Armageddon - Max Hastings [368]
Tareczynski spoke with the detachment of a man whose sensibilities had been dulled by six years of his own sufferings. The soldiers of liberating armies were shocked beyond reason by the Nazis’ vast monuments to human savagery and tragedy, which scarred Germany from end to end.
When Zinaida Mikhailova saw the first Soviet soldiers walk into her compound at Ravensbrück, she and some of the other Russian women burst into tears and tried to embrace them. The Red Army men pushed away the ragged skeletons in revulsion. Zinaida had been in the camp for three years. Some of her fellow inmates were catatonic. “Quite a few simply could not understand the meaning of liberation at all,” she said. “Our minds were not very well.” Twenty-three thousand women survived. At Ravensbrück alone, some 115,000 prisoners had died during the previous two years, including Anne Frank and the British agent Violette Szabo.
When Veta Kogakevich was liberated by the Red Army from her camp in Poland, she believed herself to be about seven years old. She was sent to an orphanage in Novgorod, where she was presented with a birthday, arbitrarily selected as 28 October. It was twenty years before she was able to discover any clues about her own background, since all documentation about her origins in Belorussia had been destroyed. She was the youngest survivor of her camp.
The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division liberated Jerzy Herszburg’s concentration camp at Wöbbelin on 2 May. “We felt too exhausted to celebrate in any jubilant way,” he observed, but one of his friends fulfilled an old, old promise, to kiss the feet of the first Allied soldier he saw. Afterwards, said Herszburg, as they strove to come to terms with the miracle of their own survival and the nightmare they had experienced, “I believed that we were fortunate that there were no psychologists or social workers with us, to help sort out our problems.”
Lieutenant Dorothy Beavers was one of a U.S. Army medical team dispatched to Ebensee. “Nothing had prepared us for the camps,” she said. To their amazement, many of the inmates spoke English. These were highly educated Hungarian Jewish girls, reduced by lice and starvation to the last waystation before death. When a photographer from Life magazine appeared, one of them ran away into a field. “Look at me,” she sobbed to Dorothy. “I’m twenty years old, and no man will ever want me now.” It was Edith Gabor. Many of her fellow prisoners were suffering from tuberculosis, and all had ulcers. As the nurses gently bathed them and treated their hurts, Dorothy Beavers was astonished to hear them describing pre-war trips to London, visits to the British Museum. “We discussed Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven—and the food we’d prepare for the Jewish holidays.” The nurse spent six weeks at Ebensee, administering plasma to men and women at the last extremities of life, carefully weaning them on to a liquid diet. “It was the greatest shock of my life, to see hay ladders jammed with bodies. It got to us all. After two weeks, we were just sitting around staring into space.” Medical teams began to arrive at the camp, to take away their own nationals. An Italian doctor turned up one day and asked: “Any Italians here?” “Yeah, one guy,” came back the answer, “but he’s dying.” “If he is going to die,” said the doctor passionately, “he is going to die with us.”
Edith Gabor was photographed at Ebensee by Life. She met Clark Gable, though she was made to promise that she would not say who he was, for fear of causing a riot among the other prisoners. Many months later, she went home to Budapest. She found her family’s apartment in the hands of hostile strangers who demanded, “Who are you?,” then closed the door on her for ever. The Gabors had lost everything, including the lives of most of the family. By a miracle, Edith discovered her eight-year-old brother Georg living as a scavenger on the streets nearby. She learned that their