Famed war journalist Martha Gellhorn reported from every major war zone in her lifetime. At 28 years old, she covered the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona. At 80, she was in Panama reporting on the American invasion.

She was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, a fact which threatens to overshadow Gellhorn’s legacy as one of the greatest war reporters of the twentieth century. She died in 1998, at 89 years old, after a 60-year career in war correspondence and travel writing.

She also published 21 books, both journalism and fiction. Her well-honed writing skills and activist attitude made Gellhorn a compassionate asset to the wars she covered.
Her warfront dispatches were published in Collier’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly and the Guardian, as well as her most famed book of war reportage, The Face of War (1959).

It is this book that hides the gem of Gellhorn’s long career: a report from the first Nazi concentration camp, simply titled “Dachau.” It needs nothing more than this. Her writing is so intense, so perceptive, and so penetrative that it is impossible to read the story without feeling permanently altered by it.

“All I did was report from the group up, not the other way round,” Gellhorn told her editor at the Daily Mirror, Hugh Cudlipp.

This is what great muckrakers do: they rake the muck and they get dirty. Gellhorn spent her life on the ground with the people her stories were about, producing journalism that was able to explain, define, and capture the unimaginable truth.

In addition to this “in the thick of it” reporting, Gellhorn never neglected her medium; she recognized the importance of the written word as a powerful tool, and she used it accordingly.

Through reports like “Dachau,” the West was exposed to the reality of the Nazi regime and confronted with the inhumanity of concentration camps for the first time. Gellhorn was one of the first journalist’s to enter the concentration camp, and one of the last to leave. The images remained with her for the rest of her life. Gellhorn describes the dehumanization of the prisoners through malnutrition, physical brutality, and medical experimentation:

“They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.”

Gellhorn’s piece is rife with visceral and disturbing description, creating an immediacy and presence that-60 years since Dachau was abolished-is still uncomfortable to read. Despite the sameness of the prisoners’ appearance, Gellhorn tells their stories individually-ensuring that she gives enough time and attention to the atrocities that the men and women of Dachau have had to live through. One man-or as Gellhorn describes, “what had been a man”-had arrived at Dachau in the last boxcar, where he was locked inside with other men, women, and children by German guards. The people inside the boxcar “slowly died of hunger and thirst and suffocation,” Gellhorn writes, adding, “from time to time, the guards fired into the cars to stop the noise.” But “this man had survived.” Gellhorn describes her encounter with him, which is both disturbing and moving, writing with a compassion and humanity that makes the horror of the situation even more unbearable:

“He was found under a pile of dead. Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked and suddenly he wept. ‘Everyone is dead,’ he said, and the face that was not a face twisted with pain or sorrow or horror… ‘Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.’”

Martha Gellhorn captured this moment by reporting it as one human to another, rather than as an objected, disinterested party.

The “Dachau” piece is full of precious human moments, full of stories and characters, full of pain, and suffering, but also of hope. In the beginning of the piece, Gellhorn is flying away from Dachau with American soldiers when one of the soldiers says to her: “We’ve got to talk about it, if anyone believes us or not.” And so she did. And the Western world was forced to sit up and listen.

Ready “Dachau” here.