After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 (review)

On April 15, 1945, British tanks rumbled up to the barbed wire fence surrounding the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. The soldiers climbed out of their tanks, walked up to the wire, and peered through it. One by one, they began to vomit. The overpowering stench of countless corpses rotting in the sun, and the ghastly sight of skeletal survivors was an unimaginable experience even for these battle-hardened veterans. They were the first Allied eyewitnesses to what later became known as the Holocaust.

After Daybreak is a vivid, gripping account of what happened after the British opened the gates of Bergen-Belsen. Never before had an army encountered such a catastrophic medical emergency. Bergen-Belsen was, in effect, a small city of 60,000 brutalized, starving, and typhus-ridden inhabitants. How the British doctors, nurses, medical students, clergymen, and other volunteers struggled to save the lives of the survivors is the focus of Ben Shephard’s superb book. Shephard is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, the preeminent historian of military psychiatry, and the author of the magisterial A War of Nerves (Harvard University Press, 2001). Letters, diaries, interviews, and military documents provided Shephard with the raw material to reconstruct how the British coped with this unprecedented medical crisis in the days and weeks following the liberation of the camp. The story is one of trial, error, and eventual success.

Approximately 14,000 inmates died after liberation, and about 2,000 perished after receiving food far too rich for them to digest. Medical personnel failed to realize that ravenous bodies adapted to starvation conditions cannot initially withstand a normal diet. One of the most heart-rending tasks was deciding who would get a chance to live and who would be left to die. Resources were limited, and not everyone could be saved. Nightly staff meetings, fortified by alcohol, kept the exhausted doctors sane and focused on their mission. After several weeks, the situation began to improve, and the mortality rate declined. As more survivors regained their health, glimmers of normal life began to emerge. Inmates obtained musical instruments and held concerts and dances. One Red Cross relief worker wrote home saying that “Belsen is very gay, parties and internee concerts every night.”

One of the most remarkable and bizarre episodes occurred when a large shipment of lipstick mysteriously arrived at the camp. The overworked doctors were initially annoyed because they were expecting desperately needed medical supplies. But as it turned out, the lipstick had a profoundly positive effect on the female survivors. Sending the lipstick, as one colonel recalled, was an “action of genius, of sheer unadulterated brilliance.” Its distribution, he said, “had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

Shephard’s narrative skill and his mastery of the primary sources, especially the personal accounts of the survivors and the doctors, bring this remarkable story to life. Few of the details, of course, are as uplifting as the lipstick episode or the accounts of dances and concerts. Most are graphic depictions of the consequences of Nazi brutality: “scenes of indescribable horror, filth, squalor, and disease,” as one of the medical students put it.

The British military wasted no time in filming the horrific consequences of Nazi brutality and publicizing it widely. Here was undeniable evidence of Hitler’s evil regime, and clear justification for Allied actions against Germany. Footage shot at Bergen-Belsen can be seen today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Shephard also discusses the postwar psychiatric opinions regarding the mental status of the survivors. Some experts emphasized the lasting psychic damage—nightmares, survivor guilt, anxiety, and depression. Others emphasized the resilience of those resettling in Israel and elsewhere. Part of the explanation for diverse clinical outcomes may lie in the diversity of experiences that...