Monday, January 08, 2007

Banksy...

I somehow stumbled upon this guys site, interesting pictures, also an interesting read. Thought I'd share it, (this is straight from his site, so if you check it out you will see this, I guess it's plagurism, hmm... oh well, no offence intended:


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.

Camp
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. 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 we 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 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 tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War museum

3 Comments:

At 4:37 pm, January 09, 2007, Blogger The Dekkers said...

Wow, heart breaking stuff, the horrors that these guys went through... my own grandfather was in a POW camp during WWII for helping smuggle Jews out of Holland - he never spoke about it - not surprising when you read an account like this...

Having said all of that it is amazing what gives people a sense of purpose, it often can be the little things that we do not the grand gestures that give a person hope - if only the church as a whole would listen to this message & put as much value on the gift of hospitality as they do the gifts of prophecy & healing etc... it does not take much to love our neighbours (Just our lives I guess!)

Peter

 
At 8:09 pm, January 09, 2007, Blogger urbanmonk said...

Wow! Your banksy lovers too! Was this text from his site? Or a post script you added?

I dont mean to minimise the text. Its heart breaking, but I think the street art of Banksy takes the human and makes it a bit absurd to make you think from a different angle.

have you seen the painting on his home page of Mary and Joseph with an israeli style wall ( replete with guntower) seperating them and Bethlehem? Now that is a nativity scene!

 
At 8:57 am, January 10, 2007, Blogger Josh and Melody said...

yeah this is straight off his web site. I looked at what i thought was all his pictures, but didn't see that. I'll take another look to see if I can find it.

 

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