by Denis Avey
I kept my head down towards the inside of the bunk with my feet towards the corridor so I couldn’t be seen. Behind our heads was a tiny wooden divider and beyond that another set of bunks and more festering prisoners. For now my partners lay head to head and I got my first look at them close up. Both faces were drawn and weary, old beyond their years and yet they looked stronger than some.
One was a German Jew, the other Polish. The German was easier to communicate with. My knowledge of the language was basic but improving and he spoke a bit of English. The camps operated largely in German but it didn’t mean everyone spoke it well so dialogue with the Pole was limited.
I could hear raised voices in strange tongues coming from the passageway near the entrance. It sounded like an argument. The nightly bartering that I had heard so much about had begun. Anything picked up during the day, anything that was a thing, anything that you could possess, however small, was traded here by the men squashed into the gangway. A button, a thread of cotton, if you needed one, all these had a value, even a nail. If it could be turned into something useable, if someone wanted it, it could be traded and re-traded for a few extra calories.
I had no watch but from the light outside when we arrived and the time that had passed, I guessed it was seven or eight o’clock in the evening. Most of those around me were already played-out and didn’t move unnecessarily. They lay, trying to conserve energy.
I was startled by the crash of metal and another putrid smell filled the room. The nightly soup had arrived in a large vat. The barracks were crammed and airless but that pungent odour quickly overpowered all other smells. Everyone jostled into line, presented their bowls and then hobbled back to their bunks to eat it.
I stayed put. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself and I couldn’t have swallowed it anyway. It was ghastly stuff made of rotten cabbage and boiled-up potato peelings with God knows what else. The smell alone turned my stomach. I was still feeding on adrenalin and avoiding the soup was easy. The others had no choice. They had to eat it.
Each prisoner guarded his metal bowl with his life, they were even tied to their belts. Without a bowl there was no soup and without that ghastly soup there was no life. Later, as sleep took them, the bowls became a hard pillow that they clung onto, even when unconscious.
I never asked the names of my protectors but I remember thinking at the time that they didn’t look especially Jewish. But then, what did Jews look like? I wasn’t sure I knew. With the barracks lost in darkness it was easier to talk. It wasn’t a flowing conversation. I put questions in German and English and we struggled in whispers. My bunkmates had the sunken eyes common to all but they seemed less traumatised by their surroundings than most. I had the impression they were new to the camp.
I told myself they were buoyed-up by the cigarettes I had got to them through Hans and by the thought of those they would receive when I was safe – cigarettes they would trade for calories.
I guessed there were between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people in that barracks hut. I was sure many had known comfortable lives; they had been professors, teachers, businessmen who had been stripped of everything and thrown together. Now I was gasping for air alongside them amidst the stench of faeces and sweat. It smelt of death in there and no mistake. It was sickly and overpowering.
Little by little in hissing tones, my bunkmates gave me a picture of life in Auschwitz III. They told me of the fenced-off hospital block, the Krankenbau, with no facilities where the seriously ill were sent. If they weren’t back on their feet within a fortnight at most, they were on the lorry to Birkenau to be gassed.
They told of the women held in captivity in the Frauenhaus and used as prostitutes. There were sixteen or seventeen of them, I was told. It was usually the German Kapos that got to go there. It was payment for the punishments they inflicted.
The bestial torment of it flashed in grainy images before my eyes in the darkness. God almighty! Given the type of men the Kapos were, career criminals, possibly rapists and murderers – it was unthinkable.
I tried to memorise their names and those of the SS guards but I was frustrated. I had wanted to know more about the selections, the gas chambers, but now I understood that I was in the wrong place for that. The camps were separate but inextricably linked. These people were being driven on relentlessly; falter or weaken and they were sent on the gas chambers. There were many parts but it was one machine.
As the hours passed, my Polish bunkmate dropped into an unsettled sleep. The German struggled on with my questions but the silences grew longer and his words less distinct.
