SKIRMISHER

They all were dying, and the only thing that started to bring back their humanity, their individuality… was lipstick.

I’m quoting, roughly, from Banksy’s manifesto. Banksy’s the guy who just recently launched a funny “guerilla attack” on Paris Hilton’s debut album. But the humor, in my high-fallutin opinion, falls a bit flat. So I resort to Banksy’s own website to dig up some dirt, only to find myself gazing at the kind of story that made me wish I had written.

Banksy’s manifesto contains this extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The key word here is something red and surprisingly vital; watch out.

“…Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

Stumble it!