The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz Read online

  THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ

  DENIS AVEY

  with ROB BROOMBY

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © Denis Avey 2011

  Foreword Copyright © Martin Gilbert 2011

  The right of Denis Avey to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 71416 6

  Epub ISBN 978 1 444 71418 0

  Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To the memory of Ernie Lobet,

  and a man I know only as Hans.

  CONTENTS

  The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgements

  The Holocaust Educational Trust

  Photosection

  Foreword

  This is a most important book, and a timely reminder of the dangers that face any society once intolerance and racism take hold. Denis Avey, who is now ninety-three, wants his book to be a reminder that Fascism and genocide have not disappeared – as he has said, ‘It could happen here’. It could indeed happen anywhere where the veneer of civilization is allowed to wear off, or is torn off by ill will and destructive urges.

  It is good that Denis Avey now feels able to tell his story. Many of those who went through the traumas of the war years, including Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, found, as he did, that in 1945 ‘no one wanted to listen’. Sixty-five years later, a British prime minister, Gordon Brown, welcomed him to 10 Downing Street to hear his story, to commend his courage, and to give him a medal inscribed ‘In Service of Humanity’.

  It takes courage to be a witness. To this day, Denis Avey recalls with horror, among so many other horrors, a Jewish boy ‘standing to attention, drenched in blood, being beaten around the head.’ This book should be read by all those who want an eyewitness account of the nightmare that was the slave labour camp at Buna-Monowitz, just outside Auschwitz, where the Jewish prisoners in particular were subjected to the harshest of treatments, and killed once they were too weak to work for their SS taskmasters.

  Denis Avey’s experiences of the Nazi treatment of the Jews are disturbing – as they should be, for the human mind finds it hard to enter into a world dominated by cruelty, and where a small gesture like that of Denis Avey towards a Dutch Jewish prisoner is a rare shaft of light and comfort. He also tells us of his time before being made a prisoner of war: fighting in the Western Desert. Here too he tells a powerful tale without flinching from the horrors, and the death of his friend Les, ‘blasted to kingdom come’ next to him. ‘Les was the chap with twinkling eyes. I had come all the way from Liverpool with him, I had danced with his sister Marjorie, sat round the kitchen table with his folks, laughed at their jokes and shared their food.’ And now his first reaction, on finding ‘half of poor old Les all over me’, was ‘Thank God it wasn’t me.’ That reaction still troubles him today.

  The honesty of this book heightens its impact. The description of Buna-Monowitz is stark, and true. By swapping his British army uniform with a Jewish prisoner’s striped rags and going into the Jewish section of that vast slave labour camp zone, he became a witness. ‘I had to see for myself what was going on,’ he writes. Our knowledge of one of the worst corners of the SS kingdom is enhanced because he did so. This book is a tribute both to Denis Avey, and to those whose story he was determined to tell – at the risk of his life.

  Sir Martin Gilbert

  8 February 2011

  Prologue

  22 January 2010

  A microphone was thrust in front of me as I climbed out of the taxi by the fortified gates of Downing Street. What could I tell them? I was there because of something I did in the war – not my fighting in the Western Desert, not my being captured by the Germans, but because of what happened in Auschwitz.

  Back in 1945 no one had wanted to listen, so I stopped talking about it for the best part of sixty years. My first wife saw the worst of it. I would wake up covered in sweat with the sheets soaked, haunted by the same dream. I can still see that poor lad now, standing to attention, drenched in blood and being beaten around the head. I relive it every day, even now, nearly seventy years later. When I met my second wife Audrey she knew something was wrong and she knew it was to do with Auschwitz, but still I couldn’t speak to her about it for decades. These days I can’t stop going over it and she thinks I’m trapped in the past, that I should move on, look forward. That’s not easy at my age.

  The polished door of 10 Downing Street that I had seen so often on the news framing the country’s leaders opened and I stepped inside. In the hallway they took my coat and ushered me up the stairs, past the framed portraits of former prime ministers. At one point I faced a photograph of Churchill himself, and thought to myself that it was a surprisingly small picture for such a giant of a leader. I paused for breath, leaning on my metal walking stick, before going on past the post-war premiers with Thatcher, Major and Blair towards the top.

  I flopped into a chair – I was ninety-one and I needed time to recover from the climb. I looked around in awe at the grandeur of the Terracotta Room with its high ceilings and chandeliers. I knew that prime minister Gordon Brown had announced that morning that he would give evidence before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war and with the general election coming I wondered whether he would have time to meet me.

  The mood changed in a flash. The prime minister came into the room, headed straight for me and took my hand. He spoke very softly, almost in a whisper. The room was now full of people but it still felt like an intensely private moment. ‘We’re very, very proud of you. It’s a privilege for us to have you here,’ he said. I was touched.

