by Denis Avey
When the train came to a halt, the station signs said ‘Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof’. We were shunted into a siding and put into covered lorries. Now the guards were German. After a long journey mostly through open countryside the truck stopped in a small forest clearing where we were allowed to get down to relieve ourselves. Instantly I was on edge. The German guards began setting up a machine gun on a tripod. It was facing our way. I thought they might shoot the lot of us there and then. We were miles from anywhere with no witnesses. If they began shooting should I run or try to attack the gunners? The moment passed. They dismantled the weapon and we got back on the trucks.
Over the next few months I passed through a number of camps. I wasn’t always sure where I was and looking back it’s hard to be certain in which order I visited them. After a lengthy journey we arrived at one camp where we were put in a compound and there were Russians on the other side of a barbed wire fence.
I tried to speak to them over the days but with no common language we didn’t get very far. I could see they were in a terrible state. They were trying to keep their spirits up and they put on a show for us, dancing behind the wire, but they were frail and malnourished and they could barely manage it. It was a sorry sight. There was a terrible stench and it was days before we learnt why. The putrid smell came from decaying corpses. The Russians were being slowly worked and starved to death. Their rations were insufficient to sustain them and we were told that in desperation they kept their dead alongside them in their bunks to claim their food for a few extra days.
The rats were thriving. They were the size of cats and certainly eating human flesh. I could smell it on them. They had no respect for barbed-wire fences. I slept on the floor and woke at night to find them running across my bed. I felt their breath on my face. They stank. One of my ancestors had been a rat catcher centuries ago. If he could have seen us in the middle of the twentieth century, an era of industrial miracles, with rats feasting on people, he’d have thought civilisation had collapsed. He would have been right. I felt the bite of strange creatures larger than cat fleas. We called them bed bugs. I don’t know what they were but when I squashed them, the blood they had drunk burst from them.
I was soon in trouble. Crossing the camp one day, I was pulled up short by a German officer who was screaming at me. I had failed to salute him. I tried to explain that in the British Army we didn’t salute anyone without a cap. He wasn’t having it. One of the lads shouted that I should salute and forget it. Reluctantly I did and the officer let it go.
After a while we were split into groups and I was sent to work with the Russians down a coal mine. I stepped into the lift-cage at the pithead and dropped into the darkness, the fragile frame creaking and bending under the strain, on the verge of falling apart. The armed guards at the bottom of the shaft ordered us to walk until we reached the seam. They barely spoke to the Russians at all, they just clobbered them instead. There was brutality there all right. I was the only Englishmen on that face and they were easier on me. I was set to work shovelling coal into a skip from morning until night. I worked standing in water. It was cold and grim. There were no helmets or protective clothing for anyone, but the Russians had the worst of it. Many were toiling barefoot, hacking at the seam with heavy tools. I was not allowed to talk to them.
I had been down there for three days when I heard screaming from one of the guards. The aggression in his voice drowned out the scraping of shovels and the sound of picks in the darkness. They were knocking one of the Russians about. He had improvised some protection from the sharp rocks by tying thin strips of rubber to his bare feet. I knew straight away he had cut them from a disused conveyor belt I had seen in an abandoned side tunnel.
The guard was hysterical and shouting about sabotage. More Russians were dragged from the coalface and all ten of us were shoved up against the tunnel wall, faces blackened and smeared. There was no begging or pleading. There wasn’t time. I wasn’t aware of an order. The shouting stopped. The five soldiers lifted their guns and one fired without hesitation. A deafening shot reverberated around the network of tunnels and poorly lit passages. It was followed by another, the second guard firing as the first pulled back the bolt to reload.
I had only seconds to react. There was nowhere to run. If I was going to die in that godforsaken pit I would take one of them with me. That much I could do. It would have been death whatever happened. There were more shots in rapid succession. Then it stopped. Five bullets and five dead Russians in the coal dust. I had been the eighth in line.
My eyes had been fixed on the firing squad so I never saw the Russian bodies hit the ground. My ears were still ringing as we were bundled away. I had faced death before but with a fighting chance. This time survival had been down to the whims of a brutal enemy. I had come as close to capitulation as I was to get. I had played no part in my own salvation. What happened in that satanic hole shook me more than anything before or possibly since.
I was taken to a sparsely furnished room. The guard gave me a violent shove towards a chair and the questions began. In broken English, the officer asked if I was behind the ‘sabotage’. Had I put the Russians up to it? Who had given the order? There was nothing I could say. There had been no plan, just an exhausted wretch trying to protect his cold, injured feet. If I was planning anything, they said I would be shot. I believed them.
The threats unnerved me but I still had a motor inside that wasn’t completely broken. I was marched to a train and thrown in with another group of prisoners. They were normal rail carriages with a corridor down one side and small, basic compartments. We didn’t know where we were going. I asked to be allowed to use the toilet and realised it was at the end of the carriage and near the door. The guard was standing far away. I didn’t know the other lads at all but I spotted a possibility. As the train came to a stop we got the door open, jumped onto the tracks and ran for the nearby fields. About half a dozen of us got out before the train began to move. There was no coordination and we scattered, running in all directions.
