Humanity

Extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willet Gonin DSO who was amongst the first British soldiers to arrive at the Nazi Death camp Bergen-Belsen. it was liberated in April 1945 close to the end of the second World War.

"It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived.

This was not at all what men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance.

I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick.

At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."