by Denis Avey
There were two particular atrocities against our men that were widely discussed in the camp. I wasn’t on the spot but I heard all about them.
‘Jock’ Campbell was a sharp-witted lad and despite camp conditions he was usually well turned out, even dapper. The story goes that the column was returning to camp one evening when Jock spotted a female forced-labourer struggling to carry a heavy canister.
When Jock saw what was happening, he broke out of the column and went to help. He was ordered back in line. When he refused he was bayonetted, though not fatally it turned out. Some accounts have pointed the finger at a soldier named Benno Franz. I never saw the incident so I can’t say. What I did see was Campbell lying in the dirt being attended to by some of the lads when we were marched past. It was nasty but it can’t have been a full thrust and I am now fairly sure he recovered.
On 23 February 1944 a corporal from the Royal Army Service Corps was hard at work on the Buna-Werke site when he was ordered to climb seventy feet up a steel gantry covered in ice. He refused, saying that without the proper footwear it would be lethal. He was shot dead on the spot. His name was Corporal Reynolds. Some accused an officer called Rittler, others said it was the soldier Benno Franz again. I recall hearing a shot that day and never went to look as it was not an unusual sound. Those events doused what good humour there was.
Some in E715 decided the best way to cope was to fill what little spare time they had with creative activity. They tried putting on theatre productions in the barracks to raise morale, to show we weren’t beaten. Some bright spark had the idea of dramatising the story of Sweeney Todd, as if we needed the demon barber to add spice to our mundane lives. People were being dispatched all the time.
Perhaps someone was attempting a subversive allegory. If they were I can’t remember much of it other than the German guards and censors coming to check what we were up to. There were other dubious productions but it wasn’t my way of coping. We were witnessing a never-ending atrocity and I didn’t want diversion.
I changed my mind when it came to football and so did many of the lads, we were only human. A few T-shirts and some shorts were brought into the camp and someone dreamt up the idea of an international tournament of sorts. The teams were to be England, Scotland, Wales and South Africa but there weren’t enough of each nation. Burt Cook was the only South African to play, as far as I can recall, so they were just team names really. I played two games on the right wing for the South African team, I scored in the final and we won.
The matches took place on a field to the east of the main entrance and I fancy there were machine guns set up to stop us getting too frisky. Doug Bond, who became a friend of mine years later, was goalkeeper for England, though I didn’t know him at the time. The chance of a game had been hard to turn down and right or wrong I enjoyed it enormously.
Looking back we were perhaps naive. We were lined up for team photos afterwards and we can all be seen smiling, fresh-faced, into the lens. Now I think we were part of an elaborate propaganda exercise. The photographer was a civilian, as I recall, and the photos were handed out to us later. Around the same time we received some fresh uniforms, they weren’t new but they were smarter than what we had. Many of the lads were lined up and photographed in those too.
It was a gift to the Germans. It helped the Wehrmacht to put some distance between their treatment of us and the methods the SS used on the Jews. Someone was anticipating the questions that would come in the post-war period. I have no doubt it also helped the camp commanders keep the visitors from the Red Cross off their backs. They had proved to be highly gullible anyway. Some of their reports into conditions in our camp I saw later bore little resemblance to the truth.
They suggested we had been able to play football whenever there were enough guards. It was utter balderdash. One Red Cross report claimed that the work was not hard and that there were no complaints about it.
They said we had hot running water, and even more ridiculous that they had seen inmates playing tennis. The Red Cross did report that the pit latrines were insufficient in number and that the drinking water was unfit for consumption, something the Germans had at least confirmed to them.
This was not a cosy environment. I never knew who I could trust. There was constant talk of spies in our ranks, ferrets we called them. I was aware of the story of Miller, I recall seeing him. He was a well-spoken chap. He had arrived alone from Lambsdorf camp and told the lads he had served with the Green Howards, one of the smaller regiments. He had aroused suspicion immediately. Details of his war service and his knowledge of the regiment didn’t add up, so the story went. Some of the boys started fishing around. They concluded Miller was a ferret – a spy placed in the camp to get information from us.
What we heard was that they jumped him in the latrines, killed him and threw his body into the pit below. I wasn’t in on that one, but I never doubted it at the time. There were plenty of men capable of doing a job like that in the camp. The Germans never responded to the fact that a man had gone missing.
The IG Farben Industrial Complex, Buna-Monowitz in 1944
Auschwitz III, Buna-Monowitz at the end of 1944
Chapter 10
We worked eleven hours a day. Forget everything you have seen in war movies where the men swan around in cricket sweaters, doing a bit of gardening or gym to cover their escape tunnels, smoking pipes and teasing the Germans. It may have been like that in the officers’ camps but for us, the ‘other ranks’, it was hard, physical work, though it was not nearly as hard for us as for the stripeys.
