On the Banksy website there is a section called Manifesto which quotes an extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The extract is rather lengthy and much of it fairly tough-going, but Willett Gonin notes, eventually, the arrival in the camp of a very large quantity of lipstick.
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 these 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.
Neither Willett Gronin nor Banksy remind us that most of the liberators and relief workers at the camp had great difficulty in recognizing the female internees as women.
The Nazis had successfully stripped them, almost entirely, of a meaningful sense of identity. The liberators were completely unprepared for what faced them inside the gates of the camp. And even with the evidence of their own eyes, many of the liberators were so traumatized that they could not overcome their own preconceptions. The image of humanity was so twisted and distorted that it had become unrecognizable.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that those women welcomed the protective mask of lipstick and clothing.
Table of contents for Lest We Forget
- Lipstick
- Google - the evil empire?
- Presque vu XXXXI
- Himmler - Speaking To His Own
- Evil? I Don’t Think So.
- Can the President Pardon Himself?
- Bush Acting Strangely? - I Don’t Believe It
- Paul Wolfowitz and Accountability
- Presque vu XXXX
- Presque vu XII
- Subversive Vanity Fair
- Bush Lied
- Science and Reason
- The Dixie Chicks
- Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years
- Women at Work
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Sep 28th, 2006 at 6:45 am
Horribly, ridiculously poignant.
Sep 28th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Poignant indeed. Thanks for this, John.
Sep 28th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
A macabre vision, but one which I see not as a restoration of humanity but a victory of conformity.
Despite all they had been through, rather than asserting their dignity and humanity, they choose instead to showcase their lips. After all, what more is a woman?
We seek to understand why people could so unquestioningly play the roles necessary to commit such atrocities – in my mind, those women and their lipstick are a chilling reminder.
Sep 29th, 2006 at 3:27 am
This brings strong images to hold in the mind - rather like grey photos that feature the emphasis of “a touch of red”.
I knew two old Quaker sisters who went in with the liberation team at Belsen, they would not be drawn much on what they did. One thing they mentioned was that soap was as important as food there, they washed very weak people as tenderly as they could and the reaction was wonderful to see.
Sep 29th, 2006 at 9:11 am
That’s more or less the image that Banksy saw, and painted. You can see the reproduction on his site.
Bergen-Belsen was rife with typhoid fever and typhus when the British troops arrived. So much so that another thirteen thousand people died of disease and starvation after the liberation.
Some British soldiers claimed that, when they first entered the camp, the stench of the ten thousand rotting, naked, unburied bodies, could be smelled ten miles away.
The prisoners had been without food and water for a week, and there were no medical supplies.
Sep 30th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
As the descendant of a concentration camp liberator who never really slept through a night again, well, these clearly were not images easily shaken…
Oct 1st, 2006 at 9:01 am
Chilling and poignant, John. No matter the amount of material I have read on such atrocities, every time I shiver and think: this can’t have happened, we “humans” can’t be like this.
Oct 4th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Is there a book made of the diary, I would like to read some more.
jb says: The source is The Imperial War Museum in the UK. They may know about published material.
Oct 8th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I find paradoxes here, within these comments, these ideas, these images and within my own thoughts.
London. In times of peace. I look at people in the street, women’s faces, men’s faces. I see body modifcations, multiplying, painted faces, defects, masks, non-conform traits hidden; the individual endeavour of disguising his/her humanity, to wrap essence in superficiality, to conform, to be individually communal, this I cannot comprehend.
Bergen-Belsen. In a time of oppression. These brutalised women, destitute, locked up like cattle, stripped down to the surface of their humanity - flesh, bone, no words, no ‘I’, left to rot. That these women should choose to paint their lips, this I can somewhow relativise.