Avalanche of Daisies (48 page)

‘What the hell is it?' they asked one another. There was nothing in the woods to cause it, as far as they could see. Yet the further they drove, the stronger and more repulsive it became. It even blocked out the scent of the pines.

Then their journey came to an end and they saw what it was. The camp lay directly ahead of them and scattered on either side of the track were scores of dead bodies, men and women, some in convicts' striped suits, some in rags, some half naked, their arms and legs stick-thin, their heads shaven, all of them blotched with purple bruises and smeared with blood.

The men of the 11th Armoured looked out at them in horror, all thinking the same thing. Why were they so desperately thin? Why had they been left where they fell? It must have been an execution of some kind, because they'd been shot from the front and fallen face upwards or onto their sides. Had they been starved and then shot?

‘Dear God!' Steve said. ‘What sort of place is this?'

The gates were being opened. It was time for them to enter.

‘It's called Belsen,' the sergeant said.

The commandant of Belsen concentration camp was waiting at the gate. From their vantage point beside the leading armoured car, Steve and Dusty had a good view of the proceedings and the man. He was exactly the sort of creature they expected – thickset, stocky, arrogant, cruel – and he dominated their attention, dressed in the immaculate, be-medalled uniform of a high-ranking officer, with a well-brushed cap and brightly polished jackboots, his face a mask of brutal insolence, heavily jowled and fleshy, with small eyes and beetling eyebrows. He showed no sign of fear at all and had turned his back on the camp and his prisoners, as if they were nothing to do with him, as if they didn't exist.

Behind him, the camp spread out its stinking and obvious presence, lines of cheap wooden huts, an expanse of bare, flattened, long-dead earth – where was all the grass? – and hundreds of prisoners, waiting, still and terrible, like half-clothed skeletons, stick-limbed and filthy, their skin the pale yellowish-white of old parchment, heads shaven, faces gaunt and scabby, eyes sunk into purple sockets. Some were standing, their arms dangling at their sides as if they no longer had the strength to lift them, many more were lying on the ground, too weak and ill even to sit up. And the stench cloyed around them, sickening and pervasive.

The troops at the gate were so appalled at the sight of them that they were bereft of speech. They looked from their own sturdy bodies and well-fed faces to the emaciated skulls and weary eyes before them and couldn't believe that they were seeing such things.
How could anyone be reduced to such a state and still stand? How could anyone be reduced to such a state? They didn't look human. But that thought, true though it was, was too shaming.

The commandant was the only person who wasn't abashed by the filth and starvation behind him. He clicked his heels to greet the brigadier and introduced himself as Joseph Kramer, looking as though he was proud of himself. Then he introduced his companions, a line of SS men and another of SS women, chief of whom was a pretty blonde, young and plump and looking most attractive in her trim uniform. ‘Irma Grese.' It was all polite and proper and pompous, as if they were at a garden party.

The brigadier's way with such people was cold and absolute. He turned to the military policemen who were waiting behind him. ‘Arrest them,' he said and climbed back into his staff car.

‘Now what?' Steve asked the sergeant.

‘Now we escort the food truck in,' the sergeant said.

‘Poor bastards!' one of his privates said, looking at the prisoners with anguished pity.

‘Don't let any of them touch you,' the sergeant warned. ‘If you get lousy, you'll get typhus an' I'll bet they're crawling alive.'

It was true. They could see the lice, walking across those bare bony backs, climbing an exposed arm, squatting on a child's forehead, evil, disgusting creatures, large as thumbnails and dark with blood.

‘He'll get the hygiene section in,' the sergeant said, nodding towards the brigadier's car. ‘De-lousers, medical corps, casualty clearing station, the lot. The wires'll be red-hot now he's seen this.'

They inched into the compound, driving very slowly because the prisoners who could stand were staggering towards them, holding out withered hands and calling to them, ‘
Shalom! Shalom!'
signing, taloned fingers to cracked lips, that they needed food, their eyes imploring.

‘It's coming,' the sergeant called to them. ‘Quick as we can.'

