All The Horrors Of War A Gripping Tale

Nonetheless, Hughes was profoundly affected: “The weak animal-like cries of ‘many only just able to realize that there might still exist a ray of hope for them’ moved Hughes to the core. He understood why, in this place, normal standards had disappeared; self-preservation was the only instinct left. Daunted, assaulted, he sank into despair. He was an expert at evacuating casualties. He could organize personnel and communications, medical and surgical teams, and hospitals. He had overseen burials and controlled chaos during rescue missions. But in this hell, where to begin?”

Lerner graphically depicts how the brigadier “grasped the enormity of both the crime and the work ahead. Living skeletons shared bunks and the floor with the dead. They used the dead as pillows and mattresses and to warm their bodies. They had little to nothing in the way of straw or blankets. They wore filthy clothing or none at all. Every face bore signs of misery.”  

In the event, Hughes “outlined immediate tasks: provision of food and water, burial of the dead, evacuation of the camp, hospitalization of the sick, rehabilitation of the fit. … Hughes made urgent demands on the British Second Army. In the ensuing days and weeks, he would bring to Belsen medical units, military government detachments, and garrison troops. He would call for help from UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), Red Cross sections, experts in typhus control and feeding the starved, and other groups. He would press German nurses and doctors into service. The emergency assemblage would be woefully inadequate in numbers. Had he ten times the personnel, he might have been able to stem the death rate of roughly five hundred people each day, a tragic statistic that continued for weeks.”

Having contracted tuberculosis, the feeble Genuth was additionally beaten unconscious in a petty spat with her fellow tent-mates, who by then had been reduced to beastly tendencies; once again she somehow survived, and through the Red Cross was rehabilitated in a sanitarium in Sweden. Although her health suffered for years thereafter, she eventually revivified; a decade after the war, she married in Stockholm, and subsequently immigrated to America, had children, and found a career. Genuth has now also spoken to some 250 school groups about her Shoah experiences and adjures her listeners to refute Holocaust deniers.