  His wife Sarah introduced herself to me. I didn’t know what to do so I kissed her hand and said she was more beautiful than on the television. She was, but I still shouldn’t have said so. It was the kind of indiscretion that, luckily, a ninety-one-year-old can get away with. I quickly moved to safer ground by adding, ‘I liked the speech you made the other day.’ She smiled and thanked me.

  The press photographers and
TV crews wanted their shots of the two of us together. I thought the prime minister was having a rough time politically and I told him I didn’t like the way his colleagues were stabbing him in the back, and that if he needed a minder I was ready. He smiled and said he’d bear it in mind. ‘I wouldn’t do your job for a gold clock,’ I said. I may not have voted for him, but he was a decent man and I was impressed by his sincerity.

  Gordon Brown’s attention was intense and undivided and for a while it felt as if it excluded all the other people in the room. I have a glass eye – another legacy of Auschwitz – and I struggled to focus on him with my good one. Mr Brown is also partially sighted and we sat so close together as we talked, our foreheads were almost touching.

  He spoke of ‘courage’ and ‘bravery’ and I started to tell him about Auschwitz, IG Farben, the SS, all of it, the details tumbling out in no particular order. At one point I struggled to find a word and ‘Häftling’ – the German for prisoner was what came out. ‘That happens to me when I remember those days,’ a concentration camp survivor in the party said.

  To be honoured as one of twenty-seven British ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ soon after that was humbling. Most were honoured posthumously. Only two of us were still alive; the other was Sir Nicholas Winton, who had saved more than six hundred children from Czechoslovakia. I emerged with a solid silver medal bearing the words ‘In Service of Humanity.’ On my way out, I told a journalist that I could now die a happy man. It’s taken me almost seventy years to be able to say that.

  Now that I can talk about those terrible times, I feel as if a load is slowly lifting. I can think back clearly to the heart of it, the moment of the exchange.

  Mid-1944

  I knew we had to be quick. I waited, hidden in the little hut. I couldn’t even be sure that he would come, but he did and as he ducked inside I pulled off my tunic. He closed the door on the turmoil of that hideous construction site and shuffled out of his grimy striped uniform. He threw the thin garments to me and I pulled them on without hesitation. Then I watched as he dragged on my British army battledress, casting looks over his shoulder at the door as he did it.

  He was a Dutch Jew and I knew him as Hans. With that simple exchange between the two of us I had given away the protection of the Geneva Convention: I’d given my uniform, my lifeline, my best chance of surviving that dreadful place, to another man. From now on, wearing his clothes, I would be treated the way he had been treated. If I was caught, the guards would have shot me out of hand as an imposter. No question at all.

  It was the middle of 1944 when I entered Auschwitz III of my own free will.

  Chapter 1

  I never joined up to fight for King and Country, though I was patriotic enough. No, I enlisted for the sheer hell of it, for the adventure. I had no idea how much hell there would be.

  There was no sense of heroic departure when I went off to war. We left Liverpool on the troopship Otranto on a bright August morning in 1940 with no idea where we were headed.

  I looked at the Royal Liver Building, across the broadening strip of brown Mersey water and wondered whether I would ever see the green Liver birds crowning it again. Liverpool had not seen much bombing then. It would get its share a month after I left, but for now it was largely a peaceful city. I was twenty-one years old and I felt indestructible. If I lose a limb, I promised myself, I am not coming home. I was a red-headed soldier with a temperament to match and it would get me into lots of trouble but that is just how I was.

  I joined the army because I was in too much of a rush to join the RAF. The paperwork took longer. That was my first lucky escape. Watching the Spitfires plying the clouds overhead I still wanted to fly but joining the RAF then would have meant near certain death. The RAF pilots were the knights of air, but when the Battle of Britain started, the poor buggers didn’t live long and I was lucky to be out of it.

  I enlisted on 16 October 1939 and I was a crack shot so Rifleman Denis George Avey No. 6914761 was selected to join the 2nd Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, and was packed off for training at a barracks in Winchester.

  Rain or shine, it was pretty rigorous. As a ‘regular’ mob they gave us new recruits a particularly hard time. There was an awful lot of drill, plus physical training and endless obstacle courses so we collapsed exhausted into our bunks each night and were pretty fit by the end of it. We were taught to use every weapon available to the British Army but I had grown up with guns. My father bought me my first shotgun, a ‘four-ten’, when I was eight years old. It had a specially shortened stock so I could get my arms around it and I have still got it on my wall.

