大象传媒

This story was recorded and posted by Mark Jeffers, with permission from the author. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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We were shipped out and eventually landed in Belgium where there had been a big mistake in the intelligence. There was a large German occupancy and a battalion of officer trainees. We went through Holland where we were constantly fighting from day to day. We fought in the Battle of Walcheron which was a Dutch island blocking the allies access to Antwerp. At one stage I captured a German officer who turned out to be their chief engineer, who was like gold to us. The Germans had dropped about twenty - forty thousand mines and there were no maps for them. In the end the British Navy blew a hole in the Dyke which flooded the area the Germans had occupied. I took the soldier I had captured back to headquarters but he just kept telling us that there were no maps. He wasn鈥檛 like gold to us after all!

My division advanced into West Germany towards Bremen. We went past Bremen and about ten miles north we were then ordered to go on to Magdeberg. About twenty miles outside Bremen we came to a concentration camp, Sandbostel. There were about one hundred to two hundred camps in total across Germany and this was not one of the big execution camps. A large part of the area was an out camp of the Belsen camp but it was not set up for execution. There were enough huts to accommodate approximately one thousand people. When we arrived we liberated the camp. One of our duties was to recruit German girls above the age of fourteen from the surrounding villages all around the countryside. They had to wash and shave the men in the camp. The engineers set up a 鈥淗uman Laundry鈥� as we called it and the men were disinfected. The young German girls could not believe the horrible things that the German Army had done to these men. The men had all the hair shaved from their bodies and they were given food and two blankets each; one to sleep on and one to wear.

Many of the huts the men were housed in had been burnt but there were many strong ones in good condition. The huts were disinfected and the beds had to be lowered so that the men could get into them.

There were many corpses lying around the place. Many of the people couldn鈥檛 eat the food we gave them. They kept vomiting. I went round the camp one day with the Head Doctor, Lt Col Bearn Royal Army Medical Core (RAMC) and we came to a hut full of people, about thirty. The hut had been cleaned up and disinfected and was more presentable. But the people inside it could not eat any of the food that they were given because they had been starved for so long. Many of the men were crying and most didn鈥檛 know that they were going to die. The Doctor couldn鈥檛 stand it at all. He told me that all the people in that hut were going to die, he was sure of it, and he couldn鈥檛 do anything about it.

While walking through one hut a man grabbed my boot and kept shouting 鈥淔ree! Free!鈥� He was a lecturer from Holland who had been sent to the camp for listening to 大象传媒 Radio. He had been there for eighteen months and he couldn鈥檛 believe that he was free now.

Eventually, after a couple of weeks pre-digested food and paper sheets arrived, but no clothes arrived before I left.

Trying to describe the atrocity that was witnessed at camps like these is impossible. All the above text gives no idea of the experienced reality of the whole thing.
No one can ever describe the feel and the smell of a concentration camp. No film comes close to describing the atmosphere of it and experiencing it first hand. It is unbelievable how low human beings can sink towards their fellow man. How they can be so cruel but also how they can plan the cruelty. The camp had a strict timetable operating through it bringing more and more people in.

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