A Busload of Insanity by Gillian

I have never forgotten the stench of that smoke. I suppose I never will. It permeated everything and everyone. Clothes, hair, air. It was as if it emanated from our very pores. Even the cat, and her kittens so recently arrived in this world, stank of it.

England in 1952, when the dreaded Foot and Mouth Disease necessitated the burning of over 30,000 cattle and 32,000 sheep carcasses, many animals having been destroyed ahead of the disease, to prevent it’s spread. Rather like setting a fire ahead of a fire, to stop it. 

Or not.

I sat up in the front of the school bus with my friends, as far as we could get from the older tougher boys in the back, loud with bravado, outbidding each other for the most gory descriptions of the ongoing mayhem.

The rest of us were curiously silent. We sat pale-faced and pinched lipped, hunched into ourselves, staring mutely at the floor so that we didn’t have to look out of the windows at the black palls of smoke rising from our own or our neighbors’ farms.

I was a teacher’s child so not directly affected.

It didn’t feel that way.

Even those not old enough to understand the reality of the economic disasters afflicting their families were struck as dumb as those of us only too aware. Parents were inexplicably gruff and angry. Many kids suffered a cuff up side the head for some miniscule or completely imagined infraction.  The very young ones cried over the sudden disappearance of Bessie, Rose and Mabel. This was a time and place of tiny farms where the few milk cows were often christened, and treated almost like family pets.

A strong wind was blowing at right angles to the road, and suddenly the bus was engulfed in a stinking black miasma. With whoops of delight the hooligans in the back began opening windows. For some reason the rest of us seemed propelled into action. Ronnie and Derek from the Barker Farm, seated immediately behind me, started a steady drumming of their feet into the back of my seat. The Llewellyn twins began an endless rendering of Ten Green Bottles. Little Lucy Jones droned through her seven times table over and over again.

I almost let out a scream but managed to swallow it back. I felt trapped, imprisoned, those burning creatures following me wherever I went, blocking my eyes and rushing up my nostrils, clinging to every inch of my being. I couldn’t breath.

And in the black swirl of mass destruction, little children sang ditties and chanted numbers.

A busload of insanity.

By some nasty stroke of fortune I was back in England when the next intense attack of FAM hit in 1967 when almost 100,000 cattle and 200,000 sheep bodies were burned. Thankfully I missed the last and most devastating event in 2001 when the numbers soared to 3 million sheep lost and over half a million cattle. The very idea of all those carcasses burning numbs my brain, fortunately, but sadly not my senses.

That ghastly smell is sometimes so real to me that I sniff at my skin, my clothes, amazed that others seem so blessedly oblivious.

Forty years later finds me wandering about in a daze of horror at Auschwitz.

I didn’t expect it to be a barrel of laughs, but the place affected me even more deeply than I had ever anticipated. Vast piles of hair, thousands of pairs of shoes, mounds of gold teeth, and most pathetic to me all those battered old suitcases complete with address labels.

Had their owners truly believed they were going somewhere? Other than to their deaths, that is. Or was it simply a last desperate clinging to make-believe?

But the worst was the smell. That god-awful stink of burning flesh. Did no-one else smell it? I think not.

It was January. A cold slushy snow covered the ground; a bitterly cold wind forced its way out of Russia.

I tried to block those scantily dressed half starved prisoners from my mind and decided a hot cup of coffee was the answer.

Or not.

I simply could not go into the Visitors’ Center/café/bar.

What was it doing here, for God’s sake?

How could you stuff down a burger and fries, kielbasa and sauerkraut, in this place of starvation? How could you send postcards to loved ones back home of this place of torture and death?

How could I even think of finding warmth for my body and solace for my soul in a hot steaming cappuccino?

Most visitors to Auschwitz are quiet and respectful, but suddenly some people streamed from the Visitors’ Center to board a huge multi-colored tour bus huffing and puffing in the parking lot. I don’t know where they were from, this group, but they laughed, they slapped each other on the back as they shared comradely jokes, they chugged their Cokes and Heinekens and munched on candy bars.

I walked away into the slush, now being enhanced by wind-propelled sleet.

A busload of insanity.

© 29 January 2013

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.