The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

by Denis Avey

  I sat down and he handed me water in a battered tin cup. It was my first drink in at least twenty-four hours and I gulped it down in seconds. He brought me more. Now I became aware of its earthy taste but I gulped just as fast. He stood there with his eyes fixed on me. ‘Food?’ I said gesturing to my mouth. ‘Eat?’ He cast around in the dark then gave me a handful of raisins. The strong taste stung my palate. After bread and more water, I flopped in the corner and slept.

  I awoke feeling groggy. The old man was still there. He brought me eggs and a pastry with dried fruit in it. I nodded gratefully as he withdrew and watched me eat. After the dog biscuit on the boat it was a feast. I asked where I was and got a blank stare and more words I couldn’t understand. An idea dawned on me so I took a stick and drew a vague map of Greece in the dirt floor, struggling to give it recognisable shape. He stared at the squiggles more baffled than ever until I added the unmistakable boot shape of Italy to the left and he came to life with an explosion of repetitive language. He took the stick and pointed with conviction to the three fingers I had drawn to represent southern Greece. So that was where I was. I could tell from his vehemence that he hated the Italians who had occupied his country.

  I revived a lot with food and rest and I don’t know now how long he sheltered me for but I couldn’t stay there for ever. If I was caught with him he would get a bullet, it was as simple as that. I wasn’t really sure how far I could trust him, though, looking back, that assessment now seems harsh. I wanted to get away.

  He gave me some old canvas sandals, which I tied to my bare feet with a bit of cord and he produced a coarse shirt that I put on under my tunic. I was reluctant to dump my military clothing. I knew the risk. Disguised as a civilian I could be shot as a spy. I am sure he was relieved to see me go.

  It was a solitary journey and I had to stay out of sight: the oil stains would attract attention. Added to this, my geography of the region was poor and I couldn’t visualise what lay ahead. My watch had survived the water and I used it to find north. I avoided roads, trekking over hills and through olive groves. I kept away from settlements and drank water from tiny streams when I could find them. I was weak and lethargic but forced myself to keep going. I was beyond the stage of having hunger pains and I knew from now on I would have to steal to eat. Every contact risked betrayal. If anyone helped me they might be shot. Theft was the better option for everyone.

  During the day people were usually working outdoors, often some distance away from their huts. It was easy to break in and a bit like being on patrol in the desert again: find a good vantage point, hunker down and observe. When I knew it was safe I’d go in but there were only slim pickings to be had. The people were poor and suffering from the Italian occupation. I never left with a full stomach but on one occasion I found the same sort of dried fruit pastry the old boy had given me.

  When I realised I was in Greece I had dared to think I might stay out of the bag a little longer but it was hard to imagine getting right across occupied Europe and home. As the days passed, I grew weaker. Still smeared with oil and now caked in earth, I stumbled into a small band of men and women working in a field. I scared them more than they scared me. I asked for water. They understood and handed me a long, skin flask. I drank what I could and headed off quickly.

  Soon after that I saw there were armed men on my tail. I suspected they were Italians. Someone had reported me. I ran into a large olive grove and crouched down to hide but it was hopeless. They began shooting, there was nowhere to run and they would have killed me. Surrounded, I emerged with my arms up. They tied my hands and walked me to a truck. I was in the bag again.

  It was a long journey. I was taken to a crowded camp full of allied prisoners, British and South Africans alongside Greek partisans. It was a dreadful place made up of bivouac tents in a field. There was a lot of rain and even snow. Many of the prisoners were severely ill with dysentery and other diseases. There were no latrines when I arrived so the prisoners had to go where they could and they were so ill that meant anywhere. It was a dreadful place, that field, and the prisoners quickly named it ‘Dysentery Acre’. Eventually the Italians relented and a trench was dug about four feet by ten and four feet deep. It was soon full: 160 cubic feet of human excrement. It stank.

