Things are not alwaays what they seem
An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett
Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate
Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
“I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men
and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a
barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere,
some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had
fallen.
It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to
their assistance.
“One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect.
(Story continued in comments )
6 Comments
David,You’re obviously still in the post Christmas / New Year, ‘reflective phase’ – however, good on ya for a couple of intelligent postings.I trust there’ll be lot more of this sort of thing in Idealog……Cheers and all the best for ’06!
It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it. One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance.I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity”Source: Imperial War museumThis isn’t copy writing. But this year I’d like to suggest a return to copy writing. Vivid, well told stories that connect with people.I remember an op-ed piece in Campaign (Oct ’86 – why do short term memories elude me, but I remember this kind of detrititus?) by John Webster, who’s campaign for the reconstituted Cadbury mashed potatoes topped Campaign magazine’s list of favourites…but I digress, the short article suggested that, instead of effected (and affected) commercials produced by art directors, giddy with the possibility of new technology, advertising should look to what rates on TV – at the time it was Eastenders (which was almost reality tv before there was reality tv). Tell simple, engaging, human stories (even if they are fronted by dodgy Martians).By the way, I came across the lipstick story on the web site of British guerrilla (graffiti) artist Banksy. It’s well worth a visit.http://www.banksy.co.uk David MacGregorFounder / Creative DirectorIdealog magazine
Tried to upload that jpeg but it arrived broken. FYI everyone The best way to deal with pics is to send them to neilfrench@nyc.com and they can be added to your post.
Back then, lipstick contained large amounts of pig fat.
More people should hear about this dark period in our history. I met a survivor of The Holocaust when I was at school. He was in his 70s and it still reduced him to tears to talk about it.
Sounds a lot like an agency I once worked at.