I was mentally exhausted. The shooting in the mine had taken its toll.
I should have learnt the lesson from Italy: you had to plan an escape properly to be successful. We were in uniform and stood out a mile. I don’t know how many were caught but I was soon looking down the barrel of a gun again. There was no shooting thankfully but it was over and I was taken to a room questioned and knocked about a bit. After that I was sent to a camp that I believe was Lamsdorf. I never got to find out. My card had been marked. I was a habitual troublemaker.
I was transferred almost immediately to the punishment camp at Graudenz in northern Poland. I was told to strip and a man puffed pungent white powder over me, between my legs and under my arms. My hair was cropped short and I was photographed like a criminal from the front and the side with a number board around my neck. I was Prisoner 220543.
They led me to a spartan barracks with three English fellers and a Scot already inside. They were rough types with shaven heads and they looked like they deserved to be there. We didn’t have much in common. We were allowed out briefly for exercise into a small yard surrounded by high walls. There was nothing to do but walk in endless circles. I didn’t have much to say. The shooting in the mine still weighed heavily on me.
There were no mattresses just bare timber bunks. To sleep I had to remove the wooden laths in the middle to give my bony hips space, otherwise it was agony. The wood-fibre blanket was so thin I could see through it. I turned too quickly on the first night and my elbow ripped a hole in the middle of it.
In the morning I was taken into another bare room with two officers sitting behind a table. As the questioning began again the guards moved in to stand on each side of me. I saw their heavy polished boots. It felt like I was going to get a pasting but they were going through the motions. I was relieved. They still thought I had been involved in something with the Russians but my uniform gave me some protection unless they could prove something.
I heard of terrible things going on around me in other parts of that huge camp but I was OK. I had been sent there as a punishment but at least I wasn’t working in that awful mine any more. After about three weeks I was on the move again, this time by train with a couple of guards.
Chapter 9
We arrived at a small station. The platform was very low and I had to climb down some steps to get off the train. I was marched off straight away down a rough track and after about two miles we came to a camp in quite pleasant countryside. Compared to where I’d been recently I couldn’t believe it. There were ten well-built wooden huts, grass in the compound and just a single wire fence at the perimeter. We’ll have some fun here, I thought. A few hundred allied prisoners were already inside. There were electric lights, running water, lavatories you could sit on and central heating pipes. The twin bunks had straw filled mattresses, even decent blankets. I heard it had been built for the Hitler Youth. It certainly looked like it.
The other prisoners told me where we were, a little south of a Polish town called Oswiecim.
The next morning we were woken at 0630 hours and marched out of the gates, through fields and woods for a mile and a half until the countryside abruptly vanished. Ahead was a vast, sprawling building site, stretching far away. Smoke plumed from chimneys and steam cranes. The dark bones of a satanic factory complex were rising from the mud in concrete and iron. Above them, a screen of barrage balloons bobbed on steel cables. We were marched in.
The whole site was crawling with strange, slow-moving figures – hundreds, no, thousands of them. All were dressed in tattered, ill-fitting striped shirts and trousers that were more like pyjamas than work clothes. Their faces were grey, their heads were roughly shaven and partly covered by tiny caps. They were like moving shadows, shapeless and indistinct, as if they could fade away any moment. I couldn’t tell who they were, what they were.
The rest of the lads called them the ‘stripeys’. They told me the Germanised name of this Polish town, Oswiecim. It was Auschwitz.
I recognised these poor wraiths as my fellow beings though much that marks humanity had been stripped from them. I could see that already. They wore the Star of David badge. They were Jews.
We were split into work Kommandos of twenty to thirty men and sent off to different contractors, all within their own fenced-off areas. The work began immediately, shifting and carrying building materials and heavy pipework around the site and laying cables. Right away, I saw how it was. When something needed to be shifted, they would call for the poor stripeys, who would appear as if from the earth and swarm around the pipe, valve or cable to be lifted. It took so many because they were so weak. There were men hauling huge bags of cement on their backs, others struggling with wheelbarrows.
Brutal foremen, wielding clubs or heavy knotted ropes, stood over them. These were criminals recruited as Kapos, prisoners who had the power of life or death over the others and they used it freely. I hated them instantly. I witnessed my first beating straight away and found it hard to believe that life was now so cheap. Even in the desert, we had taken more notice of death. Here they didn’t run to the cost of a bullet to end a stripey’s life when boots and clubs would do it for them.
At this point, they kept these Jewish prisoners away from us. Talk to us and they risked being shot or beaten to death. At night we returned to our half-decent camp and they were marched off, God knows where.
The massive factory was being built by the chemicals giant, IG Farben, primarily to manufacture ‘buna’, synthetic rubber for Hitler’s war effort, as well as methanol for fuel. The site was two miles long from east to west and almost a mile deep. Within that wired compound, laid out like a massive grid, there were countless individual ‘Baus’ or building sites and the place was dominated by a large industrial plant with four tall chimneys. We called it the Queen Mary after the three-funnelled liner. Somebody couldn’t count. There were buildings, towers and chimneys going up everywhere, gantries and plumbing on a giant scale, with narrow railway lines along each block, bringing in all that was needed to get this place up and working. Everywhere, in the nooks and crannies of this industrial nightmare, were the poor creatures in their filthy zebra uniforms, many too weak to stand, let alone shift and carry. I knew by now that this was no ordinary labour camp. They were being deliberately worked to death.
