History: In 1996, I had the privilege to interview a number of people who had worked in Belsen on the rehabilitation and care of survivors and were first-hand witnesses to the atrocities of the Shoah.
Dr Hann Collis was one of them and she and her husband, Robert, brought a number of Jewish orphans to Ireland in the late 1940s. Robert Collis came from an Anglo-Irish family and had worked strenuously to eradicate TB in the tenements of Dublin. In 1947 he published an account of his time in Belsen, Straight On: Journey to Belsen and the Road Home. In After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen 1945 Collis's story is featured, along with those of many others involved in the extraordinary task of nursing back to life and health the thousands of people abandoned to die of starvation, deprivation and typhus in the hellhole of Belsen.
It is a tale of bungling and quiet heroism, compassion and indifference. While Ben Shephard has written an account which is essentially a fascinating contribution to medical history, it also contains comprehensive eyewitness accounts culled from diaries, memoirs and letters. Indeed, as Shephard tells us, the discovery of new archival material is, in part, his motivation for writing the book. Contributors to the ever-growing opus of Holocaust historiography have been accused by some of creating an industry.
However, Shephard's contribution is not superfluous and he negotiates his harrowing material surefootedly . Central to the book is the judgment of the Allied - and specifically British - response to the rehabilitation effort.
As is graphically underscored in the book, the British Army personnel who went to liberate Belsen on that fateful April day in 1945 had no idea what awaited them. Even though Auschwitz and Dachau had been liberated some months earlier, nothing could really prepare the military for what they faced.
"The things I saw completely defy description," wrote Major Ben Barnett, one of the first officers to enter Belsen on April 14th, 1945. "There are no words in the English language that can give a true impression of the ghastly horror of the camp. I find it hard even now to get into focus all these horrors, my mind is really incapable of taking in everything I saw because it was all so completely foreign to everything I had previously believed or thought possible."
Amongst its liberators, Belsen quickly became known as the "Horror Camp". When the British arrived, approximately 41,000 people remained, crammed into a few huts. Brig Glyn Hughes, the officer in charge of the liberation, observed that the huts "were filled to overflowing with prisoners in every state of emaciation and disease". A military man hardened to the extremes of human suffering, Brig Hughes wept openly as he toured the camp.
However, it soon became clear that swift action was required if the former inmates were not to succumb to the ravages of rampant disease and starvation. There were shocking mistakes made in the treatment of the starving. Within the first few weeks 2,000 people had died, hurried to their deaths because they were fed unsuitable and over-rich foods. The phrase "killed with kindness" comes macabrely to mind. As Shephard points out, however, the medical personnel charged with the business of rehabilitation were woefully ill equipped, literally and mentally, to deal with an unprecedented form of humanitarian catastrophe on a massive scale.
Some recent scholarship, most notably Rabbi Isaac Greenberg, has questioned the efficacy of the rehabilitation effort. His thesis is that the deaths of 14,000 people in Belsen post-liberation were brought about partially by British military failing to respond adequately and that this failure was fuelled by an underlying indifference to the fate of European Jewry. Shephard flies this at the beginning of the book yet After Daybreak does not adequately address this thorny issue.
Nonetheless Shephard's book also highlights acts of compassion. After a number of weeks struggling with the mounting death toll, medical staff and volunteers were rewarded by a sudden boost in morale of those in their care. When the sick recovered sufficiently, they were dressed in new clothes. One British doctor found it "moving beyond words to watch the transformation". In one surreal turn of events, a dance was held and frail, skeletal women survivors were waltzed around in the arms of strapping soldiers.
These and other extraordinary and graphic images, as well as the moving first-person testimonies of survivors calling to us down the years from their own letters and diaries, lift what might be a slightly pedestrian narrative into a higher realm.
Katrina Goldstone is the communications and membership officer of Create, the national arts support organisation. She is also a critic and has written extensively on Jewish history and culture