by Alice Nutter
My Dad cleared out a concentration camp at the end of WW2. My sister thinks it was Buchenwald, but it was more likely Bergen-Belsen. I know his regiment, the East Lancashire, was involved in its liberation.
A bottom of the ladder private, he wasn’t prepared. They told my Dad that the whole operation would take two weeks. Six months later he was still there. He said the worst thing was being surrounded by starving people you couldn’t feed – they were so unused to rich food, they were gorging and dying. So my Dad had to beat people back from a food lorry. What the concentration camp inmates needed wasn’t food but saline drips.
My Dad spent his life, as I remember it, sitting in the corner of the living room smoking. In the drawer of the alcove next to him was a German Luger. He said he’d taken it off a German. When my Mum wasn’t in he let me look at it. It was never loaded.
Unable to reconcile the horrors of the camp with the neat German village close by, the British troops took their lorries into the village and loaded up the local population. They drove them back to the camp and forced them to take part in the clean-up operation. Both Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were suffering a typhus epidemic, and so the scale of death would have been huge – 13,000 in Bergan-Belsen alone in the weeks after liberation.
My Father’s long dead now. It’s impossible to ask him, now, about his wartime experiences, or indeed his life. But the little he did share has helped me understand the difficult, disappointed man I grew up with. His stories, even the few he told me, made it easier to see him as a flawed, hurt man, more than just a bad parent.
For me, those stories were important. They went a little way to explaining how things came to be. As a writer I’ve never had any urge to dramatise my family life as was. That would be too painful for all concerned. But I find with stories like my Father’s behind me, and by drawing on experience and fictionalising it I am freed to tell big stories. Then I can answer some questions for myself. What will happen to the soldiers coming back from Iraq? How will what they have seen and done influence the way they bring up their kids? For me, stories make sense of the world as it is — and once we begin to understand the world we are freed to disagree with it and change it to something better.