Mentioned briefly in a footnote of my last post, here is a snapshot of one of my most treasured possessions.
This photograph, as the back says, was taken by my grandfather of the concentration camp at Belsen as it was burnt to the ground by the allies in ’45. My grandfather drove lorries in the war and I assume he was there to transport survivors away. I did ask him about it once as an older child and he told me that the Canadian soldiers who had liberated the camp, inadvertently caused several deaths by giving the starving survivors too much food, even a slice of toast could be lethal to their systems, so they ended up giving the inmates tiny, tiny squares of buttered toast at first. I do wish I could ask him about it now, as an adult, particularly his feelings about it, but I’m not sure he would have said very much more; his generation very often didn’t and I quite understand, it was a way of coping.
