From the BBC:
“Belsen 1945: Remembering the
medical students who saved lives”
(Students from Guy's hospital
just before they left for Belsen)
"It deeply affected him and
his trust in human nature," says Anne Stephenson of her father John
Reynolds, one of 95 London medical students who arrived at the notorious Belsen
concentration camp in May 1945 to help care for survivors wracked by disease
and starvation. The camp had been
captured on 15 April by British troops who had no idea of the horrors they
would find inside when the first tank pushed open the gates. For the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, the first
broadcaster to enter the camp, it was "the world of a nightmare". There
were 43,000 prisoners still alive, about two-thirds of them women, many so weak
from starvation and disease they were unable to move from the huts where they
were held and they were dying at a rate of about 500 a day. The medical students, average age 21, were
volunteers, recruited initially to help care for starving Dutch children but
who found, just before they were due to travel, their destination had been
changed to Belsen. By the time they
arrived at the beginning of May, most of the bodies had been removed but
thousands of sick and dying people still languished in the huts. "People in all stages of disease. Many
were dead. Practically all were emaciated," John Reynolds, then a
23-year-old student at St Thomas's medical school, wrote later. "Nearly all the internees had violent
colic or diarrhoea." They were suffering from a range of diseases
including cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, sores, boils and gangrene. "The people themselves were, on the
whole, hopelessly filthy with no sense of decency or pride in themselves,
treating the dead as furniture and their beds as latrines." He carried these experiences with him for the
rest of his life, says Anne, herself a doctor and a member of the academic
staff at King's College Medical School of which St Thomas's is now part. "I remember once, we were all sitting
having dinner and he suddenly said: 'I remember a blonde woman and they shot
her in the leg. They shot her in the leg.' "He had post-traumatic stress disorder,
honestly. He had terrible PTSD that was never treated." Led by senior
military medical staff, the students helped halve the death rate within a month.
It tested both their medical skills and
their personal stamina to an unimaginable degree, according to Westminster
student Michael Hargrave, in his diary.
A major puzzle was what to feed
the internees.: British army rations
were indigestible to starving people and could kill them, a concoction called
Bengal Famine Mix, was unpalatably sweet, and intravenous feeding threw some,
who feared fatal injections, into panic. Ultimately, diluted soup and glucose drinks
worked best.
Deaths overnight: In
pairs, the medical students were allocated to huts where each morning they
would separate the living from those who had died overnight. "The bodies
are dragged out by those who can walk and then the Wehrmacht load them on to
massive lorry trailers, guarded all the while, and bury them in immense
graves," wrote Guy's student John Kilby in a letter to his mother. Those needing medical help were gradually
transferred to a makeshift hospital for 7,000 housed in a military barracks
camp. John Reynolds recounts how the
huts were burned down one-by-one until only one was left. On 21 May 1945
"an official ceremony of the burning of this last hut was attended by all
those who worked in the camp... a volley was fired, the Union Jack unfurled and
then the hut was burned to the ground by flamethrowers." A week later, the students' month at Belsen
was over and they were sent back to their medical schools. "These days, of course, you would have a
debrief and you'd have post-traumatic stress disorder counselling," says
Prof Stephen Challacombe, a professor of oral medicine at King's and a medical
historian. "It was so stark, just, 'Give
up your uniforms, you're back in civilian life'." Of the 95, despite being inoculated, two
returned with tuberculosis and seven with typhus. DDT was used liberally to kill lice and Anne
Stephenson says her father always wondered whether the cancers he suffered in
later life were connected with the pesticide. In their later careers as doctors and
academics "all the reports, to a person, talk about how magnificent they
were", says Prof Challacombe who has delivered a series of lectures on
their story. This year, to mark the 75th anniversary of their endeavour, King's
College Medical School, which, as well as St Thomas's, also includes Guy's, and
accounts for 34 of the 95 students, is erecting plaques to their memory. "When they were asked to go, they could
never have imagined what they would walk into and do," says Prof
Challacombe, Sometimes audience members
bring their parents' letters and diaries from the period, among them Gilly
Kenny and Jenny Meade whose fathers, John and Bernard, were among the King's
College contingent and remained lifelong friends. Gilly says it was after her father's death
when "we had to clear out all sorts of papers and we came across some that
related to his time in Belsen... that it became a bit clearer". She found the lecture "very emotional...
I learned a lot". Prof Challacombe
believes the most difficult time for the students was when the patients were
transferred from the huts into the hospital. "There is a point at which
numbers and bodies turn into real people... suddenly individuals in beds as
opposed to a mass of individuals lying on a floor... "They did feel it when those patients
that they'd been looking after, trying so hard, then died, I think that would
have affected them." He hopes modern day medical students will take a
message from the story. "I think understanding their sacrifice,
understanding their willingness to get involved and to contribute is a real
hallmark of medicine. "I think
there's a lesson for me in helping people to understand you can attain those
pinnacles and you can contribute, everybody can contribute however insecure
they feel at the time."
^ 75 years ago these medical
students went to the liberated Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany (where
Anne Frank died) to help save the survivors from the German Holocaust. Today
medical students are going to New York City to help save people from Covid-19. You
can’t say that something that happened decades ago doesn’t fit into today’s
society. ^
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