Letter written by Helen Oglethorpe (extract) dated 28 May 1945
We left Holland on April 29th and came up to the Belsen Concentration Camp. It has been truly terrible and I never really believed what the newspapers told us but it was even worse than that. The first few weeks we spent clearing out all the SS and Hungarian troops’ barracks and turning them into hospitals and cleaning out the actual Concentration Camp. There were 52,000 living and 10,000 unburied dead in an area of about 1 sq. mile. One can’t imagine it unless one has seen it. A further 13,000 died on our hands in the next three or four weeks. We had medical students from all the London hospitals working in the Concentration Camp picking out the people who might live and trying to clean up a bit. They did a marvellous job and are leaving to go back soon. Each internee on leaving the Concentration Camp went through the Human Laundry where they were scrubbed from head to foot and de-loused and all clothes burnt. The result was that we had thousands of naked people and in the warm weather, the place was an absolute nudist colony, only one hardly thought of the people as human as they are such scraps of humanity. It must have been a bit of a shock for our nursing orderlies as a lot of them were in charge of women’s wards!
It has been an awful job but we are more or less organised. There have been a lot of units here, RA’s, RE’s and RAOC and also 32nd CCS (first here), 11th FDS, then us, and then the 163 Field Ambulance and the 35th CCS. Not many units when you think that we have 15,000 patients and about 10 to 15,000 people who are considered convalescent and more or less able to look after themselves.
We are commandeering German MO’s and nurses and nursing orderlies now to do all the work under our supervision. Typhus is going down rapidly and also the death rate now is negligible. I shan’t ever forget this nightmare. But those other units working with us have had some of the nicest people we’ve met which has been some compensation. There is no Physiotherapy, of course, as two of us couldn’t possibly contemplate 15,000 patients!! We were, after a day or two put into the Hospital Office, as when we arrived our Registrar, our CO, our Company Officer, our Chief Clerk and hoards of others, nearly all our administrative staff were on UK leave, so Joan (Rudman CSP) became the Registrar and I the Chief Clerk, and we really, literally the two of us, plus one corporal organised the whole show. But now they are all back we are slipping out gradually. The 29th BGH (1800-2000 beds) has arrived and we very much hope they will eventually take over, and then what!! I’m afraid we’ll be sent to the Far East.