The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (52 page)

bulldozed into graves.” Indeed, the British estimated that 10,000 bodies lay unburied in the camp upon their arrival, and perhaps 13,000 more died in the weeks fol- lowing the camp’s liberation.
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It was not uncommon, then, for liberators to see the lib- erated as nonhuman, as lost souls, like shades from the underworld. Leslie Hardman, a Jewish chaplain in the British Second Army, reached Belsen in the first days of its liberation. “I shall always remember the first per- son I met,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was a girl, and I thought she was a negress. Her face was dark brown,

and afterwards I realized that this was because her skin was in the process of healing, after being burnt. When she saw me, she made as though to throw her arms around me; but with the instinct of self-preservation, I jumped back. Instantly I felt ashamed; but she under- stood, and stood away from me.” Hardman, entering the camp, joined two young British soldiers who were carrying heavy bags of potatoes for the prisoners.

Almost as though they had emerged from the retreat- ing shadows of dark corners, a number of wraithlike creatures came tottering towards us. As they drew closer they made frantic efforts to quicken their feeble pace. Their skeleton arms and legs made jerky, gro- tesque movements as they forced themselves forward. Their bodies, from their heads to their feet, looked like matchsticks. The two young Tommies, entering camp for the first time, must have thought they had walked into a supernatural world; all the gruesome and fright- ening tales they had heard as children—and, not so many years since, they had been children—rose up to greet them; the grisly spectacle which confronted them was too much. They dropped their heavy sacks and fled.

The prisoners then “fell upon the sacks and their con- tents almost like locusts descending upon a field of

corn. With queer, inarticulate cries, in voices which were thinner and more reedy than those of children, they fell upon the ground, upon the sacks, upon one another…to gain for themselves a precious, priceless potato.”
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Derek Sington was no doubt right in saying that “words like ‘liberation,’ ‘tomorrow,’ ‘wait,’ had lost all meaning for them. They were consumed by the famine which was burning them up, possessed only by the wild urge to eat and survive.”
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In Belsen, as in Buchenwald, accounts of the libera- tion drew upon a common vernacular that limned sur- vivors as locusts, skeletons, the living dead—the stuff of ghoulish fairy tales. Liberators rarely perceived the camp survivors as human beings. Instead, survivors appeared as apes, mummies, idiots, babies, cordwood, scarecrows, and dying rabbits: a veritable thesaurus of diminished humanity. For some of the liberators, sur- vivors evoked not only disgust but hatred. “All I felt was horror, disgust, and I am ashamed to admit it, hate,” wrote Captain R. Barber of the RAMC of the men in the Sandbostel camp. “Hate against the prisoners them- selves for looking as they did, for living as they did, for existing at all. It was quite unreasonable, but there it was, and it gave us one possible explanation of why the SS had done these things. Once having reduced their prisoners to such a state the only emotions the guards

could feel were loathing, disgust and hate.”
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It was no wonder, then, that few of the liberators wanted to linger in these camps. At Dachau, units of the 42nd and 45th Infantry divisions liberated 32,000 prisoners. But the Americans were so shocked by the camps that there was no pride or evident satisfaction in the task. Nor was there much personal empathy or contact be- tween liberator and prisoner. As one American soldier put it, “I for one was very happy to get out of there af- ter three days. For me, it was wracking, and it was one of the happiest days of my life when they told me that, ‘OK, you’re going back, you’re going away.’ Because I don’t know how much more I could have taken of that camp.”
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We can hardly fault him for wanting to flee the corpse-littered scene after three days; but it bears re- calling that some people spent as long as ten years at Dachau.