But there's so many of them, Steve thought, as they drove gently on. There must be thousands here. How can we possibly feed so many? What will we give them? They're much too weak for ordinary food. To his shocked eyes the problem seemed insurmountable. The men squatting by the roadside or propped against the kerb with their heads lolling on their chests – their pitifully sunken chests – weren't even bothering to ask for food. They looked as if they'd crawled there to die, already more like corpses than human beings. They must have been starving for ages, Steve thought. That foul commandant has been watching them starve to death, poncing about in his fancy uniform and his bloody jackboots with that fat female of his, and all the time he's been watching these people starve to death. How could he do such a thing? The cruelty of it made him ache.

They found the cookhouse, which was empty of everything except cooking utensils, and there was a rush to fill it with supplies and get it operational. Steve and Dusty, having no other duties, joined the teams who were carrying in the food. The most important items were sacks of flour, dried milk and sugar, which were unloaded first so that the cooks could set to work right away.

‘Bengal mixture,' they explained when they were asked what they were making. ‘Invalid food. It's all they can take when they're as bad as this lot.'

It looked like gruel and Steve grimaced at it. ‘And we thought
we
were hungry out on the road,' he said.

Dusty was gazing into the distance. ‘What's that under the trees?'

‘What trees?' Steve asked, looking round. He hadn't thought to see anything growing in such a place, but there they were, three miserable trees, covered in dust and drooping for lack of sustenance like everything else
in that hellish place. Heaped in their shade, too terrible to be believed, too grotesque to be comprehended, was a pile of dead bodies, all naked and rotting and all so thin that they were nothing more than long bones covered by strips of yellow skin, stretched and creased like old chamois leather and glistening in the spring sunshine.

‘Jesus!' Steve said. ‘Jesus Christ!'

Dusty was estimating the size of the pile, sixty yards long at least, probably more, thirty yards wide, four feet high. ‘Fucking hell, Steve! There must be hundreds of 'em.'

‘It's monstrous,' Steve said. ‘To let them lie there like that. Like rubbish.' He wanted to weep and scream at the obscenity of it, but he couldn't. He had to stay in control. ‘How could they do such a thing?'

It was a question all the troops were asking and they went on asking it all evening, long after they'd left the nightmare of the camp behind and returned to their own, clean, hygienic headquarters, where they were well fed and given beer to drink and water to wash in and extra supplies of cigarettes for that much needed smoke.

Steve and Dusty scrounged clean clothes, had a shower and a shave and a very good meal, and listened to the latest news on the wireless, but even then, restored to themselves, they couldn't shift the smell of the camp from their nostrils or the memory of its horror from their minds and that night it was hard to sleep for the appalling images that swelled in their dreams. Being shot and killed in battle was horrific enough but it was something they could accept. It was the way things were in a war and as bad for one side as the other, a matter of odds and luck, eased by the knowledge that some of it could be avoided by pre-planning and quick thinking. But to be starved to death, unarmed and defenceless, men, women and children, was too cruel to be comprehended. How could they do such a thing?

And early next morning, they had to go back to it.

‘It'll get better', the sergeant reassured them as they drove towards the camp, ‘once we get things sorted out.'

But the smell was worse and it didn't take long to discover why. The engineers had arrived and the terrible business of burying the dead had begun. They'd already dug a huge pit and were using a bulldozer to push the pile of rotting corpses into it, scooping them up in a tangle of arms and legs, torn skulls and rat-bitten bodies. The driver of the bulldozer was vomiting into his face mask – poor sod – but it had to be done. There was no time for individual funerals, even if such a thing had been possible, given how many dead there were. There was no time for dignity or pity. They had to be buried quickly before the entire camp died of typhus and dysentery. The only satisfactory thing about the whole revolting business, in the troops' opinion, was that the people being made to assist at the graveside were the captured SS guards.

