The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson

care in order that the available means may be applied to those who have some prospect of recovery.
    Making such decisions over life and death was difficult emotionally as well as practically, and it is easy to see why many of the liberators were haunted for years by what they had seen and done at Belsen. At the same time, for those survivors who witnessed such choices being made about family members and comrades, it was easy to feel that not enough was done. Although the liberation of Belsen has long been proclaimed as one of the great triumphs of British forces in World War II, some commentators have recently pointed to serious shortcomings in the provision of medical aid. Notably, the deaths of 14,000 people – most of them Jewish – in the month after the liberation can be cited as evidence of failure on a grand scale. While the critics maintain that the number of deaths could have been reduced if the British army had allowed Jewish relief agencies into the camp, half of these deaths occurred in the first terrible week, before any teams of volunteers were able to arrive. However, the anti-Semitism evident among sections of the British government and the British military explains why some Jewish community leaders at the time felt that there had been deliberate discrimination. Also, there were indeed problems with the delivery of medical services, caused by confusion in the military chain of command as well as the fact that the troops who arrived at Belsen were not trained to deal with a humanitarian crisis. Shortage of transport and the camp’s location in the middle of a battle zone did not help.
    Despite these circumstances, over five intense weeks beginning in mid-April, a massive relief operation was mounted by a small number of military medical officers and soldiers, together with volunteers from a range of agencies, backed up by a hundred young London medical students. It was a struggle waged on two fronts. As one contingent toiled in the original Belsen camp to provide water and food and sanitation, and to get the dead buried as quickly as possible, the other contingent supervised the creation of an emergency hospital comprised of 13,500 beds at Belsen Camp II. By 21 May, some 29,000 survivors had been ferried by field ambulance to the former German army barracks, where they were dusted with DDT and housed in what became, for a couple of months, the largest hospital in Europe.
    It is on my second trip to Belsen that I am given the privilege of visiting the place that was originally built as a Panzer Training School, which was subsequently transformed into a Displaced Persons Camp and which finally became the British army base that is currently the home of the battalion known as the Desert Rats. As with the place that I now think of as ‘the other Belsen’, this landscape has memories stacked, layer upon layer.
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    If the site that is now the Memorial has no Disneyland-style recreations, Hohne Camp is like a vast Wehrmacht theme park, a life-size model of a vintage 1930s German barracks. Despite the modern vehicles on the roads and the British Tommies in the canteen, where I am taken for lunch by the hospitable Welsh civilian who is the army’s assistant liaison officer, I feel as if I have fallen into a time warp.
    I have read that, in the time of the Reich, this kaserne housed 15,000 troops, and as I am driven around the base I am rendered speechless both by the sheer size of the place and by the way everything seems to be endlessly replicated. Here, the main unit of design consists of a square parade area enclosed on three sides by five two-storey blocks of living quarters; these complexes are set up and down the wide streets of the barracks in a dizzying array of mirror images. It was these ‘squares’ that in April/May 1945 were converted into the emergency hospital, with beds (requisitioned from local civilians, sometimes at gunpoint) ranged in rows out in the open and also inside