  There was no room for embarrassment. I’d had dysentery on the blue and I knew what it was like, the sickness, the stomach pains and the urgency. You lined up cheek by jowl, a row of backsides sticking out over the edge of the banking. I remember one thin-faced chap crouching next to me in a sorry old state. Somehow he lost his balance and slipped down the banking into the hole. He was waist-deep in it, poor feller.

  ‘That’s the second time I’ve been in here today’ he said.

  After that I was moved north and held in a large warehouse near Patras. We had bread and water and nothing more but at least we were led out by a guard when we needed the latrine. He stood and watched as we crouched over a shallow stream. The conditions were a little better but that didn’t last.

  Chapter 8

  We were loaded on board another ship. It was warm down below, a pleasant change from the chilly camp and this time, we didn’t have to travel in a cargo hold. There were Italian soldiers on board, going home on leave. One tried to talk to me as we filed past, asking in Italian, then in French who we were and where we had come from. He didn’t get very far.

  One torpedoing had been quite enough for me but looking at the maps now, I think we took the safe route, hugging the Greek coast inside the islands of Cephalonia and Lefkas before entering the Strait of Corfu to make a rapid dash across the Strait of Otranto to the heel of Italy.

  We spent the journey sitting on the floor. At night an Irishman with a tender voice sang a sad song and two South Africans talked about their home. We arrived at a harbour full of guards, maybe Bari or Brindisi, and were marched off to a tree-lined field with a little grass. There were hundreds of us by now and there was no barbed-wire fence so they needed more soldiers to watch us. Some of the lads there were in a terrible state, with swollen faces and limbs from lack of vitamins.

  They gave us little to eat and those who had any strength left soon kicked up a rumpus about it. We shouted and jostled the guards until it all got out of hand. We were lucky no one was shot. In the end they regained control and five of us were isolated from the rest. They chained us to trees, shackling our arms and legs and we cursed our way through a miserable day. I’d usually been the one in charge. Now I was tethered like an animal. It seemed an age since I’d set off from Liverpool in the Otranto, expecting adventure. We stayed in that field for three or four days and then we were moved to a proper camp.

  It had long low barracks of stone and concrete, divided into five bays with timber bunks for around fifty people in each. We were given a couple of warm blankets and a thin palliasse stuffed with straw for a mattress. This was Campo Concentramento Prigioniero di Guerra, Sessantacinque. That’s Prisoner of War Camp PG 65 to you and me. It was close to Altamura in southern Italy.

  One of the Italian officers was a major who looked like Jimmy Cagney. He was a reasonable feller and he was as pleased as punch when we told him. There was no forced labour and no brutality but the extreme lack of food made it a shocking place.

  We had an outdoor cookhouse and the Italians dumped trees in the camp to fuel the fire. One of the lads who still had some strength chopped them up. He probably got extra rations. A huge cooking pot was placed on the flames and in it went whatever they had, which was usually not much more than macaroni. When the soup was done it was carried around the camp in ten-gallon aluminium containers and dished out, just one ladle of thin liquid per man, per day. To start with we got a small piece of bread on top but that was soon halved in size. There was a slurp of ersatz coffee for breakfast and that was it. I started to feel my body deteriorating and none of us were well to start with.

  The lice in our clothes had a better diet. I could take my shirt off and squash a hundred between my fingers.
Within half an hour there would be a hundred more. They drove you scatty.

  Soon after arriving we were lined up and asked what we did in civvy-street. The interpreter’s English wasn’t great and I remained suspicious, so said I was a cat burglar. He looked up from his list, clearly baffled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cat burglar,’ I repeated.

  ‘Gat bugglar?’ he said looking towards his superior for a reaction. There wasn’t one. He wrote something down and moved on to the next man.

  When the first Red Cross parcels arrived we thought we were in heaven, though we had to share each parcel between many people. There would be a tin of powdered Klim – milk spelt backwards – a little coffee or tea, a tin of vegetables or some processed cheese, sometimes dried eggs, plus a small bar of chocolate, sugar or raisins.

