Product Description

'The things I saw completely defy description': when British troops entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, they uncovered scenes of horror and depravity that shocked the world. But they also confronted a terrible challenge - inside the camp were some 60,000 people, suffering from typhus, starvation and dysentery, who would die unless they received immediate medical attention. "After Daybreak" is the story of the men and women who faced that challenge - the army stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, medical students and relief workers who worked to save the inmates of Belsen - with the war still raging and only the most primitive drugs and facilities available. It was, for all of them, an overwhelming experience. Drawing on their diaries and letters, Ben Shephard reconstructs events at Belsen in the spring of 1945 - from the first horror of its discovery, through the agonising process of trying to save the survivors, to the point where Belsen became 'more like a Butlin's Holiday camp than a concentration one'. By the end of June 1945, some 46,000 people had survived at Belsen; but another 14,000 had been lost. Should we therefore see the relief of the camp as an epic of medical heroism - as the British believed? Or was the failure to plan for Belsen and the undoubted mistakes that were made there further evidence of Allied indifference to the fate of Europe's Jews - as some historians now argue? "After Daybreak" is a powerful and dramatic narrative, full of extraordinary incidents and characters. It is also an important contribution to medical history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #403123 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
"* 'In his excellent and lucid account, Shephard fully makes his case that the aftermath of the liberation of Belsen was an episode in which the British can take pride...a powerful and dramatic narrative.' - Frank McLynn, Independent * 'A solidly researched, scrupulously balanced and sensitive account of the liberation that will serve as a fitting tribute and a guide to future generations about how best to remember Belsen.' - David Cesarini, Guardian * 'A moving story.' - Times Literary Supplement * 'Contributors to the ever-growing opus of Holocaust historiography have been accused by some of creating an industry. However, Shephard's contribution is not superfluous and he negotiates his harrowing material surefootedly.' - Katrina Goldstone, Irish Times"

Hampstead & Highgate Expres, 20 May 2005
An exemplary study of the liberation... His conclusions are sensible and fair

Frank McLynn, Independent, 13 May 2005
[An] excellent and lucid account

Customer Reviews

Liberation from a different view point!
I found this book difficult to put down. If you are a reader of holocaust biographies and historical books, you will find this extremely interesting and informative. The account of the liberation of Belsen and the years afterwards is told here by those who actually liberated and worked in the camp. Different events are detailed and accounts of those incidents are told from the view points of both survivors and liberators. Very often the survivors felt that their needs as holocaust victims were often over looked or not understood, (although of course extremely grateful to their liberators), whilst the British army and volunteer doctors and medics descibe their inability to be able to provide the victims with appropriate care, due to all resources having been used in the war and there being no precedent to this scale of atrocity before.

This book is well researched and reminds the reader that for many holocaust victims, liberation actually didn't provide an immediate, happy ending and that many of those who arrived in Belsen shortly after the liberation were affected by what they found for the rest of their lives.

This is an honest, factual account of the liberation at Belsen and I would highly reccomend you read it.

In the Name of Humanity, Read this Book
Oh, My Dearest Reader, Prepare to have cruel reality bite your senses!
Current mass media allows the horrors of war, famine and disease to be brought to us as never before - and sometimes we are upset and sickened by what we see. Now, imagine the cameras going into Belsen and flashing their story into our homes! The truth is, no news agency would be allowed to because what was found there showed how low humanity can sink. Then, stop for breath; there is even worse - the camp guards, the local population, all in denial it was anything to do with them - all seeing it as hardly a problem, some, even laughing!! This book is the definitive account of the evil of Nazism, and why no sacrifice is too great to make sure it never happens anywhere in the world again - ever! The accounts are not from sensationalist reporters, academic historians or bored soldiers out to make a name for themselves, they are from medics and ordinary people thrown in to a place that not even Dante himself could have visualised, and told to liberate and safe (where possible) these tortured innocents. When you have read this book, ask yourself one question - Why did fellow humans allow this to happen? I am still trying to find the answer. It isn't easy.

The Golden Trumpet of Humanity
I must admit that I found this account quite confusing and irritating and lacking in any critical rigour which, I presume, is due to the subject which has been exploited in endless tabloid articles and documentaries throughout the world. This particular account is by what seems to be an accredited, Oxford-educated historian and depicts the setbacks of the English (or should I say British?) army's attempts to relieve the Belsen camp, showing our English friends how they like to be seen: restlessly rushing around to save lives while blowing into the golden trumpet of humanity.

Not surprisingly perhaps, there is no mentioning of their own air-born mass killings of civilians, which had reached a peak towards the end of the war due to the defenceless German cities and towns. A reader of this book gets the impression that Belsen was a place of hell within a country where houses, streets and traffic systems were still intact, where there was food and medication aplenty. Apart from the casual mentioning of a disruption of the camp's water supply (p.15) due to Allied bombing there is not even a hint of whether there might be a possible connection between the conditions of the camp and the merciless Allied bombing campaign which aimed to kill every human being on German soil, no matter whether soldiers, prisoners of war or land workers.

The Belsen commandant Kramer is described by the author as a man who follows orders (p.15) and the reader wonders whether the British did not follow orders when they annihilated German cities or the heroic American pilots who pressed a button to trigger an atomic inferno on sleeping Far-eastern cities. Oddly enough, we find Kramer staggering across the countryside on some humanitarian mission as it seems instead of making sure that the `final solution' is implemented in the camp (presumably this would have been his order though the author, obviously seeing this contradiction, tells us by some far fetched, outlandish argumentation that this had ceased to be the case). The book tells us that, according to a British officer's account, most inmates were non-Jews, which is in contrast to the public perception of this camp (p.40). But the author does nothing to clarify this contradiction. If only a minority have been Jews at Belsen and if we follow the author's argument that the conditions at Belsen were the result of a deliberate policy of annihilation, we must assume that the `final solution' did not only include Jews but everybody who was imprisoned in the camp: Germans as well as gipsies, French and Dutch as well as Russians and Poles.

On p. 28 the author quotes another scholar as saying that what we now know as the holocaust is a construction of the present and would not have been recognizable to anybody at the time when it actually happened. This is an interesting thought but the author, not surprisingly perhaps, does not follow it through but uses it as an excuse why the Allies did not act at the time though he assures us that Allied intelligence did know all about the camps (p. 30). This is weird indeed. They knew everything but did nothing despite having complete air superiority? They looked on as 6 million Jews, 5 million Poles, 2 million gypsies and millions of others were gassed and then cremated so that their traces virtually vanished from the face of the earth?

I think that this book contributes nothing to the historical truth or the attempt of seeking it but everything to myth making and the justification of what is still thought to have been a `just war'. In its black and white drawing of noble Jews and evil Germans (admittedly, there are a few concessions to make the contrast less stark and more believable) it helps to uphold the continued stigmatisation of an entire people. It also affirms the Anglo-Americans in their continued grip on the world and gives justification to them having fought this war as well as to them fighting any future wars as they will always allege to fight them in the name of humanity rather than to further their own interests.