Each day I saw Jews being killed on the factory site. Some were kicked and beaten to death, others simply collapsed and died in the dirt of exhaustion and hunger. I knew the same was happening in every corner of the camp, in every work detail. These Jews might be able to prolong their lives a little but the outcome was likely to be the same. They weren’t fed enough to survive. Around midday the dreadful cabbage soup arrived. We could barely stomach it, though ours offered some nutrition while the stuff the Jewish prisoners had was little more than stinking water. From time to time we managed to exaggerate the numbers on our work Kommando to get more soup than we needed. We couldn’t give it directly to the Jews but we left it standing around where they could get to it. If the guards or the Kapos saw them eating our soup they kicked it over to stop them. There was usually a beating.
At the Buna-Werke they sucked the life and labour from each exhausted man and when he was spent, he was sent to be killed. I did not know the names then but they went west, either to the original brick-built camp, Auschwitz One, or the vast new wooden sprawl of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There they would be killed sooner rather than later, many immediately on arrival. Behind it all stood the SS and the executives of IG Farben itself. The Kapos, the prisoners put in charge of their fellows, became the focus of my anger. They were evil men and many wore the green triangle of the career criminal. Their survival depended on keeping the rest of the prisoners in line. If they lost their privileged job they were friendless and then they didn’t live long.
People talk about man’s inhumanity to man, but that wasn’t human or inhuman – it was bestial. Love and hate meant nothing there. It was indifference. I felt degraded by each mindless murder I witnessed and could do nothing about. I was living in obscenity.
For the Jewish prisoners anything that could be traded or swallowed had value. It might offer them the chance to live a bit longer. They all had to find a niche, a way of securing a few extra calories a day, or they died. The risks for them were enormous.
We were privileged in comparison, but only in comparison. We argued for the occasional Sunday off and there was a slight easement in our conditions. Not before I got into an unexpected row with one of the senior contractors on the IG Farben site.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A little knowledge of a language in a place like Auschwitz could be deadly. I had accused one of the managers on site of being a ‘Schwindler’ to his face
for making us work seven days a week without a break. He went berserk. I knew I had misjudged the word when the guards were called to take me away.
In the end a translator was called in to mediate, a Scottish soldier with better German than mine. He argued that in English to call someone a ‘swindler’ was a mild criticism, like calling him a rogue. Clearly in German it was much worse. Actually ‘Schwindler’ was mild compared to what I really thought but that plea took the heat out of the row and calmed things down. I had been lucky again.
It was generally hard graft and we were angry that our forced labour could help the German war effort. We complained that the work was in breach of the Geneva Convention. To my surprise the complaint was passed on and we were summoned to an office building on the IG Farben site. I was one of five lads chosen to go and make the case. I was amazed they were prepared to listen at all but when we were ushered into the office and saw that a senior officer was going to preside over the meeting I knew that it didn’t bode well.
He listened to the complaint then he took his Luger pistol from his holster, slammed it on the table and said. ‘That’s my Geneva Convention. You will do what I say.’ We were sent back to work but we were determined to do whatever we could to hinder what was going on.
I was often ordered to make deliveries to the office of one German engineer. He wore a trilby hat and high boots or gaiters when he was out on the site but he was chatty and seemed to like me. We had some plans to subvert the work the Germans were making us do and that connection made the subterfuge easier. That’s where I got to know Paulina, a young Ukrainian who worked there. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union she and many other Ukrainian women had been transported across Europe and press-ganged to work for the Nazis. They had more freedom than the Jewish prisoners. They didn’t wear striped uniforms and they were not there to be exterminated but life was still precarious for them. They had to have courage to help us and Paulina helped us a lot. She came from somewhere on the Black Sea, she was young, had a broad face and wavy blond hair. She tipped us off when special shipments of machinery or components were expected to come in so that we could try and arrange some sort of sabotage.
When it was too tricky to meet in the engineer’s office we’d tie up in a small boiler house. The boiler man was a forced labourer and I’d warn him in advance. He knew what was going on but he teased us anyway, linking his fingers together whilst whispering the words ‘amour, amour’ suggestively.
He had unscrewed a sheet of corrugated iron from the structure behind the boiler so that if the SS came into the shed when we were talking one of us could escape out the back of the building. I never had to.
The information Paulina gave us was vital. We swapped labels on railway trucks hoping they would go to the wrong places. We slipped sand into axle-bearings so they would run hot and wear out. We twisted the blades on cooling fans so that they would vibrate and gradually damage the machinery. We even laid sharp stones under electrical cables in trenches in the hope they would eventually sever the supply. When we were directed to rivet the huge gasometers, we developed a way of peening the rivet head so it looked neatly finished but would work loose in time and cause a leak. I would sneak into the contractors’ yards, find the bottles of oxygen for oxyacetylene welding and use a removable key I had made to open the valves and release the gas. Acetylene could be smelt; oxygen couldn’t. It was the perfect crime. My engineering expertise came in handy for the first time since the desert. I was glad to be of use.