  My father insisted on strict discipline with guns. In the country you didn’t get the ‘yes possiblys’ – things were black and white. I grew up in a world of moral certainties and I was expected to stand up for what was right. He taught me to respect humans and animals. Birds were shot for the larder, not for sport. I learnt to shoot on clay pigeons and pretty soon I could throw them in the air myself, pick up the gun and knock them out of the sky before they fell to the ground.

  Army rifle shooting was a different ball game but I quickly got the hang of it and I was soon hitting bulls on every range up to 600 yards.

  At the end of one particularly long day of physical training, we were on the Winchester rifle range. I squeezed the trigger of the Lee-Enfield .303, felt the kick and hit the bull’s eye, no trouble.

  The chaps operating the targets were hidden behind an earth mound. They pointed out the hits using a long pole with a twelve-inch white disc on the end. As the chap lifted the pointer hesitantly towards the bull to mark my hit, I pulled back the bolt and shot the white disk clear out of his hand.

  The target man wasn’t in any danger, but I am ashamed to admit I was showing off. It got me a severe reprimand but it made me popular with the regular soldiers. I was made a ‘star’ man on account of my marksmanship and wore a badge on my uniform to prove it.

  The bayonet training had been pretty grisly. Bayonets are always known as ‘swords’ in the Rifles. We were being prepared to kill people up close where you could smell a man’s breath and see if he had shaved that morning. You were ordered to run at human effigies thirty yards away, screaming and hollering as you charged. You jabbed the blade into the guts, pulled it out and swung the rifle butt around so you could knock his head off as you passed.

  Looking on disapprovingly was Sergeant Bendle. He was a thickset man, short and tough. ‘Louder, louder’ he bellowed at us until he was red in the face. And he wasn’t happy until we were screaming as much as he was.

  It was psychological warfare and shouting helped you get through it but we still had to do it again and again until we were proficient. I knew if it was a question of me or the other feller, it wasn’t going to be me writhing in agony.

  Man-to-man bayonet fencing was better because at least it felt like a sport. We had spring-loaded swords fixed to rifles with a protective bauble on the sharp end. If we got a thrust in without it being blocked, the blade was supposed to retract. But of course the Regulars would give it an extra push beyond the stop, giving you an agonising pain in the guts. It was a reminder of what was at stake if you let your guard down.

  After Winchester we went to Tidworth on Salisbury Plain. There was one officer there who was especially popular with the lads. He was a dapper-looking gent, well turned-out with a dark pencil moustache and tidy hair. He was a 2nd Lieutenant at the time, I believe, and a cracking officer but he was better known to the rest of us as the gentleman thief, Raffles. The film had come out just before the war and posters were still around. The officer was the suave and sophisticated film star, David Niven.

  After one exercise we gathered around him for a debriefing session but we all wanted the gossip from tinsel town. He was comfortable with fans but he had trained at Sandhurst before the war and he was now adjusting back to military life again. He had just appeared opposite Olivia de Havilland in Raffles but it was ‘Ginger’, his co-star in Bachelor Mother,
he talked about most and we all knew who he meant. There was a good deal of joking around before one of the lads chirped up with, ‘I bet you wish you were anywhere else but here, sir?’ There was a momentary pause then he said, ‘Let’s just say I’d sooner be tickling Ginger Rogers’ tits.’

  Reality hit in the fourth week of May, 1940 when a hundred of us were specially selected and marched down to Tidworth railway station without being told why. We knew things were going badly in France. I was put in charge of about twenty men and told to allocate the mortars, the Bren guns and the rifles.

  After an hour, the train came in, billowing clouds of steam and smoke. We climbed in amongst the civvies and began the haul towards the coast.

  The British Expeditionary Force was in serious trouble, Calais was besieged and the German noose was tightening. The 1st Battalion, The Rifle Brigade was pinned down there and our unit from the 2nd Battalion had been put on standby to go in to help.

  We sat there on the wrong side of the Channel. Staring into the intense coastal light from the safety of England, it was hard to imagine the disaster unfolding across that narrow strip of water but we could hear the concussion of the big guns – an eerie, melancholy sound.

  The 1st Battalion had only been in France for two or three days, rushed over to try to keep Calais harbour open and help our army escape. They put up a tough resistance, fighting until there were no more bullets left. A handful of survivors were brought back by the Royal Navy but the rest were killed or captured. Winston Churchill thanked them later. He said their action tied up at least two German armoured divisions while the ‘little ships’ picked up so many men from Dunkirk.

  For us, going in would have been suicide. We would have been wiped out in the water. Happily, the big noises realised that and the plan was abandoned. If I had a guardian angel, she had just appeared again. It would count as my second lucky escape after failing to get into the RAF.