The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

by Denis Avey

  There I was chalk in hand in a half-finished passageway close to the epicentre of the Nazi killing machine, staring at the chalky letters and symbols on a pipe.

  Hans saw I was alone and took his chance. He came straight up and asked me if I had a cigarette. Then he caught sight of my mathematical scrawl. When he spoke it was in German. All he said was ‘I know what that is.’ (‘Ich weiss was das ist.’) The daily jostle for food and survival was momentarily forgotten. The two of us stopped and stared at that strange formula and for a few heartbeats it felt like we were communing with the centuries of human wisdom and ingenuity, the world of decency and learning that had been swept away.

  Hans was a Dutch Jew with high cheekbones and a thin face. He was an educated chap, I recognised that the moment I met him. I found out later that his family had run a department store, or something like it, in Amsterdam before the war. I never knew much more about him than that. I’m not even sure Hans was his real name but it was what I called him. Knowing names was dangerous. If they interrogated you that was it, they’d get it out of you somehow and someone would be for the bullet. If I identified myself at all I called myself Ginger.

  When my focus returned I realised he was in danger and I shooed him away. If he was seen talking to me he would be for it. He was gone in an instant but those brief moments had made a deep impression on me and I looked out for him from then on.

  That meeting with Hans was to be the beginning of the most foolhardy venture I have ever been involved in but first I had troubles of my own to resolve because soon after Hans left, a guard stumbled across the chalked letters. He summoned help. A uniformed delegation appeared and stood around in baffled silence contemplating the mysterious symbols on the pipe. Then the inevitable happened. I was taken to a small glass box of an office on the ground floor for questioning.

  There were only two SS officers present and they were convinced my scribble was a secret coded message of some sort, but what did it mean and who was it for?

  ‘It’s not a code it’s a formula,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit like Pythagoras’ Theorem … only different.’ I knew this was going to be hard to explain. They looked unconvinced. ‘It’s to do with triangles,’ I said, ‘calculating the area of triangles.’ There I was, trying to explain Heron and Pythagoras to the SS. With their broken English and my basic German we weren’t getting very far. My actions didn’t make any sense to them. The truth was it was just one of those weird things I do.

  It was a cold day when I met the second of the prisoners who left an indelible mark on my life. My back was aching with the strain of hauling loads of pipes across the site to have flanges welded onto them. The three-storey filtration plant was practically finished. Now the bigger job of installing the equipment inside was underway.

  I never really smoked in those days but cigarettes were the only universal currency in Auschwitz. You could almost buy a man’s life with them. They had other uses too.

  A number of senior German engineers overseeing the project arrived to review progress. They walked about, rolling and unrolling their plans and taking notes then standing around looking important and talking to each other.

  I did what I always did when they were around. I got as close as I could and lit a cigarette with the sole purpose of blowing the smoke in their faces. They didn’t appreciate it much. The other lads followed suit. We had to do it subtly. Too aggressive or obvious about it and there could be trouble, but they got the message.

  Smoking was also a way to get cigarettes to the Jewish prisoners without attracting attention. I hated them having to scramble in the dirt for them when I threw the butts away but it was better than doing nothing. Even a cigarette end could be bartered.

  I emerged from the filtration plant, leaving the sound of hammering and bright flashes from the welders’ torches behind. I noticed straight away that a young Jewish prisoner had his eye on me. I guessed he was probably waiting to see if I would drop a cigarette. His head was shaved like the others but there was something special about him. He had more expression in his face. He didn’t look like a corpse but I knew he soon would. They all did eventually. I remember the transports of Hungarian Jews arriving. They were big strapping fellers some of them. Within four months they were skin and bone and many of them were already dead.

  This lad was around nineteen and somehow different. I noticed straight away that his zebra uniform was thicker than most, not quite so worn out, maybe even cleaner than the others. It made me cautious at first. Perhaps he was one of the favoured few, the Prominente, who had found questionable ways of rising up the camp hierarchy. It didn’t seem likely but I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Ernst,’ he replied. ‘What is yours?’

  Somehow his manner overcame my caution. There was something likeable about him.

  ‘Call me Ginger,’ I said. I think I gave him a cigarette and then we parted. That was it.

  It was a few days before I saw him again. We didn’t look at each other, that was too dangerous in the open, so we talked as we walked. He was struggling with his English but as soon as I understood what he was trying to tell me it changed everything. He said something like, ‘Me sister in England …’

  These simple words stopped me in my tracks. Had I understood him correctly? He had a sister in England? I was astonished. I looked at him. He was tired but he wasn’t as drawn-looking as the others. He explained in a mixture of English and German that his sister had managed to escape to Britain in 1939, one of the last to leave Germany. Her name was Susanne, he said and she had made it to Birmingham. Just hearing the name of a familiar British city on the lips of one of those poor devils was unsettling. A link had been made, I felt closer to him. I was not an emotional man but I realised how much I blotted out just to survive there. His sister was safe in Birmingham and he was stuck in this hateful cauldron.