I lay and listened to the wheezing and groaning of the others in the dark. Someone was rambling to himself, endlessly repeating the same locked-in phrases. He was not alone. There were the screams of people reliving by night the terrors of the day, a beating, a hanging, a selection. For others it would be the loss of a wife, a mother, a child on arrival. When they awoke, the nightmares continued around them. For them there was no escape.
When you give up, you don’t even feel pain any more. Every emotion or feeling is cut away. That’s how they were. That’s how it was.
I struggled to breathe again. It was stiflingly hot and there was the putrid smell of ripening bodies. Auschwitz III was like nothing else on earth; it was hell on earth. This is what I had come to witness but it was a ghastly, terrifying experience.
I was hunkered down amongst those fading people but unlike them I had brought myself in here. I had plotted, angled and bribed to see this place and just as I had got in, I was going to get out, not to freedom, not yet, but to a better place than this.
I was going to leave those people to their fate and Hans would be back in that awful bunk. He would have those same anguished noises filling his head. He would try to swim above it all but lying there, six feet tall in an undersized bunk with my knees jammed into the bones of a stranger, I knew in the end it was inevitable. I drifted into a turbulent sleep listening to the broken-tongued words of a man I knew would soon be dead.
I woke with a feeling of utter desolation. The Kapo was storming through the hut kicking the timber bunks. He was barking orders that echoed off the rough concrete floor. The lights came on. It must have been about four in the morning.
I could hear a man being beaten because he was moving too slowly. Anyone too weak to stand, those who had deteriorated overnight or had given up in the darkness, were pushed to one side. I guessed what would happen to them.
Breakfast was odd-tasting black bread smeared with something I took to be rancid margarine. We passed between tables picking it up as we went by. There was no going back. I kept my head down, took it and passed on. I was hungry but I still couldn’t eat it.
I thought of the cartwheels of white bread we had in the British camp, the eggs we could acquire by trade or barter. Even in our camp I dreamt constantly of food but there was no comparison to life here, none at all. On their diet death was certain, the only question was when.
I was already thinking ahead, preparing for my next ordeal – how I was going to get out of here. We shuffled out to the Appelplatz where we were counted and recounted again. When that was over, we were marched down towards the gates under the eyes of the SS. Again I pulled myself upright. They were looking to drag anyone too weak to work from the line. Once outside the gates we turned right onto the track towards the road that ran towards the IG Farben complex. I felt the first wave of relief. I still had to complete the swap but even with a groaning stomach, the long day ahead was welcome for once. I was out of that terrible place and looking forward to hearing English voices again, to getting my uniform back.
We marched into the construction site and after a while I spotted my British comrades. I hoped that somewhere amongst them was Hans. Moving around the site was more difficult for me in his rags; in my uniform he now had the protected status of a POW. As soon as the column fell out there was a brief lull before the instructions for the day were given and I took advantage of
it to get across to the Bude and hide myself inside as I had arranged. I had told Hans he had to watch out for me. He saw me set off and followed quickly. Had one of the columns been delayed by a lengthy count we could have been in difficulty. As it was the exchange could take place before the work began. I could only plan so far, with the rest I had to play it by ear. I was good at that but it still required a lot of luck.
He was agitated when he appeared in my uniform but if he minded swapping back, he never said. He didn’t want to talk. He was a decent chap and I had always known he would do the job. Still, I was relieved to see him. I knew that if he had panicked on the outside and refused to come back, that would have been it for both of us. When he emerged from the Bude it would be as a concentration camp inmate and he knew it. He wanted to get on with it. I had retrieved my boots from where I’d hidden them before he arrived and his clogs were ready.
I got his striped rags off and was relieved to slide my tunic and trousers on again. I was rejoining my tribe, taking back my protected POW status just as he was losing it. The symbolism was lost in the rush. I wanted to do it quickly.
