Dimbleby broadcast again about Belsen a month later in ‘The World Goes By’:
May 1945. To give any adequate and factual account of the task that faces our doctors and nurses when a German Concentration Camp is delivered into their hands, one must try for a moment to set aside the undying memories that will always haunt those of us who entered the Camps in the first hours of their liberation. But, in order that what I have to say may be properly said, against the right background, let me simply remind you that the doctors, the tough, experienced army doctors who arrived early at the Belsen Camp, were nauseated, literally horrified at what they found. It was not only the filth, the stench and the decay. What really shocked the doctors and the officers and men of the army, too, was to see, for the first time in their lives, human beings who had been deliberately degraded to the level of animals. In Belsen there were peasants, factory workers, and musicians, artists, and the whole range of professional people, who fought for dirty scraps of food and, in the last stages of typhus, dragged themselves towards the heaps of bodies to lie there and die. People who had forgotten the simple customs and conventions of everyday life and were now lost in a terrible apathy brought about by unbearable misery, starvation, and the certainty of agonising death.
Again he vividly described the misery of the scene still haunting him, and ended:
When I began this talk, I was going to try and divorce sentiment and practical measure of relief. But, of course, you can’t. From what I saw at Belsen, I know that the two go hand in hand. With water and food, there must be the grain of hope, there must be a smile and a wave – things unknown for five years at Belsen. You must spread the news that help and love are coming, and as the word goes round, you will see tired heads lifting and withered hands twitching in salute, and people weakly crying with joy. Then you know, as the 2nd Army brigadier said, ‘that the spark of life is returning’.
There is one other thing you must do – something without which all the measures of relief and succour would be but temporary remedies – and that is to vow with all your heart that such horrible things shall never happen again.