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By Richard Wollheim The author joined the British Army in 1942 and served in France, where he was captured and then escaped. In May 1945, just after VE Day, he was transferred to a battalion in Germany near Belsen. None of the day-to-day work I had to do could be freed from the one long shadow that was cast as I saw it over all our lives. The decree had gone out from the Allied victors that, if a German spoke to a British soldier, you were not to speak back; if a German smiled at you, you were not to smile back; and any contact between the occupying forces and the indigenous population that was not a matter of practical exigencies was a punishable offence. For my part, I saw these "non-fraternisation" decrees as perpetuating the racism that I sometimes hoped, despite my anti-Semitic colonel, the war had been fought to end. As an intelligence officer, I could easily disregard them, and did. It was, for instance, part of my job to have regular meetings with the town's burgomaster, a foxy figure in his loden jacket and herringbone knee-breeches, whom I admired for the way he stood between the arrogant victors and the self-pitying vanquished. Skin softened around his eyes as he listened to the eternal denial: Ich bin niemals im Partei gewesen ("I've never been a member of the Party"). I formed a real friendship with a couple named Schmidt, who had been bombed out of Hamburg. He had been a lawyer, she was the granddaughter of a British admiral, and they had known, they told me, Wollheims in Hamburg; I had no idea how much of what they said was credible, and how much was designed to please. Then, for diversion, I went to parties of great depravity, given by an unctuous rogue who was the Allied military government officer stationed in the larger town of Uelzen. To these parties there came officers from the local Polish cavalry brigade, bringing with them giant bottles of vodka, warm from the illicit still. Their conversation was entirely about "nos châteaux," to which they sensed they would never return. There were one or two officers from my battalion, and the German girls whom our host kept as a harem. Briefly, but so tempestuously that I tried to avoid going on leave, I fell in love with one of the girls as she told me tales of her paradisal childhood as the gardener's daughter in a castle in East Prussia. She described the roses and the lilac and the sand dunes, and then the bombardment and the coming of the Russians. Around midnight, when their masters were too drunk to protest, the girls banded together and sang songs of the Hitler Youth. Then one morning I was called in to see my new colonel. He told me that he had received a communication from very high up. There had recently been discovered, parallel to the many many unhappy soldiers to whom the company of women would mean much, a number of unhappy women, mercifully not German, to whom the company of men would mean as much. These were the women survivors of Belsen, not far away, which had been overrun in the last days of the war. It had been suggested at the very highest level that the two problems could be solved in one. Would I therefore regard it as my duty, as soon as I had arranged transport, to drive over to Belsen, see the people in charge, and arrange a dance? I told my colonel, as respectfully as I could, that I thought this a very bad idea. My colonel reminded me where the idea had originated, it had come from very high up, it was an order, and would I therefore, as soon as I had arranged transport, drive over to Belsen, see the people in charge, and arrange a dance. Belsen was in strange, beautiful country of great melancholy: an expanse of heath, with silver birches, large regular ponds, and giant rocks covered with lichen; it fostered a whole German sensibility. The camp itself had initially been conceived of in distant peacetime as a place where, in the victorious war to come, young heroes, returning from the front for a few days, might be pampered, their courage rewarded, and their worst nightmares soothed in the arms of young girls; from this original conception there remained a number of small thatched cottages standing on sandy islands in the ponds. It was in one of these cottages, mercifully out of sight of the large sheds that had become part of the machinery of death, that I lunched with some young doctors from the relief agency that ran the camp. They had taken time off from work that could not spare them to confirm just how bad an idea the dance was. People were still dying every day, and many of those who were out of physical danger were in a catatonic state. But ultimately the doctors and I lived under the same orders and, by the time I left, a day had been fixed when I would return to pick up however many women were thought fit for the ordeal. Ten days later, I arrived with my trucks while, back in Bevensen, a
A week or so later there was another message from High Command, conceding an error. The error had been to take the women to the dance in Bevensen, rather than taking the dance to the women in Belsen. The change of plan was conveyed to the relief workers in the camp and, two weeks later to the day, now in high August, I was riding back to Belsen with my three-tonners, this time packed with soldiers, clean and scrubbed, their brasses polished, their belts and gaiters blancoed. Sitting up in the cab of the foremost truck, I could hear the marching songs familiar to me from the early days of training in the countryside of Kent. We had come a long way, but arguably with little learnt. Meanwhile, Belsen had gained in festivity. One of the large sheds had been selected as the ballroom. It had been cleared of patients, fumigated, and decorated with paper chains. At one end of the shed, a dais had been constructed, and on it a makeshift band awaited our arrival. It had been assembled from the Hungarian guards, once one of the most feared elements in the camp, but now, purged presumably of their worst members, they were dressed up in national costume and, provided with concertinas, were playing a potpourri of folk dances. Along one side of the improvised ballroom the women were drawn up, some talking in knots, others patiently waiting in line. The clothes that had been found for them were mostly black, some wore large floral scarves with tassels, and they carried big handbags. They all looked as though they had never seen the sun in their lives. There was a long initial moment of embarrassment, but then, encouraged by one another, some of the more forward soldiers walked across the floor. There was no language in common, there were not even, as there had been throughout the campaign in Holland, a few garbled words picked up in friendly encounters. In their effort to surmount this pitiless silence, the women did the only thing they could. They invoked the one fragment of sign language they had left to them, and in which their abraded identity lay close to the surface. They bared the left arm up to the elbow and exposed a row of numbers tattooed in capillary violet, which were to have been their one-way tickets for the transports. The soldiers, who had no idea what they were looking at, stared meaninglessly, the women redoubled their explanations until one soldier or perhaps more, thinking that this was ill-disguised flirtation, pulled the woman he was talking to onto the dance floor. I do not know what happened next, but within moments a fight had broken out. One woman was hitting a soldier on the head with her handbag, and I saw one of the soldiers, who was not to be balked of his dance, pulled down onto the floor, as he held the tattooed wrist of the woman he still saw as his partner. The musicians played louder and faster, but it fell to me to call the whole thing off, to get the soldiers into the trucks, and to drive back as fast as we could, but whether we drove through the dark, or whether it was still light as I believe to be the case, I cannot exactly remember. I dared not ask myself what kind of impression this whole scene made on the European doctors. The next morning, I gave my colonel as detailed an account as I could of how this second ill-imagined piece of improvisation came to nothing. To the best of my knowledge High Command did not answer, nor, as far as I know, did it return to the problem of frustrated desire. Shortly afterwards I was posted to England, I was demobilized, and I returned to Oxford for the first peacetime term. I was 22. Richard Wollheim, who died last November, taught at Berkeley from 1985 until 2003, the last five years as chairman of the philosophy department. The author of major works in philosophy, art, and psychology, he wrote "A Dance at Belsen" during his final illness. His Germs: A Memoir of Childhood will be published by Waywiser Press this month in England and next fall in the United States. |
 Women after liberation from Belsen in 1945.
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