Description
Object description
image: a group of gesticulating figures gathered around a prostrated figure. They are shown from an elevated perspective.
Label
Mary Kessell visited Belsen in August 1945, four months after the liberation of the concentration camp in April. The
original concentration camp buildings had been evacuated and burned down as a health precaution. The surviving inmates were transfered to
Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, which was established in July 1945 in the barracks of a nearby former Wehrmacht training camp. Mary
Kessell's experience of Belsen differs markedly from that of artists like Leslie Cole, Doris Zinkeisen and Eric Taylor, who witnessed the
concentration camp immediately after its liberation.
Mary Kessell produced a series of seven drawings 'Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945', and wrote an extensive diary about her experiences in
Germany.
Label
Excerpt from Mary Kessell's diary describing her arrival at Belsen (Department of Printed Books, Imperial War Museum):
'Thursday, 9th August 1945. Long dreary wet drive to Belsen, arrive at lunch time. Meet the Colonel in Charge, who takes me for an
afternoon tour over the whole camp. It's vast and quite wonderful. What drawings and paintings. People of all types & nations, horses,
soldiers, children, lines of washing, refugees playing musical instruments, lonely folk with their arms on window ledges gazing into space,
more washing. But they are all beginning to live again and children laugh and love you and hold you by the hand. I was amazed at all I saw,
it was exciting and most moving. [...] Relations are traced, and convoys returned to their own countries from the main square, lorries
decorated with flags and greenery.'
IWM ART LD 5747 b might relate to the following diary entry for Saturday 11 August 1945: '[...] One whole village that had been deported,
returning to that same village again. A paralysed woman, like paper - lying on a sofa - strung up with luggage & children sitting round
her. National songs being sung outside the doors, [...]'.
History note
War Artists Advisory Committee commission
Inscription
Mary Kessell