The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson Page B

symbolic of the renewal of life that came in April 1945 with the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which I have come to commemorate. Today I am with a busload of Belsen survivors and younger family members of survivors, making a tour of the DP camp as a kind of prologue to the official ceremonies of the seventieth anniversary, which will happen in two days’ time. Despite the illustriousness of my companions, for safety reasons the gates to the hospital are locked, and we all stand at the barrier, poking our cameras through the bars to take our snaps. Suddenly a woman cries out, ‘ All the children ! All the children born here, stand in front of the gates !’
    There are five of them – three men and two women. All around my own age, or perhaps a year or so older, they were born in the Glyn Hughes Hospital between 1945 and 1950, and as they line up now for a photo opportunity, camera shutters click and click again. After the Holocaust, every new life was especially precious, and today everyone wants a picture of these children who were born against the odds.
    Despite the many differences between the backgrounds of these survivor-children and myself, the thing we have in common is that we are all engaged on a quest to find our pasts; like me, they obviously crave information – any fragment of information, no matter how small. So when finally the cameras are put away and the group is disassembling, I go up to one of the five and tentatively ask, ‘Would you like to see a photo of some babies in the hospital?’ I take out of my bag an A3 photocopy of a spread from the Nursing Mirror magazine dated April 1946, showing a montage of scenes inside the Glyn Hughes Hospital, including one of an Australian doctor, Phyllis Tewsley, with half a dozen newborn babies in the nursery.
    Would they like to see it ! Not only the five who were born here but also everyone in earshot crowds around the photocopied page – and me. Where did this come from? How did I happen to have it? Indeed: who am I?
    I point to one of the other photos, which shows my father, posed as if he is discussing some important medical matter with the matron, and I explain my connection with this uniformed bureaucrat. Immediately, the woman whom I think of as the organiser starts arranging the five ‘children’ in front of the hospital gates again, but this time with me in the middle, holding the photomontage. It would be unbearably rude to jump out of shot but, as cameras snap, I feel invidious, ashamed. If they had known Dr Wheatley, I find myself thinking, they would not have been so quick to include me.
    Although the records of his administration make it clear that my father ran the hospital very efficiently, there was a problem with his attitude towards the people in his care. A month or so after he took over the role of superintendent, a French doctor who was in charge of the Medical Inspection rooms wrote a comprehensive report on the camp, in which he stated that ‘Dr W’ had a ‘more correct and friendly manner’ than his predecessor, but ‘unfortunately it does not seem that he has a better understanding of the state of mind ( états d’esprits ) and the needs of the DPs’. Even more damningly, the UNRRA archives contain a fragment of text from an article published in late 1945 in an American Jewish weekly newspaper, which (in the translation provided from the original German) declared that ‘the UNRRA hospital is under direction of an Englishman Whittley, who only employs former German doctors and nurses who were not quite innocent of the big destruction work’.
    Whatever truth there is to this allegation about the culpability of his medical team, it is the case that there were seven German doctors (some of them former Wehrmacht officers) and 131 German nurses working at the Glyn Hughes Hospital in my father’s time, and there is evidence that he was both