  ‘Do you have an address?’ I asked. He said he did but he needed to remember it. I wondered whether he was checking me out. He probably realised he had one chance and he wanted to get it right. I had to wait.

  The next time I met him he had his sister’s address clear in his mind. He told me straight away. It was 7 Tixall Road, Birmingham and I memorised it immediately. I said I would try to get a letter to her. That simple promise was the beginning of a mystery that would stretch across almost seven decades.

  Ernst had an impish, intelligent face. In the few months I knew him I never saw him get beaten, but it was just a matter of time for most of them. An injury or a beating would hasten his decline.

  Back in the camp I thought long and hard before deciding on the best way to make contact with his sister. She might not read English yet. She might not trust me. In the end I decided to do it through my mother who would probably understand how to interpret my obscure messages.

  When I put pen to paper I told my mother to write to Susanne and tell her that I was with her brother in the British camp. I gave the impression that he was an English soldier and that he had a wound to his hand and couldn’t write but other than that he was OK. It was a load of rubbish, of course. I think I even created a false regiment for him. Through my mother I told Susanne as directly as I dared that the only way to help him was to send cigarettes, as many as she could afford, to me by post. I said I would try and get them to him a little at a time. I knew it was a long shot but if my letter got through, at the very least Susanne would know Ernst was still alive. It was worth a try.

  That letter was written in normal English. Usually I wrote to my mother using a childish code my sister and I had developed.

  Those letters were full of references to things on our farm. I’d write about our cattle being sent to the abattoir. To get across the numbers of concentration camp prisoners I referred to the herd then say it was to the power of three or whatever it was. I even tried biblical terminology and references to Moses. It was clumsy stuff but it was the best I could do.

  To underline that I was talk
ing about the Jews I referred to Queen Victoria’s prime minister, but without using Disraeli’s name. Alternatively I would mention Epping Town where my mother knew a number of Jews lived. She needed a lot of imagination to get any of it but I learnt later she had grasped what I was trying to do.

  I desperately wanted the world to know what was going on. I tried to tell her to pass the information on to the War Office but I couldn’t do it openly so I began referring to a man my parents knew about who had worked at the War Office before 1939. He lived in Ongar and I had often been in the same train to London with him when I was studying. I hinted as clearly as I dared that she should try to contact him. In the end she chose a different method and wrote two letters to the War Office. It was very general information and I don’t know how she phrased it. She wasn’t well but she tried.

  I had no idea what the outside world knew about the death camps then. I had been in the army since 1939 and there wasn’t much news reaching us in the desert. In captivity there was even less. Now I think the allies knew a lot about the concentration camps by that time.

  We did have some information coming in. There was a radio hidden away inside our camp, E715. I never saw it myself but I was told it was a basic crystal set. One of the lads had put it together, bartering and smuggling the parts with anyone who had contact with the outside world. It was kept well hidden. And it was usually assumed that someone had it secreted away somewhere.

  Most of us heard the news from the radio second-hand through a fellow prisoner we nicknamed ‘Stimmt’, probably from a German phrase he liked to repeat, ‘das stimmt’, meaning ‘that’s true’. I think his real name was George O’Mara, a pleasant feller who would trip around the huts passing on what he knew, a sort of whispering town crier.

  We saw German newspapers from time to time, particularly when we were using the latrines inside the Buna-Werke. I found a copy of one publication – probably the Völkischer Beobachter – with an edict from the SS printed in it, boasting of their plans for Britain when they were victorious. They said they would govern from Whitehall, execute all prisoners of war and allow their brave soldiers to impregnate English girls with good Aryan blood. Just right for the latrines.

  It was chilling propaganda but it only served to enrage me more. Like I said before, I hadn’t joined up for King and country but youthful adventure had now become a moral conflict for me at the very time I could do little about it.

  I could move around quite easily between bouts of work. If I put a pipe on my shoulder I could cross the entire building site without anyone asking me questions. We all did it. Occasionally I would come across Ernst.

  Once I was in a hut in a contractor’s yard with a couple of other British chaps when he came in. We had been talking for a few minutes when we heard a noise and realised a guard was mooching around. Ernst couldn’t get out in time so he hid at the back behind some upturned tables.

  The guard stepped inside, looked around and demanded to know what we were up to. I managed to keep him occupied but I was talking utter rubbish to him in broken German and in the end we went outside leaving Ernst hidden in there. It was a while before he dared to come out. It sounds dramatic now but the British prisoners pulled off tricks like that all the time. He must have been scared but he never mentioned it. The next time we managed to speak, when the Kapos were out of range, all he said was that my German was very good. It wasn’t, but I appreciated his words.

  Ernst never told me about his family in any of our furtive meetings. I knew of his sister in England and that was it. The letter I had written seemed unlikely to get through and the address was probably wrong. I didn’t hold out much hope. What with Allied bombing, theft and general wartime disruption I thought it was highly unlikely any cigarettes would arrive.