I repeated the warnings I had given him before we had swapped: stay calm and don’t run. I hardly needed to tell him how to behave like a Häftling. I wasn’t sure he was taking it in. He was gone as soon as he was ready.
It was days before I was able to reflect on those hours in Auschwitz III and appreciate the utter desperation of the place. It was the worst thing you could do to a man, I realised. Take everything away from him – his possessions, his pride, his self-esteem – and then kill him. Kill him slowly. Man’s inhumanity to man doesn’t begin to describe it. It was far worse than the horror I faced in the desert war. Then I had an enemy before me and I did my duty. I was good at it and so I survived.
The swap had called for a lot of luck but I was disappointed with what I had learnt from one trip. There were many questions I still couldn’t answer but I had seen it and that was a start. The feeling of the place preyed on my mind.
I rejoined the British prisoners and the daily grind began. There was a pile of flanged pipes to be loaded, and more of those screw-top valves. They weighed about sixty pounds apiece. Getting them on the trolley was the hard part but once the wheels were rolling it was bearable. Once I had got them across the site we stacked them ready for installation and so it went on. It was midday before I could eat anything and by then my appetite had returned.
It was a while before I could talk to Bill. I knew he would have done the business with Hans; I was sure of it. Jimmy had been less involved as it turned out, but they had managed. Bill had got him in rapidly and hidden him away in my bunk well out of sight in the back corner of the hut. They had both been sworn to secrecy. We never really trusted anybody so the fewer that knew the better.
Avey was ill, that was all they told the others. I had taken to my bunk and wanted to be left alone. Bill took Hans food and drink and he had kept his head down throughout the evening. None of us knew all the British prisoners in the camp by sight, there were too many of us, but the huts themselves were relatively small so they had to keep him out of view until the count. Fortunately people didn’t take much notice of each other and it passed off without incident.
For Hans the subterfuge and risk had been worth it for the cigarettes that he could trade to his advantage. The extra rations available in the British camp should have given him a boost, some more calories. It wasn’t until I talked to him sometime later that he told me the food had made him ill. After months of stinking cabbage soup, the extras had actually upset him. It couldn’t have been anticipated but I was shocked to hear of it. It took the shine off the achievement somehow. He had been comfortable enough resting on my straw mattress under the blankets made from those strange wood fibres. It was better than he was used to and for one night he had been away from the people who wanted him dead.
As for the Kapo, I had to get the second lot of cigarettes to him now I was safe. It was some time later that I managed to pay him off. I engineered to walk past him and muttered out of the side of my mouth that I would be in a small building nearby in a few minutes. He turned up and I handed the remaining cigarettes over. He hid them away in his striped shirt and was gone. It was as if I had ripped a twenty-pound note in half and kept part of it back. He had to stick to the bargain.
The whole escapade was foolhardy. Looking back now from the comforts we enjoy today it appears ludicrous, you wouldn’t think it was possible but it’s what happened.
It was about this time that a new and somewhat ironic danger appeared. By mid-1944 the Allies had realised that the IG Farben Buna-Werke was now within range of the US Air Force Flying Fortresses and worth bombing. Jewish prisoners welcomed the raids despite the danger. They knew that the airmen far above were their friends and they were bringing freedom, but they were still terrified.
The warning on site was given by a large red and yellow painted basket suspended from one of the tall chimneys above the Queen Mary. It was supposed to rise as the bombers approached; the higher it was the closer they were. When it reached the top the planes were virtually overhead.
If we were at work when the bombers came we took cover where we could. We dived into slit trenches or crouched behind walls, while some hid in pipes. I once managed to get down an inspection hatch and into a massive culvert that which ran into the river and I found myself alongside about forty civilian workers and guards. I was allowed to stay. Around the site there were small concrete shelters for the individual guards so they could man their posts during an attack. They were both conical and comical, each one a sort of walk-in German helmet.
There was a giant concrete air-raid bunker on the site. It was taller than many of the buildings, grey, square and ugly. The Germans called anything that shape klotzig. It fitted. It could probably withstand a direct hit. I’m told it’s still there.
