Joy W. Trindles/Taverner

'Extract from a letter:

Whilst running a hospital in Belgium our colonel told us we were being flown to this concentration camp. We had never flown before, but were put in a Dakota - a frightening experience - and then trucked to Belsen. It was so terrible we cried ourselves to sleep for many nights in our tents two miles away. We had been through the war but this was something so terrible that it took some time for us to come to terms with what we saw...

Skeletons, naked, just standing about. Bodies everywhere. Some babies - still just about alive. We erected a tent and the sister collected the babies and put them in the tent. We entered a big building - the SS officers' quarters. Our orderlies took stretchers and collected any bodies that showed signs of life. We sent our colonel and some soldiers out to look for factories or shops to get clothes, sheets and blankets. When our troops went by, German women spat at them.

One of our sergeants took over a building and put up a big notice that said 'Harrods'. Our sense of humour managed to survive. I had nightmares for many years - my husband would wake me up and say I was crying again. After all these years I managed to live with my memories and the nightmares have stopped. We had no-one to talk to, we just had to keep going. Two of our sisters started drinking heavily and were sent home. I don't really know how we survived - we all supported each other and cried every night with our arms around each other.

There were Poles and French there. Most of them died. A French woman came with a French officer to get her husband. They took him away, hoping to get him back to France - he was dying and I knew he would never make it. I was there for nine weeks. Bodies were collected by trucks every day. We had a board outside and we wrote the number of bodies to be collected. Huge burial pits were dug and hundreds of bodies were put there. We saw some Germans who were PoWs - they were working on the burial grounds and we were disgusted at the way they threw the bodies in. We told the colonel and finally they began to lower the bodies in more gently. Our padre would go along and pray over each truckload.

We thought we had seen it all.
Our cheeks bloomed like peaches,
Bright eyes, Quick light movement.
Flashes of scarlet, snow white caps,

We thought we had seen it all.

The London Blitz, bombs, fires, headless corpses,
Screaming children: Yankee Doodle Dandy!

We thought we had seen it all.

Scabies, Lice, and Impetigo, T.B., Polio
and unmentionable V.D.

We thought we had seen it all.

Then France.
Day followed night and then another day
Of mangled broken boys.
Irish, Welsh and Scots
Jerries, Poles and French -
They cried in many tongues as needles long and sharp
Advanced.
Their blood ran very red and so they died.

We thought we had seen it all.

Our souls shrank deep and deeper still,
Until with nowhere else to go, soft hearts
Hardened and cocooned themselves.
Laughter broke like glass over fields and orchards
And from tent to tent.
We tried; we really tried, but some they died.

We thought we had seen it all.

Until Belsen

There are no words to speak.
We hid within our souls, deep and silent.
We clung together trying to understand,
The smell pervaded the mind and the sights and sounds
Reached those souls buried deep within and for so long
Encased in rock.
Bitter, scalding tears melted the rock
Our hearts were broken.

We had seen it all