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F

OR MOST OF the soldiers, the camps were some- thing one passed through on the way toward some other military objective. But what does this moment of liberation look like if we adopt the perspec- tive of those who were liberated? Of course, for the camp inmates, liberation meant an end to Nazi brutal-

ity. Liberation offered the prospect, however distant, of a return to families and to freedom. But such thoughts were for the most part overwhelmed by profound grief and anguish. The trauma of the camps was too great, their present focus on survival too single-minded for these prisoners to think much about the future. The prisoners also interposed a certain distance from their liberators. Yes, there was some cheering and embrac- ing and heartfelt gratitude expressed toward the Allied soldiers. There was also a deep sense of unease, almost dread, that many articulate survivors have described as being their primary sensation. In part it was shame; in part it was an awareness of the sense of loss; and in part it was fear: fear that no one would ever believe the story they had to tell.

Robert Antelme, a Frenchman arrested in June 1944 for Resistance activities, survived his incarceration in a labor camp but almost died on the eve of liberation. He might well have been one of those apelike creatures the Allies saw haunting Dachau in the days after the camp’s liberation. Antelme, after almost a year of hard labor, survived a ten-day death march from his camp at Gandersheim to Bitterfeld; then, on April 14, he was put into a boxcar and sent to Dachau: he did not get out for thirteen days. On the floor of the boxcar, exhausted, dying, and dead men lay in a heap. “ There wasn’t room

enough to straighten out our legs…. Intertwined legs would knot and then come violently unknotted, in the dark; nobody wanted to have legs on top of his. It was a free-for-all of legs.” One morning, Antelme awoke, itching madly. “Pick off your lice,” a mate ordered. He took off his shirt.

Long black strings of lice run down the cloth. I squash whole bunches of lice at once. I don’t have to search, the shirt’s full of them…. They’re brown and gray and white and full of the blood they’ve pumped out of me. These lice can kill you. My arms haven’t the strength to squash them anymore…. I put the shirt back on and take off my pants and underpants; the underpants are black in the crotch. It’s impossible to kill them all…. They’re all around my genitals, hanging on my pubic hair. I pull them off. I provide their nest and their hap- piness; I am theirs.

His Dachau imprisonment lasted a mercifully short two days. And then on April 29, a quiet, almost invisible lib- eration. Ill, emaciated, pestiferous, Antelme was lying on a hard wooden bunk that he shared with a cadav- erous old man. “’ They’re here,’” a voice called. “I sit up. A round helmet moves along the walkway, outside the window…. Leaning on my elbow, I watch the hel- mets going by on the walkway. Putting all my strength

into it, I bang at the old man’s feet. ‘ We’re free! Look, will you! Look!’” His bunkmate slowly turned his aged head to peer out the window, but “the helmets have all gone by. Too late. He falls back. I fall back too. I wasn’t able to sing, I wasn’t able to jump down right away, to run towards the soldiers. The old man and I are almost alone on our tier. The vision of round helmets had glid- ed over my eyes. He hadn’t seen a thing. The Liberation has passed by.”

Antelme downplays what should have been the central moment of his narrative of captivity. For he tells us that liberation brought no clarity, no sense of immediate relief. Freedom carried with it a growing anxiety that these young American soldiers, so helpful and cour- teous, just might not believe what these inmates had seen. Some of his fellow prisoners try to explain to an American what has happened here, what has happened to all of them. “ The soldier listens at first, but then the guys go on and on, they talk and they talk, and pretty soon the soldier isn’t listening anymore.” The inmates now come to terms with that awful burden that all sur- vivors acknowledge they must carry, the possession of a terrible truth that can never be fully revealed, or as Antelme put it, “a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge.”
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For those at Belsen, there was little question of cele- bration upon being liberated. The camp grounds were strewn with ten thousand dead bodies and the living were all near death. Hanna Lévy-Hass, a Yugoslav par- tisan and Jew, recalled that the prisoners in Belsen had no hot water after January 1945, that the whole camp was rife with lice and vermin. Dysentery was wide- spread, and the entire camp was awash in excrement. These prisoners knew that the Allies were nearby, but for Lévy-Hass, “this air of uncertainty” about the fu- ture was “a form of mental torture.” Just a month be- fore Belsen’s liberation, she wrote in her secret diary that “there is no point in knowing when the Allies will arrive, though it seems certain they are only a few doz- en kilometers away. For the present, our closest and most loyal ally is death. And if we do begin to count the days again, then it is not with an eye to the moment of our liberation, but in order to see how long the one or the other of us can still survive. There is a kind of medical curiosity in us, a strange obsession.” Libera- tion, while welcome, also made the survivors confront their own state of degradation. Fela Lichtheim, a Pole who was forced to work for more than three years in various Silesian textile factories, survived a death march from Gross-Rosen to Belsen in January 1945. For her, the months in Belsen, from January to April, were the worst of the war. Above all, the lice tormented