Lorries arrived in rapid succession all day. Among the first were the hygiene teams, who brought supplies of DDT and cases full of flit sprays, and were soon busy spraying the walking inmates who queued in long patient lines to be relieved of their unwanted livestock, scratching and waiting. One of the huts was being scrabbed clean ready for use as a temporary hospital as soon as the medical teams arrived. And there was another delivery of food, mostly bread-flour and potatoes.

The cooks were despondent. ‘Fat lot a' good mixing up all that Bengal mixture,' one of them told Steve. ‘It just made 'em sick. Poor buggers couldn't keep it down. MO reckons it was too rich. We got to give 'em potato soup.'

It had been a bad night too. Some of the walking inmates had tried to raid the food stores and the guards had been ordered to fire over their heads to keep them
out. ‘Wouldn't've done 'em no good if they'd got the food,' the cook said. ‘If Bengal mixture's enough to make 'em sick, bread an' bacon would kill 'em.'

The fresh supplies were already being unloaded. Dusty rolled up his sleeves and got down to it, but Steve couldn't face it. To be told that these poor devils were so weak they couldn't even digest invalid food upset him almost as much as the sight of the mass grave had done. He had to get out of the cookhouse or he'd be in tears.

‘I'm going to see if there's something else I can do,' he said to Dusty. ‘I feel stifled in here.'

‘Try the major,' the cook suggested. ‘He's organising everything. He was down by the de-lousing section last I see of him, checkin' 'em in.'

Being a major he was easy to find.

‘7th Armoured?' he said, when Steve had explained who he was and what he wanted. ‘You're a bit off the beaten track, aren't you?'

Steve explained quickly and with a touch of pride. ‘Captured and escaped, sir. There's two of us. Private Miller's unloading supplies.'

‘This is a bad show,' the major said. ‘Can't send you back, you know. Not for the moment. No transport.'

‘No, sir. I understand that. I came to see if there's anything I could do.'

‘We shall be pulling out in a day or two ourselves,' the major said, still solving the first problem Steve had presented. ‘So you've got two options. You can come with us, or you can wait here until you know where your lot have got to. It's up to you.'

‘We'd rather stay here, sir. We'd like to rejoin our lot, if that's possible.'

‘Righto,' the major agreed, and turned to the second problem. ‘Now you want a job to keep you occupied pro tem. Is that right?'

‘Sir.'

‘I'll detail you to assist Captain Kennedy. He's
drawing up a list of all the bed bound. Trying to get a bit of order into the place.' He sighed. ‘Anyway. He'll be glad of some help. The Prof will show you the ropes.'

‘The Prof, sir?'

‘Some sort of professor,' the major explained. ‘Speaks about ten languages, or so I'm told. Captain Kennedy's found him terribly useful. Wait here. I'll send him over.'

The person who came stooping across to the delousing section some twenty minutes later was slow and shuffling and looked like an old man. The stubble on his chin and his shaven head was grey and his nose had the beaked look of extreme old age. But his eyes were the rich brown of someone in his twenties and when he spoke his voice was young too.

He addressed Steve in immaculate English and very politely. ‘I believe you would like my help. You are to join Captain Kennedy's team, is that correct?'

Steve agreed that it was and asked what he had to do.

The Professor showed him a file full of names and addresses. ‘There are six of us now,' he said. ‘We go to each hut in turn. We complete a form for each inmate. I have lists of the phrases you will need. We wrote them yesterday. You see. “What is your name?” “How old are you?” “Where do you come from?” That one is German. This is Dutch. French. Yiddish.'

Apart from the French, which Steve recognised, the words were baffling. ‘I'll have to write them out phonetically,' he said. ‘Otherwise I'll never be able to pronounce them. I haven't got your gift of tongues.'

The Professor's gaunt face lifted into a smile. ‘I was professor of modern languages in Berlin,' he explained. ‘Once upon a time.'

That was rather a surprise. ‘What brought you here?'

Again the smile. ‘I said rude things about Hitler. A capital sin.'

That took courage, Steve thought, because he must
have known what he was letting himself in for. He was full of admiration for the man and concerned that he had suffered so much for such a trivial offence. ‘Are you all right?' he asked.