It was hell on earth. Hell on earth. There was no grass, no greenery of any sort, just mud in winter, dust in summer. Nature – not to mention the Grand Architect himself – had abandoned that place. I never saw a butterfly, a bird or a bee the whole time I was there.
It was soon clear that the guards could not enforce the rigid separation of groups. It slowed things down and they needed the work done quickly.
We were soon working alongside the Jews. From then on we shared their labours but not the lashes or the random killings. We were not supposed to die here and they were. That was the difference. When the wind came from the west, there was a sickly sweet stench from some distant chimneys.
For a few days I worked alongside one poor chap, I think they called him Franz. I had started to recognise him in the crowd. Then one day he just wasn’t there any more. I snatched a moment when the Kapos weren’t looking to ask one of the men in his Kommando what had happened to him. He gestured upwards with both hands and then said, ‘He has gone up the chimney.’
The scales were lifted from my eyes. Those too weak to work were being killed and burnt. The stench was the smell from the distant crematoria chimneys. I knew it now but being told was not enough for me.
On one march back from IG Farben a row broke out between some of the British prisoners and the Wehrmacht guards or Postens, as they called them. Our lads were winding them up, booing and jeering and I was caught up in the middle of it. There was a fracas and the Postens were quickly in amongst us trying to restore control, jostling and shoving us around. The Feldwebel – sergeant – was shouting orders. He was a tall feller and he focused on me the moment I emerged from the melee. He grabbed a rifle from a Posten, seized it with both hands and swung it with all his might towards my head. I saw it coming and ducked out of the way. There was a thud; the sound of crushing bone. One of the Germans immediately behind me had taken the full force of the blow to the side of his head. He went down straight away, his face losing shape. The butt of a nine-pound rifle swung with force at the temple didn’t leave much doubt. If he wasn’t dead already, he didn’t live long. We got back into line and prepared for retribution. It didn’t come. I never saw that particular Feldwebel again.
Our camp was too good to last. One day in early 1944 we were moved to a site only yards outside the southern edge of the IG Farben complex. The stripeys were somewhere to the east of us, close enough that at night we could hear screams and sometimes gunshots coming from their camp.
Our new prison compound was bare and basic and more crowded than the first. Icicles hung from the barracks ceiling in winter and mosquitoes swarmed in the warmer months. There was a crude latrine, just a row of holes in a plank over a pit and even those were few in number for a camp the size of ours.
We heard that E715, as it was named, had housed Russian prisoners. The rumours said the SS cleared them out to make way for us, herded them into the crude tunnel which was later to be our air-raid shelter and killed them there with poisoned gas. It was hard to know whether it was true or not. In a place like that anything was possible.
I now know that Soviet POWs were the victims of the first experiments using poisoned gas. In September 1941 hundreds of them were murdered using Zyklon B gas in a basement at the main Auschwitz camp. It worked but it wasn’t efficient enough for the camp commanders so they adapted a crematorium building to allow the gas crystals to be dropped in through holes in the roof. Nine hundred died in that experiment. The wheels of mechanised murder had begun to turn.
Back then the rumours that gassings had taken place in our own camp simply fuelled my frustration and the need for certainty. The Russia
ns were treated nearly as badly as the Jews. We were luckier than either group. Our guards were usually the Wehrmacht, the German Army, less brutal than the SS but here they had none of the humanity of the Afrika Korps.
The German officer we saw most in E715 was an NCO called Mieser. He’d turn up if there was trouble to be sorted and he was there for the morning roll call.
We would be as unruly as we dared, we were not being counted for our benefit.
Mieser’s shouts for us to be silent –‘ruhig’ in German – were quickly echoed by the lads. Whenever he appeared we barracked him, repeating it mercilessly in chorus. So Ruhig, was the name we gave him. It was schoolboy stuff but good for morale. Ruhig could be officious and some hated him but he was not one of the worst.
We rarely saw the commandant or Hauptman as we called him. I had reason to face him on one occasion. We were returning from work one night in the rain. I was standing next to a cockney lad called Phil Hagen. We were in a small barbed-wire compound near the entrance to the camp and the guards began to search us. It didn’t take them long to find that Phil had a dead fowl stuffed down his trousers, a chicken or maybe a duck, which he’d managed to get hold of somewhere.
They always punished more than one if we got caught. There was a lot of shouting and hollering and the lads soon began to jeer, forcing the guards to take out their weapons and loose a few shots into the air to get control.
I was close to Phil so the two of us were carted off and locked up for the night in a freezing cold punishment cell towards the front of the camp. There was no food or water. When we were brought before the commandant the next morning, Phil claimed the creature had attacked him and he had been forced to kill it in self-defence. There was a pause for the translation, then the commandant burst out laughing and the tension was defused. No more was said about it.