  The boredom was crushing. There was no military discipline in the camp. We had to look after ourselves. We had nothing to cut the bread with but we did have tiny metal mirrors and I found a way of splitting them to create blades. I added wooden handles to make pretty good bread knives and traded them for extra food. The camps worked on barter. You had to have something to swap. As the months passed, I set about making a sort of small suitcase out of flattened Klim containers. God knows why. I had hardly anything to put in it and it was not part of any daring escape plan. I flattened the cans then folded over the edges to link them together in larger sheets that I could bend into shape. It helped me get through the long days and a tin box of sorts emerged at the end of it.

  Although we had Red Cross tea and coffee, we had no easy way to boil water. I decided to improvise so I made an enclosed drum with revolving fan blades inside like a sealed hamster wheel. I connected it by a pipe to a tiny metal box filled with cinders, lit a fire around them and when I cranked the fan, it created a mini blast-furnace. The cinders glowed red-hot and you could boil a tin of water on top. I was terribly proud of it and it meant we could drink tea for the first time. Others went on to adapt and perfect the blowers and they were a great success.

  I suspect now that the Italians simply didn’t have the food to give us. Some of the ordinary guards had little more than we did. We even dried out our used tea leaves to trade with them.

  I was still suffering from the ignominy of capture. I barely trusted anybody and I kept largely to myself. I do remember a couple of prisoners. There was a cockney called Partridge who would do favours without wanting anything in return. Then there was another chap called Bouchard who was desperately thin and dying on his feet. He spent his days scavenging for food around the camp. We talked sometimes but never about home. Why torture ourselves?

  I heard later that some of those from other camps were taken outside to be disinfected, only to be spat on and abused by the public. We stayed where we were. Occasionally a Catholic priest would turn up and conduct a service for some of the more religious lads. Even that was done through the barbed-wire fence. He never came in.

  There were other attempts to ease the monotony. If you knew anything about anything, you could hold a talk about it. The subjects ranged from history and geography to engineering. One chap talked for hours about his lathe and the principles of turning wood and metal and how to cut threads.

  After a while they began building extra huts; we were already overcrowded and the camp was to expand. We didn’t usually do forced labour in Italy but when we were offered 150 grams of extra bread a day to help with construction we took it. The food situation was dire.

  The huts we were to build were sited outside the perimeter. The plan was to complete them first and then extend the fence around them. Going outside the wire was a thrill in itself. There could be food to filch or a chance to get away.

  I was one of six lads sent onto the roof to fasten tiles down with cement. It gave me my first real view of the surrounding land. There was just one guard watching over us and he was down below. My belly ached with hunger. It couldn’t be any worse on the run. I chose my moment and asked the guard if I could climb down to relieve myself. He reluctantly said yes, although I knew he couldn’t keep an eye on all of us.

  Once out of sight I didn’t waste a second and bolted straight away.

  I expected the hullabaloo at any moment but nothing happened and I managed to put some distance between me and the camp before resting. I have no idea when he raised the alarm but I was certainly well away.

  I had a piece of bread with me and a tiny chunk of cheese. It was the only preparation I had made. I decided to avoid the coast and head north towards neutral Switzerland. I tried to be optimistic. A home run was more likely from here than Greece but it was still hundreds of miles over enemy territory.

  The journey felt familiar. I avoided roads and large settlements and scavenged for food in remote farm outhouses. I didn’t get caught at it but I didn’t get much food either. The best I managed was the odd dodgy vegetable and something that tasted of aniseed, possibly fennel. I have never been able to eat it since. I covered a lot of distance on foot over the next three or four days but I was getting weak and hungry. I came across a small crop of wheat but it was going grey and rotting in the fields. Italy was not a happy place. It began to rain like the devil.

  I took cover in a small deserted building and waited for the rain to stop. It was dark outside when I heard voices calling. My shelter had been surrounded and they were ordering me to come out. I had been spotted.

