Informant38

a dance at Belsen and other improvisations

Belsen was in strange, beautiful country of great melancholy: an expanse of heath, with silver birches, large regular ponds, and giant rocks covered with lichen; it fostered a whole German sensibility. The camp itself had initially been conceived of in distant peacetime as a place where, in the victorious war to come, young heroes, returning from the front for a few days, might be pampered, their courage rewarded, and their worst nightmares soothed in the arms of young girls; from this original conception there remained a number of small thatched cottages standing on sandy islands in the ponds...
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Ten days later, I arrived with my trucks, while, back in Bevensen, a group of citizens chosen by the burgomaster were putting the final touches to the place of entertainment. The Belsen survivors who were pronounced fit were put into clean clothes, and lined up, though for exactly what they had no idea. However, as soon as they saw my convoy, they knew. All talk of the war being over was nonsense, and here were the trucks to take them on the first lap of their journey to death. They panicked, they would not get into the trucks.
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They bared the left arm up to the elbow, and exposed a row of numbers tattooed in capillary violet, which were to have been their one-way tickets for the transports. The soldiers, who had no idea what they were looking at, stared meaninglessly, the women redoubled their explanations until one soldier or perhaps more, thinking that this was ill-disguised flirtation, pulled the woman he was talking to onto the dance floor. I do not know what happened next, but within moments a fight had broken out. One woman was hitting a soldier on the head with her handbag, and I saw one of the soldiers, who was not to be baulked of his dance, pulled down onto the floor, as he held the tattooed wrist of the woman he still saw as his partner. The musicians played louder and faster, but it fell to me to call the whole thing off, to get the soldiers into the trucks, and to drive back as fast as we could, but whether we drove through the dark, or whether it was still light as I believe to be the case, I cannot exactly remember....

�Richard Wollheim/London Review of Books Dec.04.03