Cape Town - Chipper at 95, Leonard Berney bears no trace of the trauma of being among the first liberators to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony 70 years ago and find the first hard evidence of the horror Nazi Germany visited on its “undesirable” subjects.
Thirteen thousand corpses is a difficult image to bring to mind in a world outraged by televised news of massacres that claim the lives of eight or 14 or 120 people.
But, on top of the 60 000 emaciated, starving, mostly diseased men and women Major Berney encountered on entering Bergen-Belsen on its day of liberation on April 15, 1945, there was the numbing, putrefying sum of 13 000 dead, lying where they’d fallen in the cramped confines of the camp or heaped in unfilled mass graves.
And Bergen-Belsen wasn’t even a death camp; this was death by wilful neglect, lack of medical care, food, water or any semblance of human feeling. It was the avatar of the Hitlerian mania that dragged the nation of Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller into the basement of depravity.
Berney, at that time a staff officer in the headquarters of British general Sir Brian Horrocks in one of the armies closing on Berlin from west and east, was “shattered and nauseated” by the experience and suffered tormenting flash-backs for two or three years.
“We were battle-hardened troops, inured to death and injury,” Berney remembered, “but we had seen nothing like this. Everybody was paralysed … the sight and smell and horror was overwhelming.”
On a visit to Cape Town this week as a permanent resident of the passenger liner The World (the vessel has been his only home for some years), Berney spoke at a small gathering hosted by Cape Town’s Holocaust Museum. He described how, after the war, equipped for little but soldiering, he became a “trainee” in the fashion industry, rising to become a successful figure in clothing manufacture.
For a long time, he disdained the reunions and post-war nostalgia of regimental gatherings, and so made little of his story – until, about 10 years ago, he was roused by the surge of Holocaust denialism.
“That struck me as absolutely outrageous. How could anyone say it did not happen? I was there, for God’s sake. So I started to get involved, to keep the memory going and, as I have put it, to deny the deniers.”
There is irony in his direct experience of the consequences of the Nazi terror and his less-than-approving assessment of the function of the Holocaust – and the free world’s reluctance to welcome its Jewish survivors – in producing or hastening the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine which cost a million Arab residents their homeland.
In a small way, he was even intimately involved; Berney became the officer commanding the successor to Belsen-Bergen, a so-called displaced persons camp, which – with some 25 000 recuperating inhabitants – he ran for about three months after April 1945.
By then, captives from Belgium, France, Holland and other countries had been repatriated. Those who were left – including Poles, Hungarians and Russians, and most of them Jews – refused repatriation to Soviet-held homelands, fearing continued incarceration and abuse.
Berney recalled with disgust the Western world’s (including South Africa’s) refusal to open its doors to the, by then, half million-odd Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, whose primary objective was, as a result, to get to Palestine.
“My orders were to stop people going to Palestine. That was the official position. But the camp wasn’t a prison, and it was not an order that could be obeyed. Every night, small groups would trickle away and I did what I could to make sure they had enough food and water to last a few days and to give them addresses of other displacement camps they could call at on their long journey to Palestine.”
It was, he implied, his only humanitarian option.
As for the larger historical picture, it was because of the West’s refusal to give a home to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust that tension mounted in Palestine, “because of that Britain pulled out, and because of that, you have everything that’s happened since (in the Middle East)… it all stemmed from that refusal. It’s changed the history of the world”.
Berney’s experience of helping to relieve the plight of the 60 000 Belsen-Bergen prisoners – who were dying in April 1945 at a rate of 500 a day – inspired a dogged realism in the old soldier.
He was matter-of-factly dismissive of any idealism about using the Holocaust story to curb society’s genocidal impulses – “I have a list of 30 or 40 genocides since then, and it’s still going on; nobody has learned any lessons and it seems to be a human weakness, which is disappointing” – but he did believe that keeping history alive can be important in alerting people to risks they may not anticipate.
“What happened in Germany is instructive… Hitler came to power in a democratic way, but in just nine months he turned it into a dictatorship. The same can happen in any country, if you let it happen.”
The only antidote was, perhaps, “people power”, eternal vigilance.
Berney was modest about his role in helping fellow humans – putting the success of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen down to “military discipline”.
But there is a telling footnote to his tale: one of the people he saved in Bergen-Belsen was a young girl, Nanette Blitz-Konig. Berney wrote to Nanette’s aunt, in England, and secured the young girl’s repatriation.
Decades later, Nanette tracked Berney down to thank him. The story has a bitter-sweet aspect; one of Nanette’s friends and pre-war classmates was the tragic teenage diarist Anne Frank, who, just weeks before Berney’s regiment reached Lower Saxony in 1945, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen.
Weekend Argus