Behind the simple lines is a harrowing darkness. Did he
think of it much in his later years, perhaps quietly in a corner
at one of those dinner parties in the Cotswolds as Bernard
opened a bottle of wine for guests? Or did he manage to
put the war aside, cast adrift from the rest of his life?
rate until a short time ago was still in figures
which would probably have seemed incredible
in pre-war Europe.
The concentration camp itself, which we call
Camp I, is cleared out now, and tomorrow evening
we are to have a ceremonial burning of the last few
huts, which will perish with a Nazi flag at half-mast
in the midst.’
Around half the camp’s inmates were still sick,
he reported, while electricity and dignity was slowly
being restored. The letter is matter-of-fact: there are
no wry jokes as in the earlier letter, but neither is
this a cry of anguish on entering a place most would
consider hell on earth. It was probably natural
to skirt over such sentiments when writing to his
parents, who would have been distressed if he had
seemed overly shaken, and perhaps he also realised
that forging a sense of normality again wouldn’t be
helped by dwelling on the nightmares that had just
been experienced.
For me, the straightforwardness of the letter is
its most haunting aspect. Bill saw the effects of the
Nazi regime first-hand, but even then he had not
experienced them himself. The human mind is
capable of remarkable feats of adapting. His language
is vivid and condemnatory but by now the camp
was already ‘notorious’ in the eyes of the world.
The atrocities at Belsen seem to have been within
the realms of what he had expected – or at least had
been rapidly ordered to be such in his mind. Perhaps
Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’
can apply to the witnessing of it as much as to its
execution. After six long years of war, many Britons
were shocked by the extent of the Nazis’ cruelty
when they saw news footage of the camps, but they
knew such things had happened, and that the Nazis
were evil. Indeed, six years of being told that they
were fighting the greatest evil to face the world
probably meant that the effect was dulled for some:
it was a matter of faith, and might have been more
shocking to Bill if he had entered a camp that had
treated its inmates with a shred of human dignity
instead of deliberately leaving them to die.
Behind the simple lines is a harrowing darkness.
Did he think of it much in his later years, perhaps
quietly in a corner at one of those dinner parties
in the Cotswolds as Bernard opened a bottle of
wine for guests? Or did he manage to put the
war aside, cast adrift from the rest of his life?
For me, the true power of Bill’s story is its
unknowability. In reading about his eventful,
fascinating life, I long to know more – to have
known him, and what he felt and thought. But an
obituary is merely an outline of someone’s life, and
one that comes too late to be acted on in that way.
I often come across people who I wish I had sought
out to interview or simply talk to while they were
still alive – no more than here. In the absence of
knowing more, though, and in the spirit of what
he left behind, all I can do is be thankful others
were also interested in his life, and offer a toast
to him once more: so here’s to Bill.
.
The Wykeham Journal 2018 31