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"They couldn't drink anything, so we had to feed them with medicine droppers." | |||
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From the diary of J.C.P. Thomas Great Britain 
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May 1945: Excerpts from the diary of British Royal Air Force pilot J.C.P. Thomas, describing survivors of the Bergen-Belsen camp.
The dusty road alongside our landing strip was crowded. It was with considerable difficulty that the ambulances, loaded with the sick and dying, slowly made their way through the pedestrian traffic. My Dakota had been converted into an air ambulance, complete with welded frames to acommodate 15 stretchers and a metal bench seat for an additional 15 sitting patients. Over the past few weeks we have completed flight after flight transporting ex-inmates from Belsen to hospitals in different parts of Europe. Most of our passengers are very ill, suffering from TB, dysentery, frostbite, typhus, and other diseases. This morning the stretchers were laid out on the grass before being loaded into the aircraft. The occupants, all garbed in a coarse grey-striped concentration camp uniform, were terribly frightened. ... Near me was a stretcher containing what appeared to be a pile of dirty clothing but then I saw a quivering mouth set into a shaven skull with two enormous frightened eyes looking sideways at me. Feeling a pang of sympathy, I walked towards him, hoping that I might say something of comfort but soon realised that my action was unwelcome. Suddenly the blanket was pulled up completely covering his head. All that I could see was a bundle of rags, shaking violently. Uncontrollable fear had taken over, as any uniform meant pain and suffering to him. ... Walking away from the stretcher, I felt ashamed and completely inadequate. Yesterday when I took off, there were 35 patients in the aircraft. Some were not alive when we landed at Lille. Today, on flying over Belsen, a sickly stench penetrated my cabin and below we could see a mass of black smoke billowing from the camp. The whole complex was alight. Orders had been given to destroy the concentration camp to minimise the risk of disease. |
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Pat Lynch United States 
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They were so thin. I couldn't pick any of them up. I tried to, but if I were to pick them up I'd tear the skin. So we had to be very, very careful moving them out. The skin was just so terrible. So it would take, oh, about at least three people, one, one person take the head, one person take the legs, and very carefully lift them up and get them outside, go ahead and get them outside of that place. We put up tents outside. We had cots and clean bedding. So we'd take them out there. Or, if there was a hospital nearby, we'd go and take over that hospital and move them in there. But, uh, we couldn't, uh, for typhus, that was the main thing, there was no medication, just supportive treatment, and get fluids down them, well they couldn't drink anything, so we had to feed them with medicine droppers. And we couldn't give them hypos [hypodermic injections] because there was no place to stick them. There was no skin at all...no muscle, just skin and bone. There was no place to give them a hypo. | ||
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Colonel Richard R. Seibel Born 1907 Defiance, Ohio 
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My doctors told me, said, "Now look. These people have been on a very severe diet, and you cannot feed them very much to start off with." So, as I mentioned, we found the potato storage, so we started out making very thin potato soup, same as they'd had previously. The most precious item in the...in their diet was bread. Uh...you could get your throat cut for a piece of bread so big. Uh...they guarded a little bit of bread with their lives. We found an old bakery, and we got some prisoners who had been bakers before and you won't believe this, but you know all the hullabaloo these days about oat bread and oats and all that sort of thing, well, I think we originated that. Because we didn't have any wheat and we didn't have yeast. But we started making bread out of oats. And we baked thousands and thousands of loaves, but of course, when it first came out of the bakery, or off the...out of the ovens, it was just a mass of dough, not having any yeast or any curing agents of any kind. So we put it in...in a big warehouse and let it age until it dried out. As soon as that happened we started giving each prisoner a slice of bread. Oh my, the most precious thing they could have had. Well, we kept building up our bread supply, so finally we got to the point where we gave them two slices. And then a quarter of a loaf of bread. And then a half a loaf of bread. And they...they came in and said, "We don't want any more bread. We got enough." [laughing] We got a tremendous charge out of that. | ||
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Colonel Richard R. Seibel Born 1907 Defiance, Ohio 
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We brought in uh two field hospitals. Huge installations. And uh anyone who had to be taken care of, uh, was so assigned to these hospitals. Uh...our medical records show that we had hospitalized while we were there, about five thousand people. And as soon as they were able to uh leave the hospital they left. And we...that's what we did until [clears throat] until the bulk of the people in the camp had gone home. Now when, when I left there and my people and I left, there was only about three thousand or thirty-five hundred people left. And they...the bulk of those people didn't want to go home. And there were quite a number of Jewish people left in the camp that did not wish to return to their homelands. In checking with these people, the older Jew wanted to go to Israel. The younger Jews wanted to go to the United States, to England, or to France. And so those...I don't recall how many there were, but those were the ones that were left and the other people...uh just didn't want to go home. | ||
| Pat Lynch United States 
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Those that were then...those that were really too sick to move, we had to find a building, or put a tent up outside. We had to get them out of the camps. It was too dirty in there. And so we put tents up, and we, we knew how to run a hospital under tents because that's what we'd been doing. See, the evacuation hospital that I was with was all tents. So we knew, even surgery. We knew how to run a hospital under tents. So we put them up, put tents outside and got clean bedding for them. And they were bathed, and took care of them there, until we could move them someplace else. But mainly to get them out of those buildings that were just terrible. They were infested with mites, and, oh, just awful. | ||
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Pat Lynch United States 
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Well, starting IVs was almost impossible because here they were starving, and if you start shooting fluid in, and...it would be just a little bit too much in the heart and lungs, you know, start shooting all that in them. Here they...they hadn't...they couldn't even swallow. But we started IVs very, very carefully, and very slowly. But we fed them with medicine droppers, and then I'd try to prop them up, and...if you give them a little piece of a cracker or something, that wouldn't go down. And, uh, they hadn't swallowed anything for so long, but I used to rub this way, give them a little bit on a spoon, a little fluid, and then rub this way, and, and then finally get it...get them to swallow it, but uh... They had big old bowls of...I don't know what, some kind of soup, sitting around, like the pretense of feeding them, big old wooden bowls and a big tablespoon. Well they were too weak to reach over and pick up that spoon, and they couldn't get it in their mouth anyway, 'cause their mouth was just kind of set and drawn, and so they couldn't have opened their mouth to eat whatever this...I think it had been there about three days. | ||
| Pat Lynch United States 
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First of all you try to get...many of the patients were dead. And, of course, they were removing them, you know, right away. And we'd try to get the sickest ones first, get them cleaned up and get them outside, get them out of bed. And take care of them. And if there's any way that they had any flesh at all under the skin, we'd inject water. They call it hypodermoclysis. Sometimes in the shoulder there'd be a little fatty tissue there, muscle, then we'd inject some water into them because they were all dehydrated. And, uh, trying to feed them. And, uh, did I tell you about the men, those people whose feet were so terribly bad, they were all cut up. They wore wooden shoes and no stockings. Well there were a lot of people whose feet were just terrible. So we took care of those. And, uh, oh, I bandaged them up and put A+D Ointment or whatever I could find on them, and little two by four bandages, and get clean socks on them, and uh... But taking care of these patients who hadn't...were starving and had typhus--there wasn't any specific medication for typhus so we'd just use supportive treatment. We concocted some kind of...all we had was powdered milk and some, uh, canned vegetables. And so the fellows in the mess hall would try to make some real...oh, some kind of soup. They'd put the vegetables in the powdered milk and they'd try to feed them that. But if we'd get water down them and, uh, get the temperature down, that was the important thing 'cause there was nothing specific for typhus at that time. | ||
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