Richard Dimbleby’s live reactions entering the deathcamp at Belsen made the nation stand still. The cultured man confronted with the worst of industrialised barbarism, and a man who had never known tears wept. The nation, open-mouthed wept with him.
The BBC would not broadcast Dimbleby’s first-hand, eye-witness account of what he saw – it was too horrifying for the audience at home. They had lived through the Blitz, the burning of of the cities, the typed letters ‘we regret that your son…’ and watching a continent burn, but this was at a different level – personal, evil, without hope, incomprehensible. It was also a look down into the deep pit of the human soul.
Yet they had to know. The BBC relented and the broadcast was heard. The music stopped. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
If that was one camp, the same horror was played out across many of the Devil’s places in the east. The infernal gas, the ovens, the millions of murdered souls. Dimbleby saw the living, barely living, and the those who died in the days to come; he did not see the missing hundreds of thousands from that camp alone – or the millions murdered across the continent with eyeless industrial efficiency.
The men and women at home had to heard the voice from Belsen. As the decades pass the whole things seems to some so distant as to be unbelievable, but that is why more than ever we still have to hear it again today.