  I stepped into the gloom. I was anxious. I couldn’t see how many Italian soldiers were waiting for me but it hardly mattered, they’d got me. I was put on a lorry and taken away. They never bothered to tie my hands and I wasn’t knocked about. They got me back to the camp quickly and I spent a day and a night in a punishment cell. Then the dreadful routine resumed. It had been an unplanned effort born out of frustration. I was back in the bag and I’d have to lump it.

  Dysentery dominated life in the camp – not just some slightly inconvenient type of stomach upset but a life-threatening, demeaning illness which sapped all our energy leaving us weak, listless and in pain. We were all losing weight and with so many sick people, embarrassing accidents were common. Once you had messed yourself, getting properly clean was almost impossible with just cold water to do it. I saw lads in tears with the humiliation of it, grown men caked in diarrhoea. Many people in that camp died of preventable diseases and neglect. One man’s body was kept lying around for days in a shed before he was buried. I remember it because I inherited his trousers. Mine were ripped and filthy and the rest of my uniform was almost as bad.

  I was relieved to have them, whether they had been taken from a corpse or not. It was practical. But as the days went by I started to itch badly, and this time it was more than lice. A blotchy, lumpy, red rash appeared on the insides of my thighs. It spread quickly until I had it all around the groin and God knows where else. I had picked up scabies. Tiny mites had burrowed into my flesh, and laid their eggs. As I scratched, the skin broke and bled and I knew it could get infected in all the filth. I’d survive a painful day but at night it seemed my skin was inflamed and crawling.

  The bouts of dysentery and constant hunger meant I was horribly lethargic and getting thinner. If I stood up quickly, I would black out and keel over. After a while I began doing it on purpose just to knock myself out behind the barracks. It made the time pass more quickly. When I was out cold there was relief from the hunger, the lice and the torment of the bleeding rash. Most of us did it. The torment of scabies went on for weeks, maybe even months. Not until a bar of carbolic soap appeared in the camp to wash with did I start to bring it under control. My body was in a shocking state, but in my head, I wasn’t a prisoner at all. The enemy had done many things to me but they hadn’t captured my mind.

  That year in Italy was hellish. Many of the lads died of disease and neglect. When news came that some of us were being moved I felt it couldn’t get much worse. I was too weak to march out of the camp. There were no officers with us and no military discipline to speak of. The best any
of us could muster was a slow listless walk to the lorries. We were loaded into cattle trucks at a railway siding. In better days I would have leapt straight in but it was now a struggle to get up. A sign on the outside said ‘Forty men or ten horses’. There was one bucket for everything. I wanted to be as far away from that as possible. Many of the lads still had dysentery. I dropped down in the corner, relieved to have found a place below the only window. It was a twelve-inch square gap with barbed wire stretched across. It provided air, light and a restricted view of the world rolling by. It was also the only place to empty the bucket, which was soon overflowing. Something had to be done.

  A couple of the boys lifted it to the window but pouring a bucket of excrement through a wired-up hole above head height was messy. Much of it blew back and ran down the inside of the carriage where I had sat. There was some verbiage about that. All the shit from Shanghai and I was sat underneath it.

  We had the same old dog biscuit to eat and a container of water between us all. We didn’t know where we were going. As the train wound its way slowly north, we passed miles of deserted beaches and I saw a sign with the name ‘Rimini’. I had heard of that before the war. We turned inland and passed through villages where people came out to wave. Maybe they thought we were Italians.

  I had no idea then that this was the same route they would use to transport Italy’s Jews and other enemies of the Reich northwards to the concentration camps. Our trucks might be stinking and filthy, but at least we had the space to lie down. The Jews were crammed in much tighter, weaving their way across Europe to a fearful destination with no protection at all from the Geneva Convention, not that it had done us much good so far.

  After days on the move the track began to twist and climb and trundled through the Brenner Pass. We had reached Austria. I got my first sight of the Alps through the barbed wire. I was awestruck by their magnificence and troubled by a contradiction. I associated myself with the countryside I had grown up with. Its beauty seemed to me to be linked to the beauty in mankind. It had made me the man I was. I wondered how such frightful things could be happening in a place of such natural splendour. I hadn’t seen the half of it.