Paulina did more for me than supply information. She managed to get me cooked food to eat on a couple of occasions, better still, she gave it to me on a plate. I don’t know where it came from but I appreciated it. She liked me, that’s as far as it went. There was nothing between us but when she gave me her photograph I kept it safe all the same. I carried it in my uniform and I brought it home with me. I still have it today. She also gave me a simple signet ring with the mysterious initials FD inscribed on it and the date 1943. Even casual gifts were rare in that place and had a human value so I carried that all the way home too.
Much of the sabotage we pulled off wouldn’t have happened without her. They were all slow-burn projects. They had to be. Anything dramatic would be detected and someone would pay for it. It was too risky.
The ground for the buna rubber plant had been broken in April 1941. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, had promised IG Farben thousands of slave labourers to build it. Not a single batch of buna rubber was ever produced in that plant and I’d like to think we played our part.
The inhumanity was all around. One day I was looking towards the canteen buildings on the IG Farben site when I saw a Jewish prisoner rummaging in a dustbin for something to eat or trade, some mouldy greens perhaps or a cigarette butt or a piece of wire. He was moving slowly. Hunger and exhaustion had blunted his senses to everything other than the need to eat or die.
There was no time to warn him. He didn’t see the female guard in uniform, one of very few on the site, until she was right behind him. She knocked him to the floor with a single blow and stood astride him. It didn’t take much. She picked up a large rock in her leather-gloved hands, raised it above her head and smashed his skull with it.
She wasn’t the only female guard I saw. Someone pointed out a woman in a well-cut uniform in a party walking through the site. Her hard expression disfigured a youthful face. They told me she was Irma Grese, the notorious guard from the Birkenau extermination camp on the other side of the town. Her sadistic acts led to her execution in December 1945.
Some of the SS guards were old or had been injured in combat but I had no sympathy for any of them. They were not the Afrika Korps. They could see what was happening in Auschwitz. There was no hiding it.
On one occasion an SS man came up to me as I was working outside. He had deeply sunken eyes and a combat injury to his arm. He stood by my shoulder and, staring straight ahead, he began to talk as if to himself. He had been a machine gunner on the eastern front and he described a Russian attack that began with the blow of a whistle. There were thousands of them, he said, and no matter how many he mowed down they kept coming. He was reliving it by my side. The barrel of his machine gun soon warped with the heat of endless firing. It was useless. They were unstoppable. He was wounded and perhaps part of his mind had gone. I said nothing. How could anyone sympathise in that place?
At the end of his monologue, he picked himself up and walked off without as much as a goodbye. I saw him again three days later. He looked right through me.
I remember holding the metal pipes so that a blond, fresh-faced twenty-year-old could weld flanges onto them. He was a German civilian worker. These workers were a mystery to us but he intrigued me. I tried to appeal to him as a young man, quizzed him about music, and why the Nazis hated jazz. I thought if I caught him off guard he might speak about his past, reveal something useful. He was already poisoned by hatred. He said the Jews had destroyed his country. There was no meeting of minds but suddenly he stopped welding and sang.
‘Küss mich, bitte bitte küss mich,
Eh’ die letzte Bahn kommt,
Küss mich ohne Pause’
(‘Kiss me, please, please kiss me,
till the last tram comes,
Kiss me without stopping’)
If those innocent lyrics were at odds with that monstrous place he didn’t notice. He went back to his welding.
Another prisoner stood out for me amongst the wise and the accomplished brought down by the Nazis. His name was Victor Perez, a Sephardic Jew born in French Tunisia. In his day he had been a world champion flyweight boxer but he had been arrested in Paris in 1943. As a boy keen on the sport I knew him as ‘Young’ Perez who had come and fought in Britain in the early 1930s. I talked to him just once inside IG Farben and then very briefly. When I told him I knew of his big fight against Johnny King in Manchester he had to stop and think before he could remember. He was a shadow of the handsome young fighter whose photos I had seen
. Years later I learnt he had been forced to box on the Appelplatz – the Auschwitz III parade ground – whilst the SS laid bets on the outcome. He was shot by the SS in January 1945.
Our little acts of sabotage weren’t enough for me. The ground we trod on had absorbed much blood. That terrible stench still hung across the camp and mixed with the filth and fumes in the air. The questions were building up.
I thought I had become inured to the brutality of the place. I had to be just to survive. Everyone caught up in Auschwitz had a story, a history, but the scale of it meant each person’s personal tragedy was lost in the mass of it. Then, when I least expected it, two individuals stepped out of the crowd. The collective suffering of thousands became the fate of real people once again. So it was with Hans and Ernst, the two Jewish prisoners who got to me for very different reasons.
I met Hans whilst working on the first floor of a brick building that was slowly taking shape. It was still open to the sky but they had begun installing heavy piping along a corridor. I was out of sight in that passageway but the layout meant I could be easily surprised if a guard came prowling.
What was I doing? I was scribbling a mathematical formula in chalk on one of the large pipes lined-up waiting to be connected. I was oblivious to my surroundings. It was an idle act but I was trying to salvage something of my pre-war self, the certainties I had known. What I was wrestling to remember was a cumbersome method for calculating the area of a triangle: Heron’s formula.