  Chapter 11

  The next time I saw Hans we were both struggling to shift pipes around. For eleven hours each day we’d heave and carry the heavy-duty components, piling up the weighty stop-taps on low trolleys that ran on the narrow gauge line between the buildings. Once the bogeys were loaded we’d push them across the site to where the valves and piping were needed. Our conversations had to be snatched between the loading and unloading of those heavy tubes and the valves that went with them. That was what we were doing when we hatched our plan.

  We were sometimes shoulder to shoulder, straining together but even close up, speaking German out of the side of my mouth wasn’t easy.

  This time they were being welded into place behind another dark brick façade, that of a three-storied filtration plant slowly taking shape. Metal staircases wound up through the unfinished building. The prize being wrought here in human lives was buna, artificial rubber to keep the Nazi’s war machine rolling. We knew the site as the Buna-Werke.

  They say, ‘stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage’. It was a quotation I knew as a boy. I had made it my own back then. I knew they couldn’t capture my mind. Whilst I could still think, I was free. I had always been a fighter, I had never knowingly walked away from a challenge but it was different now. I had little knowledge of eastern religions or philosophies then but I knew the mind could take you through brick walls. It was my mind that was supplying the muscle.

  We were all forced to work for Hitler’s war effort, the slave labourers from the Auschwitz Concentration Camps, the civilian forced workers and the British POWs. We did similar backbreaking work to the Jews with one crucial difference. The programme known as ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit’, extermination through labour, did not apply to us.

  When night fell we were marched to our respective camps; the Jews to Auschwitz III, sometimes called Monowitz and about which we knew little, and the British POWs to our camp E715, on the southern margin of the building site.

  Every night, I went back to something more or less predictable, a spartan hut and poor food, but at least I could be fairly sure I would still be alive in the morning. For Hans and all the other stripeys there was no certainty of survival at all, not even to the next day.

  The Jews had had their human dignity stripped from them but they had a chance if they had something to gamble with. All attempts to gain an extra crust came down to a gamble in the end, the roll of a dice.

  There wasn’t much I could do but I was tormented by the need to know; to see what I could. As the weeks passed I managed to speak to Hans from time to time and as we spoke the idea of swapping with him took hold of me. That way I could see what was happening. I began to hang out the bait.

  If we could organise an ‘Umtausch’ – an exchange – he could come into the British camp overnight to rest. He’d get better food and more of it, possibly even eggs. To cement the friendship I gave him part of a German sausage, which I had won. Whenever we received one in the British camp we drew lots for it. If we divided it evenly the wurst was hardly worth having. If one person got it at least he had something to chew on. It was hard to eat for us but when I gave it furtively to Hans it was more nutrition than he’d had in weeks.

  I supplied cigarettes for him to trade. They were like gold dust in the camps and I was lucky enough to have an uncle who tried to send a batch of 555s each month.

  They didn’t all get through, far from it, but my father still paid him back the full amount after the war. It cost him a pretty penny.

  There were people to bribe and things to acquire but I had enough cigarettes for what I needed. I had sown the seed carefully with Hans because you trusted no one really. Not even a man who understood Heron’s formula. The idea had slowly begun to take hold in his mind, and over the weeks it matured into something approaching a plan.

  There were just two lads in our camp that I let in on the plot, Bill Hedges and Jimmy Fleet. They told me I was an idiot but they went along with it. Bill’s bunk was above mine in the back corner of the hut and he handled most of the subterfuge. It was his job to secrete Hans away. To the rest, the story was to be that I was ill and had taken to my bed.

  Bill had worked in a hardware shop
up north before the war; that was all I knew about him. I’m afraid I called the shots even then and most people tended to go along with me. They were both sworn to secrecy about it. Like I said, we didn’t trust anyone.

  The swap took weeks of meticulous planning and observation. I studied the movements of the Jewish prisoners, I knew where and when they would gather to march back to their camp, learnt to copy their weariness, the stoop, the shambling gait.

  I taught myself to walk in the crude wooden clogs they wore. I traded cigarettes for a pair, wrapped rags around my feet to cushion the rough edges and practised shuffling in them. Those clogs could be a thing of torture on the site; they helped finish many men’s lives if their feet began to swell or they couldn’t move fast enough. I had to get that right.

  One of the stripeys pointed me towards an older Kapo who I was told was less brutal than the rest. He was thickset with a dark weather-beaten face and from the stubble you could tell he used to have black hair in better times. I managed to get him onside with a bribe of fifty cigarettes – twenty-five now and twenty-five when I had returned successfully from the swap. This was without doubt the riskiest part. In a place like Auschwitz everyone had to fend for themselves. I could easily have been betrayed if he had seen a minor advantage to himself and I had seen Kapos kill people.

  Through Hans, I got cigarettes to two of his companions in his work Kommando. They would have to guide me, show me where to go. When the time was right, I hacked at my hair with a pair of old scissors and then shaved off the rest with a blunt razor.

  As the shift neared its end, I smeared dirt on my face especially on my cheeks and under my eyes to gain the grey pallor of exhaustion. I thought of the endless patrols into enemy camps in the desert. I was ready.

  But why did I do it? Why did I, voluntarily, give up the status of a protected British POW to enter a place where hope and humanity had been vanquished?