BELSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP - EIGHTH DAY [Allocated Title]

Unedited footage showing a very gradual improvement in conditions inside Belsen one week after the British authorities took over running the camp from its cruel and inefficient SS administration.

START 10:25:22 Slightly out of focus hand-held shots showing British Army priests and a former Polish inmate standing near an open burial pit in Belsen Camp No. 1 saying prayers for the dead. They are identified as the Reverend T J Stretch from Aberystwyth, Reverend Cuthbert from Seacombe, Merseyside, Father M C Morrison, from Dublin and Father Stanislaw Kadziolka, from Cracow but it is difficult to tell exactly who is who as they are filmed from a distance.

10:26:26 Shots showing Rabbi Leslie Hardman shovelling spadefuls of sand from the large heap piled up by the mass grave during its excavation and scattering it over the cadavres lying nearby. Dabbing a hankerchief to his eyes, he leaves the scene in a distressed state. A small bulldozer is then used to cover the bodies in the burial pit with sand. German army prisoners-of-war (at least none of them) use spades to cast sand onto the mass grave.

10:27:24 Scenes in No. 1 Camp at Belsen showing male survivors sitting under the shelter afforded by a shallow sloping roof of a long low building and at the entrance to a large tent. Two inmates, wearing floppy hats and dark overcoats (possibly Roma or Sinti), stare without much expression at the camera. Another inmate, with bright, expressive eyes set in a face drawn thin through starvation and wearing a clothe cap, talks to somebody off-screen. Slightly out of focus close-ups of two women with drawn faces, the second older than the first, as they converse with somebody off-screen.

10:28:29 Scenes filmed in the 'Zeltlager' or Tent Camp showing a young woman standing over another woman kneeling on the ground and washing her hair by pouring warm water onto her head. For this task, she is seen using a an empty food tin. Another woman wearing wooden clogs stands nearby, vigorously rubbing her wet hair. Another woman, luckier than the others seen here, works the soap in her hair into a lather and pours a tin of hot water onto her head.

10:29:21 Shots showing survivors, the majority of them women, standing outside a barrack hut in the main women's camp (?) watching Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) personnel from 11th Field Ambulance carrying a severely-ill camp inmate on a stretcher and putting him or her into the back of an Austin K2 ambulance (army registration 'A 1206021'). The RAMC men are dressed head to foot in gas decontamination clothing to prevent them catching typhus. The big ambulance doors are shut and the vehicle heads off (to Camp No. 2 where a hospital has been established in the panzer school barracks); note the word 'contaminated' chalked (?) onto the left hand door panel.

10:29:56 Shots showing British Army Rabbi Leslie Hardman in the centre of a group of women survivors in the small women's camp leading them in community singing. The women do their best to look cheerful. END 10:30:25

35mm