CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Belsen and a nightmare vision we must never turn away from
Return To Belsen
A Country Life For Half The Price
At a time when the news is so harsh, a documentary to commemorate the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen made especially difficult viewing.
Jonathan Dimbleby’s grim testament Return To Belsen (ITV) included footage filmed by Allied soldiers, of diseased and starved bodies thrown into mass graves, that was the very definition of a nightmare vision.
The hour-long programme was also a tribute to Dimbleby’s father, Richard — the first British journalist to report on the horror of the camps. His initial radio report was so graphic and distressing that BBC bosses baulked and tried to suppress it — until Dimbleby threatened to resign.
Camp survivor Tomi Reichental is pictured at the memorial site in Return to Belsen
The accounts of sadism by the SS guards, and squalor beyond description in the overcrowded dormitory huts, shock and nauseate us now. How they must have seemed in 1945, to an audience that had never dreamed of the horrors of the Holocaust, is difficult to imagine.
The daughter of one survivor who grew up in Israel said that for decades her mother had been unable to talk of the ordeal, because no one wanted to hear about it.
The facts seemed incredible to anyone who had not experienced it for themselves . . . and those who were desperate to forget. ‘If I talk,’ her mother would say, ‘I won’t be able to keep on living. The memories will kill me.’
One of the British soldiers first on the scene after the Nazi guards fled from the camp, Ian Forsyth, said those memories still woke him up at night. He was appalled that even kindness could be fatal to the malnourished survivors: when troops pressed food upon them, the sudden surge of calories often stopped their hearts.
‘It haunts me,’ he said, red-eyed. ‘I can’t get rid of it.’
After three-quarters of a century, there are few witnesses left to tell the story. The remarkable Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 94, the cellist who lived through Auschwitz before being marched to Belsen in the last months of the war, stubbornly refuses to let the memories become stifled.
By speaking of what she saw, she does her utmost to prevent these catastrophic crimes from being repeated. We owe her and fellow survivors, as well as the brave Army veterans, an immense debt of gratitude.
When British officers grasped the scale of mass murder at Belsen, they rounded up local mayors and German dignitaries, and made them stand at the edge of the burial pits to see the carnage that had been wrought while they diverted their eyes.
They were forced to look. Difficult as it is, especially now, we must force ourselves to look too. The alternative is to turn our backs on the world, the solution that Kate Humble was offering in A Country Life For Half The Price (C5). It’s tempting, but it isn’t the answer.
Kate joined parents Alan and Jen, who were selling their cramped £220,000 terraced house in Exeter and carting their possessions in a second-hand horse-box 700 miles to Shetland. Their new home on an exposed hillside looked like a derelict croft, but it did have superb views across the bay and the most northerly stretch of the North Sea.
Next stop, Arctic Circle.
Breadwinner Jen had given up her job in sales, and it wasn’t completely clear how the family planned to make ends meet —something about tourism and turning the horse-box into a writers’ retreat.
Faced with coronavirus and everything else, we can all fantasise about running away.
It takes more courage to emulate the Belsen survivors, and stare down life’s terrors without flinching.