her. “I didn’t have any more strength to remove the lice from me. They crawled over me like ants.” But even her words, recorded in the summer of 1946, seemed inad- equate to plumb the depths of her misery. “One cannot describe it in words,” she said, “because words hurt too much.” This young woman of twenty-one said she “looked like a seventy-year-old woman. I was unable to move. I was all run down, emaciated, unwashed for weeks, without undressing. In that one dress and coat I was lying on the floor. I wanted some water for a drink, but I couldn’t get it. I had diarrhea for two months, and then I had typhus.” What did freedom mean in these conditions?39

The liberated prisoners at Belsen generally described the British as kind and warm, though many of the young women hated having their heads shaved, which the British insisted on to control lice. Sora M., a French Jew of Polish origin, recalled that Belsen in the last days of the war was “a lot worse than Auschwitz.” There was no food: “we ate grass, anything. Corpses littered the ground.” In a paradoxical reversal, Sora said she was surprised at the vulnerability of the young Brit- ish soldiers who helped her: “they were embarrassed to see us naked, and turned their heads and blushed when they put DDT on us.” Fernande H. remembered that by the time the British arrived the inmates looked

like “larvae,” and “we were dying like flies.” She too was ashamed of having her head shaved—”I cried.” The dose of DDT powder that the soldiers sprayed onto ev- ery prisoner “burned, as we were covered with scabs.” Yet the English were “charming, adorable, very sweet.” The moment of liberation was “wonderful,” yet she was so weak she could not walk and so she had only “a subdued celebration.” Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft, a Pol- ish Jew whose medical training had helped get her as- signed to a team of doctors, first in Auschwitz and then in Belsen, recalled that despite the arrival of the Brit- ish, conditions were very slow to improve after libera- tion. “ Within the following eight weeks, 13,944 more died.” It is hardly surprising, then, that “for the great- est part of the liberated Jews of Bergen-Belsen, there was no ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes. We had no place to go to, nobody to hug. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We had been liberated from death and the fear of death, but not from the fear of life.”
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The experience of liberation also depended upon who was doing the liberating, and in what context. Not everyone was freed from a camp. Nadine Heftler, a Frenchwoman who had spent time in Birkenau and Ravensbrück, was liberated while on a death march. She saw the star on an approaching American tank,

and ever since, “the American flag has always been the flag of my heart.” For Charles Baron, a French Jew who had been held in Birkenau and Dachau but managed to escape during a transport, the arrival of the Americans in the village in which he was hiding was a miraculous moment. “ We jumped on them, hung on their necks, I started to blubber, and I cried and cried. They looked so sad, and they patted me on the shoulder saying ‘Don’t cry, Frenchy, don’t cry.’ They made the villagers gives us omelets and threatened reprisals if anything happened to us. And then they continued on their way.” But the Americans could be abrupt as well. Ida Grinspan, ly- ing half dead on a bunk in Ravensbrück, was stunned to see a few Americans appear in the infirmary on the 2nd of May. They smiled, handed out chewing gum, and departed without a word. Nathan Rozenblum saw the Americans arrive in the camp at Ebensee on May 6 and declare “ You are free!” He wondered, “free of what? Of dying of hunger?” Then the tanks left, and abandoned him in the camp. They didn’t return for three days.
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