The Students of Belsen
Warning: Graphic Content Below
With thanks to Barts Health Museums and Archives & the Kyndt family
As the end of the Second World War slowly approached, the people of Europe were left facing the effects of a war which had ravaged the Continent for over five years. If however, people had thought the end of the war would bring an end to the suffering, they would be sorely mistaken. The increasing desperation of the Nazi Government resulted in them committing atrocity after atrocity at an escalating rate; in their eyes, if they couldn’t win, then no-one should.
Early in April 1945, the British Red Cross and the War Office put out a notice seeking twelve medical students from each Medical School in London to volunteer to fight one of these atrocities - the blockade and subsequent famine that had affected the population of the Netherlands. The response was astounding with so many students applying that they had to introduce a ballot system to narrow it down to the final students in the party. Of the hundred students chosen, twelve volunteers were from The London Hospital Medical College, and nine were from St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College.
Most of the medical students who volunteered from Medical Schools across London were in their fourth year of study
The chosen students, after being inoculated against a variety of diseases’ and being issued their uniform, were told to meet at the Headquarters of the British Red Cross. It was here, just as the first part of their journey was about to begin, they were told of a new destination – Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.
“The Germans made a feeble and cynical attempt to curb the epidemic, but when the camp was about to be overrun they asked for a truce, notifying our Medical Corps that there was typhus in the camp, and that it had been beyond their powers to control it. Whether this was by accident or design was not certain, but in any case the truce was granted and fighting was forbidden in the Belsen Area.”
Thomas Gibson, a student from The London, writing in The London Hospital Gazette.
What was Belsen-Bergen Concentration Camp?
Belsen was a concentration camp deep in the Saxony region of Germany. Formerly a military training camp, the onset of the Second World War saw some of the huts being used to hold prisoners of war from Belgium, France and Poland and eventually, as the war advanced, from the Soviet Union. In 1943, part of the camp was taken over by the German SS, at which point it became a concentration camp divided into subsections for Hungarians, Polish Jews, Neutrals and Dutch Jews.
Conditions in the camp severely deteriorated as the war turned against the Axis Powers, with the advance of the Russian Army resulting in concentration camps in Eastern Europe being evacuated with at least 85,000 people being transported to Bergen in this time. The rapid increase in numbers, from around 7,300 people in July 1944, to 67,000 people upon its liberation resulted in the opportune overcrowded conditions for a variety of diseases to spread; typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid and dysentery, along with malnutrition to name a few. As the British and Canadian Forces approached, the camp was handed over by German Forces, who had lost control of a deadly typhus epidemic.
Upon arrival, the students were faced with the gravity of the task ahead. Conditions, while having marginally increased in the two weeks the camp had been liberated, were still horrific. The newly assigned Senior Medical Officer of the camp wrote in his report that it “was full of emaciated and apathetic scarecrows – without beds or blankets and some completely naked. The females are worse than the males and most have only filthy rags. The dead are lying all over the camp and in piles outside those blocks, miscalled hospitals, housing the worst of the sick. There are approximately 3,000 corpses in varying states of decomposition. There is no sanitation, but there are pits, some with birch rails. From apathy, or weakness, most defecate in the huts or anywhere.”
“The conditions in these huts were never to be forgotten. We who were there cannot allow such appalling inhumanity of man to man to be erased from the conscious of all people, either because they do not believe or do not wish to believe. We saw it, and it was irrefutably worse that we could possibly have imagined in our wildest dreams.”
Thomas Gibson, a student from The London, writing in The London Hospital Gazette.
Of the two hundred huts in total, students were placed in charge of one or two huts each, often in pairs. Their task was unenviable, supervising the removal of the dead and cleaning of the huts, in an effort to prevent the spread of typhus and reduce the death count - approximately 500 a day. Perhaps even more difficult was managing the refeeding of a severely malnourished population in the camp. Refeeding syndrome had yet to be well understood, and indeed reports from this camp were some of the earliest to describe refeeding syndrome. Immediately after the liberation of the camp, the British Army had fed inmates full Army rations; the resulting electrolyte imbalance in inmates was deadly with an estimated 2,000 people to have died in these first two days.
Following their arrival, students were assigned to the cookhouse to carry out new suggestions as well as distribute glucose solution and “comforts” such as chocolate and cigarettes. Unsurprisingly due to the poor treatment they had received, many of those held were focused on their own welfare ahead of everyone else’s, often stealing supplies and food from those who were weaker. One student, Charles Kyndt, noted that “from the very beginning of my work amongst these people I had to fight against their selfish attitude to their neighbours”. This behaviour hampered efforts to treat those in the worst conditions and it took a great deal of time and persistence for students to be able to gain the trust of their charges and truly help those in their care.
Slowly but surely, the death rate steadily fell and people were returning to a state in which they could make the journey back to whatever remained of their homes and communities. For reasons of sanitation, but possibly also of symbolism, the huts were burned and dynamited one by one until Belsen concentration camp was no more. There is no doubt however, that it remained in the collective minds of students long after they returned home, the students who would go on to be some of the first to practice in our newly formed National Health Service. As student Thomas Gibson put it so eloquently, “Thus Belsen, with all that it stood for, came to an end. But although it has ceased to exist materially, it will never be forgotten in the minds of those who were there, in whatever capacity. We know the ideology of the people who were responsible for Belsen Camp. We must never forget their creed and we must always fight against it.”
It is perhaps hard for us, as students currently at Barts and The London, to be able to contemplate the mood and actions of these students at this time and see how it might apply to us. I however, think that nothing could be more relevant. We pride ourselves in the idea that here, at Barts and The London, we learn something more than can be taught in any book. We learn that one’s character is not only judged by how well we do on a test, but in how much we do for the people and community around us, regardless of colour or creed or tongue or gender. And we learn, in the words of The London Hospital Medical College, that as we are human, nothing of human concern is foreign to us.
