People of the 20th Century
DR RENA MARWICK

Thousands of Orcadians saw the horrors of war.

But one brave and skilled Orcadian woman had to witness the unspeakable evil of war – a nightmare scenario that had no place in what mankind called civilisation. Dr Rena Marwick had to endure the trauma of going into the infamous Nazi concentration camp of Belsen.

There she found the unbelievable and heart-rendering sight of thousands of prisoner dying of starvation, disease – typhus, dysentery and Tuberculosis – and brutal ill-treatment. Her accounts of the experience make up one of the most moving Orcadian documents of World War Two.

Dr Marwick had been the GP in the island of Sanday, but in July, 1944, with the rank of captain, she was to be landed in Normandy and she spent the next six months giving blood transfusions to injured British troops in France, Belgium, Holland and, finally, Germany.

So by April, 1945, she had seen thousands of injured and dying men on the battlefield. But nothing could have prepared her for what was to follow in the peacetime as the Allies liberated the notorious concentration camp in the German village of Belsen.

Dr Marwick told the grim story of what she found in a series of letters home to her father, Provost James Marwick of Stromness.

“Wonder how you are to celebrate VE day in Stromness?” she asked in her first letter. “We are not exactly hilarious here, and I can scarcely imagine a less appropriate place for celebration than Belsen concentration camp – while living in tents on a windswept site and preparing to take in 4,000 illl patients.”

Later, Dr Marwick wrote home: “We are very glad to see an improvement in most of the patients. They are all civilians who are interned in this concentration camp – mine are all women. Their mental attitude is definitely better. For example, in the original camp, dead bodies meant nothing, or less than nothing – children played over them, other people had to walk over them, or sat and gossiped and cooked beside them, no matter who it was.

“Last week in one of my wards, one patient was very ill, and eventually died, and the others actually wept. So, at least, life is considered more valuable now.”

Her war service saw her mentioned in dispatches, and she later married Edinburgh barrister Mr Harald Leslie KC (later to be Lord Birsay) who stood as the Labour candidate in the 1950 General Election campaign in Orkney.

There have been many remarkable Orcadians, and many remarkable contributions made by Orcadians, in the 20th century. Dr Marwick surely deserves to take her place amongst that list.