The Jews had to make do with lying on their bellies in the earth and seeking what protection they could find from the terrain. Some gathered round us, thinking that as allied prisoners we enjoyed some special protection or knowledge of where the bombs would fall. We didn’t.
20 August 1944 was a pleasant summer’s day by Auschwitz standards. It was one of those rare Sundays when we weren’t required to work and some of the lads had arranged what they called a gala. It was a desperate attempt to boost morale but it wasn’t up to much. There were a few improvised sideshows – with tin cans to knock over and that kind of thing.
I heard the air-raid warning and the mood changed. We left the huts quickly and went down into the field at the rear of the enclosure where the land dropped away. There was a drainage ditch that ran east to west and a small bomb shelter in the easterly corner. It was nothing like the huge bunker on the factory site but it was pretty solid. I didn’t want to go inside. The rumours of the gassings – correct or not – were always in the front of my mind. The heavy steel doors had a large metal catch on the outside and that stoked my suspicions. It was dark and portentous. I took my chances outside in the ditch. I was not alone. Many of the lads heading into the shelter got as far as the walled ramp that ran down to the doors and stopped. They thought they were safe without going inside.
Smoke was already drifting across the camp, released from canisters to the south of the site. It was designed to fog the entire area and entice the planes away from the buna plant, making precision bombing impossible. At the altitude the Americans bombed from, accuracy was unlikely anyway.
I heard the fearful drone of bombers high above. They seemed to be coming from the south. I rolled into the ditch and heard the whistle of falling bombs. It was little comfort knowing that they were friendly. The ditch was waterlogged and my feet were soon soaked. I pressed my face into the earth banking and covered my head. There was a terrific explosion, about forty yards away. I felt the blast waves on the side of my face. It had come from near the bomb shelter. More blasts followed further away towards the factory site. It was about fifteen minut
es before the raid stopped and I could check the damage.
I ran to the shelter to find a pile of concrete about fifteen feet deep where the entrance ramp had been. There were bodies and body parts scattered over a wide area. The spot where the lads had stood had taken a direct hit. Those inside the shelter had survived, they emerged through a separate entrance. There were a few wounded lads around, but most of those outside the shelter door were dead and their bodies were trapped in the rubble.
‘Is there a miner here?’ someone was shouting. One of the lads had started to pull away the masonry but he was making little impact. He was in shock and far too timid for the task. I called him to come out and took his place and began digging without pause. Every stone was moved carefully to prevent the larger concrete slabs from slipping and crushing any potential survivors below.
I shouted for ropes and they arrived after a delay. I tied one end around one large slab of concrete after another and the lads at the rim of the crater heaved them up so I could check underneath. As we dug down we uncovered one smashed body after another, some with limbs missing, others blown apart or crushed in the masonry.
There was one large piece of concrete impeding the dig. It had to be moved. If anyone was still breathing down there we needed to get to him quickly. I could rock it but it could only move in one direction. That meant rolling it across the head of a dead soldier trapped in the rubble. I knew it had to be done for the sake of any survivors below but that didn’t stop one of the lads taking me to task. ‘The poor feller’s dead,’ I argued. ‘What would you do?’ He backed down as he knew there was no alternative. I took a deep breath and began to push. Eventually I got that body out and the remains were passed up to those outside the crater. I returned to digging.
We dug on down and back towards the shelter doorway but our hopes of finding any more survivors were slipping away. Then there was a muffled noise and I realised someone was alive in there. I pulled away more stones creating a hole large enough to crawl into. When I got to him, he was semi-conscious. I asked him which part of his body was trapped. He couldn’t answer. I called for some water and went back in with a tiny bowl to splash his face. Now he was conscious, angry and swearing. He gave me a dog’s life but we eventually got him out. His life had been saved by a three-legged wooden stool that had deflected some of the fallen masonry and created a protective pocket around him.
