spirits. Everyone felt exhausted and nervous. When would it be? Sunday? Next week? June?
Maggie Joy Blunt, however, didn’t wait for the officials to negotiate the formalities. It was a cold, wet evening, and the inflammation in her ears was bad, so she went to bed and ate a modest supper off a tray: lettuce, radish and beetroot salad, brown bread with a scrape of butter and honey, a glass of milk and, that rarity, an orange. Downstairs she
had the radio switched on; she could attend to her suppurating ears while listening to the historic bulletins on her bedroom speaker: